45 Years Ago, Alien’s Screenwriter Crafted A Horrific Vision Of Small-Town Terror
Ironically, Dead & Buried deserves a second life.
When you think about the horror films of the late ‘70s and ‘80s, you’ll instinctively think about some of the greatest genre films ever made. The ‘80s alone gave us Poltergeist, The Shining, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and The Fog, among countless others. The decade was perhaps the most widely celebrated era of horror filmmaking, piggybacking off the wild influence of films that came before to ultimately define what the next 40 years of horror would look like.
Looking at those films collectively, a pattern emerges. The slasher boom reached its pinnacle in the ‘80s, but even outside of traditional slashers, so many works centered on a fear of the neighborhood, the family, and the tight-knit community being corrupted. With the spectacle surrounding serial murderers in the ‘80s, as well as the media’s sensationalistic emphasis on violent urban crime, there was an idea that the small town was a refuge from the chaos of it all — and the horror genre made it a personal mission to shatter this sense of comfort. Countless movies tackled the idea directly, but one near-masterpiece exposed the monstrousness lurking at the heart of America’s quaint ghost towns, only to be all but forgotten by time.
Released only two years after screenwriter Dan O’Bannon revolutionized horror and science fiction with Alien, his follow-up film, Dead & Buried, is a comparatively subtle affair. Centered on the coastal community of Potter’s Bluff, the film wastes no time destroying the audience’s cozy ideations of small-town living. Photographer George LeMoyne (Christopher Allport) stumbles upon a beautiful local named Lisa (Lisa Blount) and begins photographing her, but just as their session exits the realm of professionalism and enters the realm of mutual lust, George is violently beaten by a group of townspeople and burned at the stake as his subject watches on.
It’s a jarring and unexpectedly brutal cold open that sets the stage for what’s to come, as Sheriff Dan Gillis (James Farentino) and local mortician William Dobbs (Jack Albertson, better known as Grandpa Joe) investigate George’s murder and other ritualistic murders being committed by townspeople. While there’s certainly a mystery at the heart of Dead & Buried, we know from the opening that the citizens of Potter’s Bluff are responsible, leaving viewers to ponder the cause of the divide between the town’s idyllic presentation and the terror perpetrated by its inhabitants.
Jack Albertson gives off his familiar warmth, but the stakes are far higher than a trip to the chocolate factory.
That juxtaposition is reminiscent of other major works, from the bloodlust of the once-normal citizens in Stephen King’s seminal Salem’s Lot to the perverse suburban secrets that would be revealed in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks. Over four decades of 24-hour reporting and the internet’s true-crime fixation have pretty much dispelled America’s collective love affair with the tight-knit town, but at the time, the film’s opening was a shocking repudiation of the belief that bloodshed was committed exclusively by the moral deviants who lurked in metropolitan cities.
Speaking of, Dead & Buried’s brutality is presented with a stark and gruesome directness that still feels visceral all these years later. The special effects were done by Stan Winston (the architect behind classics like Alien, The Thing, and Jurassic Park), and his involvement pays off remarkably. Whether it’s something as harrowing and cringe-inducing as watching a hospital patient be murdered with a syringe to the exposed eyeball, or a time-lapse of Dobbs reconstructing the face of a brutalized corpse, there’s a spellbinding wizardry Winston brings to his craft. It’s impossible to look away, even at its most grotesque.
As the body count starts to rise, a commonality in all the murders appears. Each one is documented by a group taking photographs and videos, almost as if they’re making a horror film of their own. Even if the fantasy of the small town was that they serve as a haven from depravity, there’s still a fixation on those ideas, an ironic desire to preserve them as a reminder of what happens outside Potter’s Bluff. At times, it feels like Dan O’Bannon and director Gary Sherman wanted to turn the tables and interrogate the audience for their eagerness to vicariously participate in brutality.
As much as you’d like to look away, the film is acutely aware that you can’t.
On the macro scale, Dead & Buried is a movie about uncovering the rotting heart of an idyllic community, but there’s also a tragic intimacy in the relationship between Sheriff Gillis and his wife, whom he suspects may be involved. The mystery of the Potter’s Bluff murders is echoed by the quiet terror of the domestic mystery: who exactly is your spouse when you’re not in the room? So many of the era’s horror films attempted to scare audiences out of their belief in the comforts of a tight-knit neighborhood, but few did it with the same frightening attention to interpersonal relationships. If your friends down the street are capable of murder, what does that mean for the woman sleeping in your bed?
There’s a suffocating dread throughout the film, from the moment poor George meets his end to the shotgun blast of a twist ending. But accompanying that dread is a strange and powerful sense of inevitability, a dawning realization of a horror you've always known but never been able to confront. Dead & Buried challenges our assumptions about where danger lies, because while the film isn’t telling us anything new, it exposes dark truths about the communities we seek refuge in — truths that, deep down, we may have been familiar with all along.
Dead & Buried is streaming on Shudder.
