I. Before the Title

The film begins with a fact.

Two labourers dig. A small party of gentlemen stands at a polite distance in the fog, hats on, hands behind their backs, the way men stand when they have been invited to observe something. A spade strikes wood. The lid comes up. On the underside of that lid — the side no mourner ever sees, the side that faces the face — there are scratches, and there is blood.

Then the title.

This is an unusual way to open a horror film, and it is worth pausing over how unusual, because almost everything the next eighty minutes does depends on it. The conventional gothic opening withholds. It offers a rumour, a scream heard through a wall, a servant who will not answer a question, and it spends its running time deciding whether the rumour is true. Corman’s picture does the opposite. It settles the matter before it has told us anyone’s name. Somebody was buried alive. Here is the evidence. Look at it.

What the film withholds instead is the man. We do not know, watching the exhumation, which of those observers we are meant to be watching. We learn later — obliquely, in someone else’s account — that Guy Carrell was in that group, that he was there as a student of the physician Dr. Gideon Gault, that this was in some sense a professional visit, and that he fainted. He is ashamed of the fainting. He is more ashamed of the fainting than of anything else he will do in the picture, including murder.

So the first scene contains the protagonist as an anonymous body in a crowd, and the film declines to point him out. That is a real decision, and it produces a real effect: the horror is established as public, communal, witnessed, before it is established as anybody’s private affliction. Six or seven men saw those scratches. Only one of them organised his life around them.

That is the film’s actual subject, and it announces itself in the first ninety seconds, before a word of dialogue. Not the fear of being buried alive. The question of what a person does with a fact that everybody else can absorb.

Everyone at that graveside saw the same thing. Dr. Gault went home and, presumably, made a note. The labourers filled in the hole and went to a public house. Guy Carrell went home and cancelled his engagement.

II. The Woman at the Door

The first proper scene of the film is a negotiation on a threshold, and the gothic instinct in the staging is so quiet that it is easy to miss how thoroughly it has been inverted.

Emily Gault arrives at the Carrell manor. She has had a letter. The engagement is off and she has not been told why, and she has come to be told to her face. Kate Carrell, Guy’s older sister, meets her at the door and attempts to send her away, and it is Kate — not Guy, not a housekeeper, not the architecture — who functions here as the obstacle. Kate is the door.

The gothic novel has a shape it likes: a woman enters a great house and is gradually enclosed by a secret that belongs to a man. The secret is usually a person — a first wife, a mad relation, a child, a body. What is remarkable about The Premature Burial is that Emily arrives at the door and demands admission to the secret, and the secret turns out to be not a person but a proposition. There is no woman in the attic. There is a hypothesis in the cellar.

And Guy takes her down to it. He does not conceal the family catacomb; he gives her a tour. This is the first of three descents into that space in the film, and the first of several occasions on which Guy Carrell responds to being loved by offering documentation. He shows her the vault. He tells her that his father was a cataleptic, that catalepsy runs in the blood, that he heard his father screaming from inside the tomb when he was a boy, that he takes laudanum now in order to sleep at all, and that there can therefore be no marriage between them.

Notice the structure of that scene, because the screenplay will reuse it three times and each reuse will mean something different. Guy conducts an interested party into an enclosed underground space and explains a system to them. He does it here with the catacomb. He will do it again, at length and with enormous pride, with the tomb he builds. He will do it a third time, in the dream, with nobody there at all.

Kate contests every word. She has been contesting it, we understand, for decades. Her position is flat and unvarying: their father died of natural causes, nobody in the family has ever been buried alive, and the screaming Guy remembers is a thing a frightened child invented and an unwell man has kept. Kate’s insistence is not gentle. It has the hardness of a position defended for a long time against someone who will not concede it.

And Emily, having heard all of this — the disease, the heredity, the laudanum, the screaming father, the sister’s flat denial — decides she wants to marry him anyway.

The ...