It is unfortunate, although not entirely surprising, that Gary Sherman’s atmospheric horror thriller Dead & Buried got a bit lost during its initial theatrical release. Despite being a sharply etched horror-thriller that managed a neat balancing act between old-school traditions of the resurrected dead and modern slasher tropes, it also happened to come out during the major resurgence of horror films that flooded the market in the early ’80s—“the biggest glut of nightmare movies in film history,” according to a 1981 article in The Washington Post.

According to a November 1980 article in Variety, nearly 40% of all domestic picture rentals that year were horror and sci-fi films. The year 1981 was even bigger, with the release of major horror sequels like Halloween II, Friday the 13th Part 2, and Omen: The Final Conflict; the special-effects-laden werewolf movies The Howling, An American Werewolf in London, and Wolfen; the slasher films Hell Night, The Prowler, My Bloody Valentine, and Graduation Day; European imports like The Beyond and House by the Cemetery; and, of course, Sam Raimi’s seminal horror-comedy The Evil Dead.

Nevertheless, like many well-crafted, low-budget horror films, Dead & Buried managed a second life on home video and went on to become a cult classic. It also earned a certain amount of misplaced notoriety because it was included, likely on the basis of the title and poster art, on the British Director of Public Prosecutions’ “video nasties” list in the early 1980s (interestingly, the Chicago Film Review Board, one of the last municipal film censors still in operation at the time, tagged it as being inappropriate for anyone under 18 even though the MPAA had already given it an R rating). The film was advertised heavily as being from “the creators of Alien,” Ridley Scott’s genre-defying sci-fi/horror hit from 1979. The screenplay was credited to Ronald Shusett and Dan O’Bannon, who had penned the Alien screenplay, although it was later revealed that virtually all of the writing on Dead & Buried was done by Shusett, as the vast majority of O’Bannon’s contributions had been dropped (the original story is credited to Jeff Millar, a film critic and creator of the long-running comic strip Tank McNamara, and Alex Stern, who apparently never wrote anything else that was produced).

The story takes place entirely in Potters Bluff, a small seaside town—it could be northern California, it could be New England—where things are a bit … unusual. The film begins with a startlingly effective sequence in which an out-of-town photographer (Christopher Allport) is on his way to being seduced by a sultry local (Lisa Blount) on the beach before finding himself suddenly and shockingly confronted by a group of townspeople (led by his would-be seducer) who beat him senseless, tie him to a pole with fishing net, and set him on fire. It’s a great shocker of an opening, and nothing else in the film quite lives up to it, although it effectively establishes the idea that anything can happen—any seemingly benign situation could turn suddenly horrific—and there is definitely something very, very wrong in Potters Bluff. Much of the story unfolds through the eyes of Sheriff Dan Gillis (James Farentino), who is charged with investigating the town’s murders. Dan is from Potters Bluff, but he is also an outsider because he left to pursue an advanced degree in criminal justice before returning. His wife, Janet (Melody Anderson), is young and seemingly vacant in a way that feels increasingly sinister. The town’s most memorable character, though, is William G. Dobbs, the local mortician played with maniacal and comical verve by Oscar-winning veteran character actor Jack Albertson in one of his final roles.

One could argue that the film’s true star is the make-up special effects work by Stan Winston, who had already won a pair of Emmys for his work on the made-for-television movies Gargoyles (1972) and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1974), but was still a few years away from the international fame he would achieve working on John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982) and James Cameron’s The Terminator (1984). Winston’s effects are a times conventionally grisly—a hypodermic needle directly to a character’s eye, a throat slashing—and at other times are virtually invisible. One of his most notable effects is a surreal time-lapse sequence in which a woman’s crushed face is taken down to the bone and then reconstructed by Dobbs. While this makes the film sound incredibly gory, it really isn’t, partially because so much work has been put into its suspenseful elements and its evocation, via Steven Poster’s diffused cinematography, of desolate, fog-enshrouded isolation. Thus, when the violence occurs, it is shocking and nasty, but never feels gratuitous or out-of-place (although one sequence involving a young couple with car trouble bumbling into a large, deserted house at night is ludicrously drawn out and requires such idiotic behavior that it loses all tension).

Otherwise, Dead & Buried is well produced and solid in its suspense. As he did a decade earlier with his feature directorial debut, Death Line (aka, Raw Meat, 1972), director Gary Sherman elevates potentially preposterous material with a mixture of style and wit. The story winds its way into a crazed third act that feels self-consciously over the top, and it works better than it probably should. There is so much attention to pacing and suspense in the film’s first half, that it feels like a much-deserved cathartic release for Sherman to essentially allow the film to go careening off the rails in increasingly spectacular fashion.

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