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Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things

A pretentious, sadistic theater director drags his troupe to a remote Florida island cemetery for a night of games that turn into a real necromantic ritual — and the dead object. Bob Clark’s 1972 comedy-horror (he is credited as Benjamin Clark) is a shoestring, post-Night of the Living Dead oddity shot with college friends for almost nothing: Alan Ormsby co-wrote the script, created the special makeup, and stars as the bullying director who digs up a corpse named Orville and dares the graveyard to answer. The tone is cruel, campy, and oddly theatrical until the zombies actually rise. Ormsby would later write the screenplays for the gentle coming-of-age drama My Bodyguard (1980), Paul Schrader’s Cat People (1982), and further collaborations with Clark on Deathdream and Deranged. Here he is pure early-70s grindhouse mischief — a theater kid who raised the dead and then graduated to bigger pictures. A cult Florida midnight movie with real bite.

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