Ten Great Cemetery Scenes For Halloween

It’s Halloween, folks. There are precious few other times a year when spending countless hours in front of the TV absorbing as much horror as humanly possible isn’t considered a huge waste of a day. But on Halloween, you get a pass. Unless you’re me. In which case horror is just a way of life. And if you are me, then take out the garbage ya lazy ass! I digress.

If there is one often overlooked staple in the realm of the horror flick, it’s the cemetery scene. The dark, foreboding gloom that meanders across a desolate landscape peppered with crooked stones and weather-worn reminders of the long deceased. Mottled gray statues precariously teeter on the edge of disarray; granite crucifixes sit wasting away atop pocked markers that once stood proud against a well-groomed yard of eternal rest. I could do this all day, but instead, let’s check out ten standout scenes that feature the ghoulish graveyard.

10

Plan 9 From Outer Space

As classically bad (slash) classically sort of good this movie has become in its cult-like status over the years, it’s still a colossal piece of cinematic shit. Ed Wood was to eccentric directors what Michael Jordan was to baseball. That is to say, not even in the same league. Yet, his niche was carved and his name will forever be associated with the Hollywood bizarre. If you’ve ever seen Tim Burton’s Ed Wood, then you know all the troubles that plagued Plan 9. If not, here’s the rundown. Suffice it to say, there was a graveyard… of sorts. But you’ll never forget it!

9

Friday the 13th Part 6: Jason Lives

By this point in the Jason Voorhees saga, our titular killer has pretty much become a death-defying zombie. He’s survived countless campers and even a few people who stupidly decided to try to stop him. Some were met with a modicum of success, only to find out in the following installment that Jason doesn’t die. At all. So what happens here that makes this an entry in the cemetery genre? Check it out.

8

Return of the Living Dead

The zombie genre was really coming into its own back in 1985. George Romero had already given us Night, Day, and Dawn of the Dead and soon it was to be Dan O’Bannon’s turn at the undead helm. You see, Romero and O’Bannon had an understanding: Romero could do all the ‘Of The Dead’s’ he wanted, and O’Bannon got to make ‘Of The Living Dead’s’. It seemed to work out just fine. Especially in this tender little love story, where we get to see scream queen Linnea Quigly dance like you read about. The scene we want to embed is actually NSFW, so this trailer will have to do.

7

Pet Sematary

Stephen King’s imagination is like some kind of playground for the sick and twisted. His horror tales are legendary, and quite a few have been made (both triumphantly and ridiculously) into feature films. Pet Sematary definitely falls into the far better than most category. Basically, we get the story of an emotional wreck of a father (King does these characters to perfection) who loses his cat, son and wife to untimely demises. All in turn receive burials in the eponymous Sematary, and each become… well, let’s just say not the same.

6

I Sell the Dead

Blake and Willie are grave robbers. But hey, they only do it to make cash by selling the corpses to a doctor in need of cadavers. That is, until the good doctor decides to blackmail them into free services lest he notify the authorities. On their next dig, the men unearth what might be a destroyed vampire complete with staked heart. Once the stake is removed, the corpse resumes its undead activities, until re-staked. This gives the guys an idea, and from here on out it’s only the supernatural. Especially since the vampire lady ends up killing the doctor. No more free services!

5

Cemetery Man

Hey look! It’s something I already wrote about this movie! It’s not plagiarism to copy your own stuff! “Rupert Everett is our lead here, which somehow became a springboard to his future (see: current) career as a C-level actor taking roles in saccharine chick flicks. This movie was so uncomfortably effed up that Rupert turned into a closet homosexual just to get the bad taste of Hollywood dick out of his mouth, and, oddly, vice versa. Basically, Everett plays the guardian of a graveyard, all the while filling the slots and maintaining the grounds. Oh, right, I almost forgot… the dead rise as zombies! That’s an important part.”

4

Night of the Living Dead

Arguably the first flick that started the whole big zombie ball a-rollin’. The Romero classic, Night of the Living Dead has quite possibly one of the most classic cemetery scenes of all time. It all comes across so innocuously: Barbara and Johnny are visiting their father’s grave when, out of the blue, someone starts ambling toward them who definitely wasn’t there a minute ago… holy crap! There coming to get you, Barbara!

3

Carrie

What? Another King adaptation? Yeah, why not. In a film where the entire premise is a huge allegory for women going through their “changes,” where might one find a worthy cemetery scene? It’s a lot of buildup featuring a chick with psychic powers, a prom, and a bucket of pig blood… oh and a school fire… but it’s there alright. Right at the very end…

2

Army of Darkness

If there’s one thing Sam Raimi knows how to do, it’s amp up the absurd to the Nth degree, and somehow eke out a trilogy. Yes, he did it with Spider-Man, and we all know how that turned out: Disco Parker anyone? But long before that misguided misstep there was The Evil Dead. Made on a shoestring budget, shot entirely at a cabin in the woods, Raimi and site-friend Bruce Campbell created a horror classic that would forever set the bar for shock cinema. When the time came to make a third, the same tongue-in-cheek storyline was coated with a liberal veneer of fantasy, and so was born The Army of Darkness, complete with a cemetery that cracks me up every time.

1

Poltergeist

Is your house swimming with malevolent spirits? Is it awash with the angry un-rested who have chosen your domicile as a pit stop on their way to Heaven’s light? Perhaps you have a little girl who spends too much time conversing with the TV people. Well, there’s a good chance your home was built atop a cemetery and all those lonely souls now being squished by your two-story Tudor are royally pissed off. Might wanna enlist the assistance of a dwarfish medium, or maybe just call the Ghostbusters. Either way, now would be a good time to pack it up. Buuut… of course there’s no clip, so I’ve taken the liberty of providing a bunch of nice pics. It’s almost the same thing. Right? Or, you can go here.