Dead & Buried

• Stan Winston's most overlooked piece isn't gore — it's the full-body-cast 'patient' in the hospital bed, a mechanical dummy he built with such lifelike, elaborate movement that the syringe-to-the-eye stab lands like a live victim is being mutilated. Winston later called that needle-in-the-eye gag his favorite effect he ever did. The acid-up-the-nose melting-face gag wasn't his at all — the studio demanded more gore after Winston was gone, and a different FX team handled that sub-par shot.
• The opening sets the whole trap in daylight: photographer Christopher Allport is lured by Lisa Blount on the beach, then beaten and set on fire by a smiling crowd while she snaps photos. The last words he hears are 'Welcome to Potters Bluff.' No cover of night, no monster — just the town doing what the town does.
• Co-writer Dan O'Bannon — fresh off Alien with Ronald Shusett — disowned the finished film in a 1983 Starburst interview, claiming Shusett wrote it solo and only needed O'Bannon's name attached to get it made. The script itself was an adaptation of an earlier story by Jeff Millar and Alex Stern.
• Britain's moral panic swept it onto the Video Nasties list — but it was never actually prosecuted, was eventually dropped from the DPP list, and didn't see a fully uncut UK release until 1999. It had originally passed uncut with an X certificate for British cinemas; the ban was a home-video phenomenon.
• Robert Englund turns up as townsperson Harry years before Freddy Krueger. Behind the camera, Steven Poster shot it — a DP who'd done second-unit photography on Close Encounters of the Third Kind and would later light Carpenter's Big Trouble in Little China.
• Potters Bluff is Mendocino, California wearing a New England coat — the main-drag shots were filmed along Lansing Street. AVCO Embassy released it on May 29, 1981, and it died at the box office, grossing roughly $216,000 before finding its real life on cult video.

The town is a closed economy of grief that runs on conscription. Dobbs doesn't reanimate the dead so much as recruit replacements for a community that refuses to shrink — every murdered tourist becomes a new resident, a new shopkeeper, a new neighbor. Potters Bluff doesn't kill out of cruelty; it kills to stay populated. Read that way the smiling mob isn't sadistic, it's civic — they're hiring.

Gillis's investigation is the film's cruelest joke because the detective is the corpse. Every clue he uncovers about the dead-who-walk is really a mirror he refuses to look into, and the closing shot of his cracked, decomposing hands reframes the entire procedural as a dead man interrogating the fact of his own death. The mystery was never 'who's behind it' — it was 'who's already gone.'

Dobbs is the mortician as artist-god, and the movie quietly argues his work is a kind of immortality the town agreed to. He preserves, restores, and animates with a craftsman's pride; the people he 'fixes' get to keep their faces, their jobs, their routines. The horror isn't that they're dead — it's that death here is just another service rendered, and everyone in Potters Bluff signed up without remembering they did.

Potters Bluff is the kind of New England fishing town that smiles too wide. Strangers passing through get swarmed, beaten, and torched by a grinning mob — then turn up days later behind a shop counter, breathing, working, normal. Sheriff Dan Gillis chases the killings into the orbit of the town mortician, a courtly old craftsman who treats death as a project. Gillis keeps pulling the thread, certain he's the one man left alive to do it. He's wrong about that, and the realization arrives at his own hands.