Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things

Director: Bob Clark

1972 / 87min / DCP

Before establishing himself in the horror film pantheon with favorites Deathdream and Black Christmas, Clark cooked up this ghoulish no-budget horror comedy about a theater troupe who travel together to an island off the Miami coast, where their sadistic director (Alan Ormsby) bullies them into exhuming the corpse of one unfortunate “Orville Dunworth” and engaging in a bit of amateur necromancy that goes better—and worse—than anyone expects. A pillar of Sunshine State horror cinema by Ft. Lauderdale native Clark, which builds a potent atmosphere of needless cruelty and gathering hopelessness. By the time the dead are preparing to set sail for the mainland, you might very well be rooting for them.