It isn't long before Boone carelessly places a couple of black-headed pins where a white-headed pins should be. To his horror, the real-life owners of these plots turn up dead the very next day. These coincidences keep happening until Boone becomes obsessed with the cemetery map and convinced that he is able to control whether people live or die depending on what pins he places in their grave plots.
This is a brilliant idea for a story, and it is told very well. The movie does a great job of keeping the viewer guessing -- is this a coincidence? Is it all in Boone's head? Is there something supernatural at work here? Or, is there another explanation? You don't know until the last few minutes of the film, and I couldn't have guessed it.
The central visual element of the movie is the cemetery map itself, which starts off as a modest bulletin board on the wall of the office. As Boone becomes more obsessed and paranoid, the map seems to grow until it covers the entire wall of the office, dwarfing Boone in one dramatic shot after the other. Lighting tricks are also used to give the map character, sometimes just making it glow supernaturally in the background so you can't help but look at it, and other times playing with the shadows of the pins so they seem to dance menacingly across the surface.
This is a good example of a small, modest flick that, despite the great premise, could have been bland and uninteresting if the writer and director didn't have some creative ambition. Thanks to the way they've approached the story, this B-horror movie stands out as unique and won't soon be forgotten like so many others.
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