Lived Once Buried Twice
2025 · 7m · Northern Ireland
Directed by Olivia Rose Beatty
Genres: dark comedy, historical, horror
Tones: dark, darkly comic, mythic
A macabre slice of Lurgan folklore in black and white: poor Margorie McCall died after a brief fever, was waked and buried in haste - but talk of the rock on her finger lures two greedy graverobbers to her grave that very night. When they try to cut off her finger, the blood flows and Margorie awakes with an unearthly scream. Funded by Northern Ireland Screen with BFI Network support; Olivia Rose Beatty's directorial debut.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A graverobber's comeuppance wrapped in Irish folklore—competent enough, but it plays the supernatural resurrection straight when the subversive move would've been to let the grave stay empty or make the real horror something else entirely.
Beatty's formal command of the morgue-like monochrome and her pacing of the folklore reveal situate this squarely in the lineage of British Gothic short work—the kind of debut that understands how constraint (budget, runtime, B&W) becomes aesthetic inevitability rather than compromise.
The single choice that crystallizes this whole piece is the decision to hold on Margorie's face the moment blood begins to flow—that split-second hesitation before the scream—where a lesser film would cut away, but Beatty stays, and you feel the uncanny rupture between the living and the supposedly dead.
Reviews
Shot in black and white, it harks back to the early, moody horrors of Universal and RKO, and is rich with period detail and a creepy, Gothic atmosphere. Beatty executes this macabre moment with the full force of Gothic horror cinema: flickering gas lanterns, deep, dark shadows and a perfectly timed shock of lightning to illuminate the ghastly sight of Margorie bolting upright up in her grave.