As We All Know, Burke Was The Real Bad Guy
Hopefully the film plays up their contribution to good surgical skills
Back in the 1800s it was a lot harder to get bodies for medical dissection, which was very important to the science of anatomy. Medical schools had to pay contractors for specimens, which were either liberated from fresh graves or produced by means of foul deeds. Burke and Hare are two of the most famous anatomical supply contractors in history, and they have been the basis for several films, some of which use their names and some of which do not.
People have been making movies about Burke and Hare since 1945, and before that the genre for Burke and Hare stories was in popular fiction like The Body Snatcher by RL Stevenson. The characters have been played by Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, and Donald Pleasance, and in a new version Simon Pegg and Andy Serkis will take up the roles. It will be interesting to see how Sean of the Dead matches up with Gollum (or King Kong, if you prefer) in the John "See You Next Wednesday" Landis version set to be released in 2010 .
Notes and Special Information
Special note: Gravedigger buddy movies have been around for a long time, and this timeless, captiving story has been retold time and again by the likes of Robert Louis Stevenson and Dylan Thomas and Even Mr. Hitchcock.