It’s set in the 1890s in a small New England town. The snarling, unscrupulous, alcoholic, wife-abuser Waldo Trumbull (Vincent Price) is partners in a funeral parlor he inherited from his elderly and senile father-in-law Amos Hinchley (Boris Karloff). His put-upon shrill wife Amaryllis (Joyce Jameson) rues the day she married her piggish hubby and gave up pursuing her opera career, not realizing that she’s an incredibly bad singer. Business is so bad that Trumbull has no money and his unfriendly landlord, John F. Black (Basil Rathbone), an aspiring Shakespearean actor with cataleptic tendencies, threatens eviction if the year’s rent isn’t paid in the next 24 hours. To drum up business, Trumbull and his timid, inept, dim-witted, escapee felon assistant Felix Gillie (Peter Lorre), break into homes of prosperous elderly men after midnight and Trumbull smothers them with a pillow in their sleep and then he appears on their doorsteps to take charge of the funeral arrangements. But things don’t go as planned, so Trumbull in this difficult time tries to kill two birds with one pillow by taking out his widower landlord.