At some point, Marge disappears from home, where she was last seen playing with her teddy bear. Polly receives a mysterious phone call, where the caller claims that he has kidnapped Marge and buried her alive. The caller also implies that Marge is in the company of the dead. Barrett and Baron theorize that Marge has been buried in a used grave, and search for clues at the local graveyard. They also search the funeral parlor of Ed Quigley, where a child's coffin was recently stolen. The Weatherby family has a midnight funeral for Nancy, and during the funeral the lost child's coffin is discovered. Within is the seemingly decayed corpse of Marge. Her grandfather Jode has a heart condition, and seeing Marge like this shocks him to death. Quigley shoots Barrett, and reveals that the child "corpse" is actually a mannequin. Barrett had set up a fake kidnapping plot, and forced Quigley to help him. But Quigley had regrets. The wounded Barrett is allowed to return to his office, where he explains to Baron the details of his scheme. He was after the Weatherby inheritance for years, and had allowed Alice and Nancy to die to eliminate the heiresses. He orchestrated the fake kidnapping to scare his father-in-law to death. The mysterious phone call was a prerecorded message to give him an alibi. Barrett dies before explaining where Marge is. Polly discovers the little girl sleeping safely in a secret room at the doctor's office. In July 1957, William Castle formed the production company Susina Associates with Robb White and announced their intention to make five films over the following sixteen months, the first of which would be "Macabre". Castle mortgaged his Beverly Hills house to finance the film. He pitched his insurance policy gimmick to Howard Koch, and interested Koch and Aubrey Schenck enough to invest in the project as well. According to "Macabre" assistant director Paul Wurtzel, Koch helped Castle by letting him use Bel-Air Productions staff and its facilities at American National for cost plus a percentage. Sources differ as to how much the film cost to make, putting it anywhere from $80,000 to $150,000 with $90,000 often cited. Production occurred from 29 July through 12 August 1957. Exteriors were filmed in Chino, California and interior shooting took place at Ziv Studios. Castle marketed "Macabre" to several distributors before Allied Artists picked it up for $125,000.