My biggest regret about Carnival of Souls (1962) is that I didn’t see it earlier in life.
In some ways, it is a schlocky low-budget horror movie. In other ways, it’s like an art film.
Its plot is simple: The automobile that a young woman is riding in plunges into a river and she is presumed to be dead. She later stumbles on shore from the water and soon takes a job in another city as a church organist. She is haunted by visions of a strange man and eventually meets a strange ending.
It sounds exactly like 80-minute version of an episode of The Twilight Zone. But it reminds me of at least three different episodes:
And it’s also a lot like Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965) and has been identified as an influence on George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968).
Carnival of Souls was shot in three weeks $33,000. The production shot for one week at the Saltair Pavilion, located on the southern shore of the Great Salt Lake in Utah, and two weeks in Lawrence, Kansas. The film’s director, Herk Harvey, was a film director, writer and producer for an independent industrial and educational film production company in Lawrence.
Some of its rough edges contribute to its effectiveness. However, lead actress Candace Hilligoss, who trained with Lee Strasberg, is very effective and creates a solid foundation for the weirdness that ensues. The movie pins on the nature of her character, Mary Henry. We don’t know her before the accident, but afterwards she seems very cold and out of touch with the rest of humanity. She regards playing church music as just a job, with no spiritual meaning. In many ways, she seems dead inside and just takes some time for the rest of her body to catch up.
(I also love Sidney Berger as John Linden, one of the sleaziest losers you’ve ever seen in your life.)
One of the things that I love about this movie is its ambiguity. What exactly happens between when that car goes into the river in the beginning and when it’s pulled out in the end? Did Mary’s adventures between those two points actually happen? If they did, what do they mean?
The two simplest explanations are that Mary walked the earth for some time after her death, until the phantoms of other undead creatures pull her back to her destiny. Another possible explanation is those events take place in her dying mind or as she existed for a time in a state of limbo.
The movie also plays with images and sounds of nature. In one eerie sequence, Mary is shopping for clothing when suddenly all sound disappears and she finds that she can’t be seen by anyone else. She wanders outside and it’s the sudden chirping of birds that signifies a return to normalcy.
It’s trite to say that the movie plays like a dream, but it’s not common for American movies to portray horror as a dream state. You see it in other countries, but American horror films tend to like to explain everything or have the terrors be concrete in nature.
But I like the idea of horror being a dream you can’t wake up from. I think true terror comes from things that can’t be explained away easily.