Carnival of Souls [1962]

The re-release print of Carnival of Souls, under review here, restores nine minutes of footage excised by a commercially-minded distributor during the film's original appearance. It is a measure of the film's odd qualities that the pruning did very little to affect the storyline of the movie but a lot to undercut the effectiveness of its atmospherics. Self-financed by director Herk Harvey - one of the cinema's one-hit wonders - and made with local talent in Lawrence, Kansas, the film was picked up for distribution by Herts-Lion, an exploitation house that specialised in obscure and / or foreign horror items, and trimmed to make it fit on a double bill with The Devil's Messenger, a Swedish-shot unsold TV pilot by Curt Siodmak starring Lon Chaney Jr as the Devil, and also to pick up its unfashionably funereal pace. According to writer John Clifford, "mostly, they cut out little things ... When Mary sees the Man in the car window she drives into a ditch. In the first version, she sat in the car and pondered the situation, and then slowly drove out. In the release print, she plunks into the ditch, looks around for about two seconds, and then goes on without much hesitancy. It looked bad.' Struck from the original negative, the current director's cut version is even more measured in its pace, but more consistent. A few minor dialogue scenes are restored, mostly with secondary characters discussing Mary's oddness but also a brief history of the abandoned carnival contributed by a gas station attendant and a snatch of underlining explanation when Mary confesses 'I don't belong in the world, something separates me from other people'.

Conceived as an extended version of the kind of storyline then being done on television in half-hour anthology shows like The Twilight Zone or One Step Beyond, with an obvious debt to Ambrose Bierce's 'An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge', Carnival of Souls, a neglected independent picture that presumably baffled drive-in horror audiences with its slow pacing and neo-Bergman imagery, has somehow become one of the most influential films of the '60s, its traces appearing throughout the area of the fantastique, from the most marginal to the most mainstream. Its monochrome look was an influence on both Night of the Living Dead, which patterns its sombre-suited ghouls on the dead souls who flock to the dilapidated dance hall here, and Eraserhead, which echoes Harvey's use of a downbeat but resonant pipe organ score, while its basic storyline has been trotted out endlessly in variants as varied as Mary Lambert's Siesta, Thom Eberhardt's Sole Survivor and Paul Wendkos' From the Dead of Night, and the water imagery, edge-of-life-and-death protanogists and abandoned carnivals crops up in Let's Scare Jessica to Death, Slayground, The Funhouse, Messiah of Evil, The Redeemer and dozens of others. Even beyond the cinema, remnants of the film surface in novels like James Herbert's The Survivor and in a remarkable sequence of waterlogged thrillers from Stephen Gallagher, including Down River and Rain. Evidently, Harvey succeeded in his intent to make a film that would haunt its viewers, to the extent that it appears to have percolated into the genre's gene pool and settled in as one of the seminal works, like Psycho [which also has its sunken car, dead-in-water blonde heroine and haunted cross-country drive] and Night of the Living Dead, which is invariably drawn upon by creators in search of something to pay homage to.

This is a film whose roughness - reflected in makeshift performances and a tendancy for the dialogue scenes to drag on - works for it, with the aimless and yet oversignificant conversations between Mary and the doctor, the priest or her lecherous neighbour at once feeling stilted and having the touch of a convincing reality. Candace Hilligoss, the film's only professional performer, is a fragile and bizarre presence, perfectly cast as an unknowing member of the walking dead, her frozen blonde hairdo and wide eyes prefiguring the catatonic heroine of Night of the Living Dead, her soullessness revealed by her succession of odd statements, from her declaration that the church is just the place where she works to her claim that she doesn't particularly want a boyfriend because she doesn't like to let people get near her. The film perhaps spells out its "psychological" plot development a little too much, when it achieves its best effects without recourse to any dialogue, as in the various encounters with the pasty-faced lead ghost, the stately dances of the living dead at the old ballroom or, most unsettlingly, the moments in which Mary disappears into her own world, surrounded by silent people who can't see or hear her and yet conduct their own lives normally. With its steady pace and apparently meandering storyline, the film has to rely on an accumulation of atmosphere effects for its chills, but the finale, with Mary being dragged back to her proper death, is as dynamic a screen evocation of panic and horror as could be wished. Too long unavailable, this is one of the most essential of all recent movie rediscoveries.
KIM NEWMAN

First Published In: Monthly Film Bulletin [issue unknown]

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