Retro Cinema: Carnival of Souls

If you think about it, movies are kind of like ghosts; they can fade from our view, disappear from our sight, and yet still linger in the air like an unexpected chill or lurch from their graves clutching at our memories and minds. That's what happened with Carnival of Souls, a 1962 black-and-white horror film that was made by director "Herk" Harvey and a like-minded group of first-time, last-time film makers taking a break from their day jobs at Centron, a studio devoted to industrial films and educational shorts. Carnival of Souls played a few drive-ins at the time of its release, but truly found an audience as late-night re-run material, popping up in the wee small hours of the morning to haunt and tease viewers with its slow, dreamlike sense of isolation, knockout cinematography, eerie score and the ripe and vital power of the lead performance from Candace Hilligoss. David Lynch and George A. Romero both cite Carnival of Souls as an influence on their work, but Carnival of Souls isn't just influential; it's worth seeing on its own as a very different kind of horror film, one that works as a dream-like slow poison as opposed to the short sharp shocks of modern horror films.

Carnival of Souls begins like a '50s youth-gone-wild film, as a group of joy riders careen down a dusty road; when one of the cars goes off a bridge, though, the fun is over. Mary (Hilligoss) staggers from the river muck like Ophelia saved from drowning, dirty and dazed; we follow her as she goes back to her life, working as a church organist in a small Kansas town. She's taking a job in Salt Lake City, and drives there with a faintly desperate air of aspiration in her gaze; she seems desperate for a new start. But her journey's haunted and troubled; faces materialize in the darkness, and a bizarre pavilion manifests itself out of the flat heartland, calling to her. She takes a room in a boarding house, trying to settle in and fending off the attentions of her boozy, woozy neighbor. But Mary's every effort begins to unravel; she's still followed by specters, troubled when a simple shopping trip descends into a nightmare where no one can see her, drawn over and over to the striking and spooky 'fun fair' she drove past on her way to town. The ultimate revelation of Mary's fate isn't shocking ... but the way Carnival of Souls reaches that destination is full of bizarre visions and troubling sights.

And it's the camerawork and composition that makes Carnival of Souls so worth revisiting; Harvey himself has said that the movie makers wanted to make a horror film that felt like it was shot by Bergman but felt like Cocteau. And after shooting talking heads and assembly-line footage for Centron productions like "Manners in School" and "How to Run a Filing Station," you get the sense that everyone involved wanted to swing for the fences here. Harvey's initial inspiration came from a chance drive by the Saltair Amusement Park and his reaction to its contrast between frivolity and starkness, the gaudy delights in what must have seemed like the middle of nowhere. Harvey's Centron co-worker John Clifford wrote the screenplay, where the contrasting moments of existential terror and '50s-style cocktail comedy somehow work together instead of neutralizing each other. Cinematographer Maurice Prather doesn't just craft striking and grim longshots -- a sequence of Mary playing the organ, shot in an organ factory, is as bold and beautiful as anything in Citizen Kane -- but also caught closer moments the editing team of Bill de Jarnette and Dan Palmquist turned into knockout sequences, like when Mary slips between a church performance and a hallucination of the uneasy dead, literally possessed by the music of Gene Moore's otherworldly score.

If you're looking for horror movie moments where a ghoul lunges for Mary or she races away from her tormentors in Carnival of Souls, you'll be disappointed; the film's not a chase, but a dance, with Mary's every move puling her closer to a fate she must know is coming. Hilligoss was trained at the Strasberg studio, and her portrait of the lost and doomed Mary still sticks; she's like the prototype for every lost blonde who wound up trapped in a David Lynch nightmare. The lower-budget moments in Carnival of Souls are fairly obvious, and a host of cheap DVD releases that came when the film lapsed into the public domain don't do the movie any favors; track down the Criterion Collection release to see the film at its best in a two-disc set that includes Harvey's director's cut, a documentary about the film's legacy and much more, as well as some excerpts from Centron shorts included for the sake of both posterity and contrast.

I can't imagine how a modern audience would react to Carnival of Souls -- a Wes Craven-backed 1998 remake veered wildly away from the '62 film while still managing to go nowhere either critically or commercially. And a horror fan who's used to the jumps and jars and guts and gore of something like Hostel or Saw would probably find Carnival of Souls the equivalent of chasing a handful of Ambien with a bottle of brandy. But Carnival of Souls takes a few unlikely parts -- a unique location, a perfect score, talented filmmakers who'd been forced to restrain their talents for too long, a lead actress who came from nowhere and then disappeared from view -- and makes them into a rich and striking piece of American horror cinema, one that's as unique as it is haunting.