Carnival of Souls
This is a film with a strange history. It was directed by Herk Harvey and written by John Clifford, two men who worked at Cetron, a firm in Lawrence, Kan., specializing in making industrial and educational films. In 1962, they made this low-budget horror film, and it did what independent films normally did in 1962. It did not quite do nothing, but next to nothing.
As far as the filmmakers were concerned, they were two guys with day jobs who had made an interesting movie that had come and gone. They had no idea they had made a classic and had achieved screen immortality ... until the film started showing up on television, usually around 2 a.m. And with those late-night TV broadcasts, the film’s reputation began to grow.
In retrospect, it makes sense that “Carnival of Souls” reached its public in this way. Many and perhaps most horror films benefit from the community experience, of sitting in a room full of people who are on edge and jittery. But “Carnival of Souls” is more like a private conversation, and it’s best experienced one on one, just you and the TV set. Its ideal audience is a single person, late at night, in an otherwise still house. It’s not a movie that inspires jolts and screams. It’s not a movie with a thunderous soundtrack that crashes down and makes everyone jump in the air.
This is a movie that gets into your mind, and it forces you to think about life and reality and the soul and the meaning of existence. It’s just a low-budget horror movie, with some flat and amateurish performances, but even that aids the experience, lending it a sense of the distant and the artificial. And as time passes and 1962 gets further away, this sense of strangeness and distance only increases.
The movie’s ideas are subject to a variety of metaphysical interpretations. But in its broad outlines, it’s about a young woman (Candace Hilligoss) who gets into a car accident on the way to assuming a new job as a church organist. She is a rather prickly and self-reliant personality, but as she goes about her business, she finds herself increasingly plagued by strange visions of a man (Harvey) smiling at her in a malevolent way. Among other things, “Carnival of Souls” is about the mind’s ability to keep the unconscious at bay — and about how terrifying it would be to have the unconscious set loose. It’s also about the possibility of a genuinely hostile universe. That’s why it’s best seen when alone, in the quiet, at a time of night when your own unconscious starts rattling at the gate. Just beware.
This new Blu-ray contains audio commentary from Harvey and Clifford (both now deceased) and various interviews and deleted scenes. “Carnival of Souls” is a rough classic, but it’s a classic and some kind of great movie. — Mick LaSalle