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Herk Harvey, director & producer; John Clifford, screenwriter; Maurice Prather, Gene Moore, Dan Palmquist, editors; Maurice Prather, director of photography; Gene Moore, composer. Performers: Candace Hilligoss, Frances Feist, Sidney L. Berger, Art Ellison, Herk Harvey.
Summary: a young woman in a small Kansas town is haunted by strange images and events after she experiences a car crash. She agrees to take a job as a church organist in Salt Lake City. En route, she is haunted by a bizarre apparition that compels her toward an abandoned lakeside pavilion. Made by industrial filmmakers on a small budget (reportedly $33,000), this low-keyed horror film was little noticed upon its initial release but over the years has attained the status of cult classic. Filmed on location in and around Lawrence, Kansas, and Salt Lake City, Utah.
Special features: Disc 1. Selected-scene audio commentary featuring director Herk Harvey and screenwriter John Clifford; deleted scenes; outtakes, accompanied by Gene Moore's organ score. Disc 2. Final Destination: new interview with comedian and writer Dana Gould; Regards from Nowhere: new video essay by film critic David Caims; The Movie That Wouldn't Die!, a documentary on the 1989 reunion of the film's cast and crew; The carnival tour, a 2000 update on the film's locations; excerpts from movies made by the Centron Corporation an industrial film company based in Lawrence, Kansas that once employed Harvey and Clifford; history of the Saltair Resort in Salt Lake City, where scenes in the film were shot; trailer; essay by writer and programmer Kier-La Janisse (insert).
“I don’t belong in this world.”
[Note: minor SPOILERS in the comments below.] Carnival of Souls is such an established cult classic, complete with dedicated fanbase, that I’m pretty much embarrassed to write about it, since what I offer will largely repeat what’s already been said by commentators more astute than I. Nonetheless … as my local library only has a grainy public domain copy, recently stumbling onto a pristine print of Souls via the tv program Harvey’s Festival of Fear was a fortuitous accident that compels me to opine a bit about my continued appreciation of this one-of-a-kind, still largely under-the-radar masterpiece.
For all its positive qualities, technically and otherwise, describing the content of Souls is quite the slippery slope. With its shifting center of gravity and shaky narrative one stumbles as to articulate exactly what the film is, insofar as genre is concerned. [1] Psychological horror? Supernatural noir? Neo-surrealist? Well, it’s not really horror, not noir at all, and barely supernatural. Possibly surreal. Definitely psychological. Even more difficult is any attempt to define what message is being conveyed, and for that matter if Souls is a ‘message movie’ at all. To be sure the film has been dissected, spiced, sliced and diced from varying points of view, both online and in print, so I’ll do my best not to go over ground that’s already been covered, but rather offer some personal observations. Aside: based on my own, very unscientific, perusal of writings online it seems the most frequent critical takes on Carnival of Souls is from the feminist and queer perspectives.
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Getting back to the cast, I’d be remiss not to mention the performance of Sidney Berger, who plays John Linden, Mary’s lecherous neighbor next door. Like the film itself, he also gets, shall we say, better with repeated viewings, not because he becomes more likeable, but because Mr. Berger’s take is so real, and so natural, removed as it is from the precious affectations of ‘acting.’ To be sure, John is among the most irritating characters in the history of cinema, and it’s one of our crosses to bear that we have to endure his endless come-ons to Mary in order to get to the really good stuff in the film.
But subsequent viewings reveal the character of John to be, well, if not exactly sympathetic, then at least human, and we can to some extent understand, though not necessarily excuse, his behavior. John is doubtless self-conscious of his proletarian roots and current blue collar status. Thus he sees the regal Mary as quite the catch and a chance to date up. [2] Most of us guys at one time or another in our lives have wanted a woman who was out of our league, and after a rebuff or two we had to suck it up and move on to more suitable company. But John just won’t walk away. His approach is to ratchet up the pressure, and Berger’s all too real performance captures his unsettling combination of imploring, cajoling and implied threat.
To be fair, if we can be fair to such a jerk, Mary’s hot and cold messages to John can be an understandable source of frustration and confusion, but his misguided strategy is to turn up the heat even more. Maybe it’s the best he can do. It’s ultimately to his credit that when she freaks out after seeing The Man yet again he leaves the situation pronto. Hot item Mary may be, John doesn’t want to deal with a crazy woman. [3]. And we breathe a sigh of relief at his departure. Indeed this is when the film’s highest octane emotional juice really begins to kick in.
But perhaps a detour to talk about Mary’s possible lesbian inclinations. In the film’s very first image we see Mary, rather incongruously, in a car with two butch girls. By the way why would a class act like Mary be in a car joy riding with a couple of juvenile delinquents in the first place? Are the three a Sapphic ménage à trois? Is this a tipoff, as early as the first scene, of Mary’s latent, or not so latent, lesbianism? Well, maybe, and maybe not. It’s true that later on in the film Mary tells the doctor she’s never had any boyfriends, or felt the need for close (heterosexual) relationships. But if we were to describe Mary’s attitude as to close friendships, it would be asexual, certainly appropriate for a walking ghost. This is reinforced by her skittish responses to John’s romantic overtures: she says yes, sort of, but her actions – her constant pulling away from John’s affectionate entreaties as if disgusted by them – imply no.
Getting back to things remiss, it would be criminal not to mention Gene Moore’s murky organ music. Its off-kilter harmonies recall the spooky music we hear in Last Year at Marienbad, a film not unlike Souls in its dreamlike ambience and somnambulist characters. By the way, the minister’s sacking Mary for playing a few dissonant chords, when the church is empty at that, seems an extreme punishment, almost to the point of absurdist.
One could go on and on, given the film’s many confluences and connections. Indeed critics and just plain enthusiasts have gone on and on. But bottom line is: what is it that makes Carnival of Souls such an enduring classic? Some would say the character of Mary: cool, ambiguous, distant, self-possessed, a Hitchcock blonde without the fire underneath. But then again there’s the Saltair pavilion, creepy, other worldly, with its Moorish design giving the impression of levitation. And for some it’s something more undefinable, not so easy to get hold of, like the movie itself. We might call it mood or atmosphere. The uneasy sense of the not quite real, not quite being there, a combination of the quirkily surreal and down-home prosaic. Ultimately Carnival of Souls invites multiple interpretations, but its emotional core remains the same. Like Mary, we search for something. For some of us it’s a sense of belonging, or meaning, others the redeeming beauty of art, still for others simply the desire to go home. But, at least in the case of Mary, the search is only realized in that ultimate release, death itself.
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[1] Carnival of Souls may well fall into the curious subgenre sometimes referred to as the spectral icognizance film (Briefel, 2009),* in which a subject doesn’t realize his/her own death and gradually learns to the truth. The trope was a favorite of the Twilight Zone, used to great effect especially in the ‘After Hours’ and ‘Hitchhiker’ episodes. Movies that employ a spectral insognizance theme or flirt with the idea include The Others, Last Year at Marienbad, Dementia/Daughter of Horror, and Sixth Sense.
* Souls has also been cited as being a representative of the ‘highway horror’ subgenre (Murphy 2017).
[2] In his crude, rough-around-the-edges way John represents life, and thus he gravitates to things that would give pleasure to a living human being: coffee, food, alcohol, dancing, bars, human company, not least the company of women. By contrast Mary doesn’t quite belong among the living, ergo her resistance to John’s advances. She has no passion in life, except perhaps her music, and even here she seems under the control of something outside herself. Everyone else in Souls, even in a limited way, represents death, not least being The Man, whom we could call the angel of death, but in this context might be might be seen as a competitor for Mary’s affections. If The Man and John are indeed rivals, it’s no great mystery as to who will win this competition. Just when Mary seems to accede, however reluctantly, to John’s romantic overtures and their implied inevitable culmination in the sex act, The Man intervenes in most timely (or is it untimely) fashion. Mary goes full-on hysterical and gradually retreats into madness. As for John, he simply disappears from the movie.
[3] It’s not only Mary who acts weird: nearly everyone in Souls is a little off, and this may be the result of the limited acting skills of the mostly amateur cast. Be that as it may, landlady Frances Feist is both blandly reassuring and a little bit creepy. The minister and psychiatrist attempt, in their clumsy, eminently patriarchal ways, to fix Mary.** The guy at the drinking fountain in the park is just plain bizarre. Of course all the ghouls who menace Mary, most conspicuously The Man, are by definition strange, if toned down and almost benevolent compared to their siblings in, say, Night of the Living Dead. About the only normal character in Souls is, counter intuitively, John, simply because he is so real, and in his way, upfront about being such a slimebag.
Insofar as the way it presents the character of Mary, Carnival of Souls is a mildly subversive work in that it portrays Mary as an independent woman who resolutely insists on going her own way. Thus, and eminently apropos for a cult movie, she resonates with those who are just different – eccentrics, gays, introverts, bohemians, and yes (by the standards of the era), independent-minded women, all of whom, like Mary, don’t fit into the world in a conventional way and who want to stop at their own Saltair to enjoy the baths and smell the roses.
** The heavy-handed approach of both almost smacks of conversion therapy. Hooray for Mary for resisting these bumbling attempts to control, or at least guide her, to the light.
Aviva Briefel, “What Some Ghosts Don’t Know: Spectral Incognizance and the Horror Film,” Narrative, v17, n1 (January 2009), pp 95-108
Kimberley Monteyne, “From the Question of Soul to a Carnival of Souls,” Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, v58 n1 (Fall 2018), pp 24-46
Bernice M. Murphy, Carnival of Souls (1962) and the Highway Safety Film, FORUM 24 (Spring 2017)
James Riley, “Have You No Respect? Do You Feel No Reverence?: Narrative and Critical Subversion in Herk Harvey’s Carnival of Souls,” in: Crash Cinema: Representation in Film, edited by Will Godfrey, Jill Good, Mark Goodall, Cambridge Scholars, 2007, pp 14-24
Lawrence A. Walz, “Mary Henry’s Journey from Owl Creek Bridge,” Literature/Film Quarterly v23, n4 (1995), pp 262-65
