wrong turn: Carnival of Souls (1962)

    Carnival of Souls. The Criterion Collection, no. 63 [New York, N.Y.], 2016. DVD. 2016. Two-DVD special edition. 2 videodiscs (78 min.): black and white; 1 booklet. ISBN: 9781681431772, 1681431777. OCLC Number 950981645.
    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, my 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 are from the feminist and queer perspectives.
 

    Whatever its genre or message, Souls gets better with repeated viewings, and this includes the performers. Candance Hilligoss as Mary gives a wondrous performance, and her nuanced interpretation captures the character perfectly. The supporting and bit players, too, semi-professional at best as they are, do a terrific job. Actually I think the lack of professional actors adds to the story’s verisimilitude, along with the on-location real life locales and the low-keyed, documentary-like presentation of the story. In fact everything about the film is handled with such a sure hand for a first-time, apparently only time, feature film director that we might be forgiven for thinking that the unseen presence of Orson Welles is somewhere in the mix, guiding things along. Indeed there are many Welles-like tableaux along the way, and the comparison of the abandoned pavilion in Souls to the funhouse in The Lady from Shanghai is almost too facile, but I’ll make it anyway.
    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 film scholars  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, for 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. 
   [Update, 30 April 2626: I recently had the great pleasure of catching the 3-D version of Souls at our local arthouse theater. Truth be told, I wasn't that fond of the 3-D effects but it was a treat to finally see this genuine classic on the big screen. Three-dimensional or no, it's still a great movie.]

  [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, DOA, 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 - and everything - in Souls is a little off. Mary's hand movements at the organ never match the music she's performing; she manipulates the organ footpedals barefoot; 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;** and 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 her, or at least guide her to the light.

Further reading:

    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

a ghost of a chance with you ...

     The Ghost and Mrs. Muir. Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation; produced by Fred Kohlmar; screenplay by Philip Dunne; directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz; director of photography, Charles Lang, Jr.; music, Bernard Herrmann. Burbank, Calif. Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, [2013]. Originally produced as a motion picture in 1947. From the novel by R.A. Dick (pseud. Josephine Leslie).
    Performers: Gene Tierney, Rex Harrison, George Sanders, Natalie Wood, Vanessa Brown, Edna Best, Anna Lee, Robert Coote. Special features: commentaries by Greg Kimble, Christopher Husted, Jeanine Bassinger and Kenneth Geist; biography: "Rex Harrison: the man who would be king"; theatrical trailer; still gallery. Summary: at the turn of the century a young widow and her daughter move into a cottage on the English coast. Soon she learns that the cottage is haunted by the ghost of its former owner, a sea captain. When he finds he can't scare her away, they soon fall into a most unlikely love affair.


    Dating as it does from an era rife with ghost movies (most of them silly comedies), The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, along with The Uninvited, is my favorite [1]. That being said, I reluctantly admit that in my most recent viewing I was somewhat less taken with Mrs. Muir than I had been in the past. Still, the film is a triumph, an under the radar gem that has crept up in critical and popular esteem over the years. Update: a second viewing, this one with the superb commentary by Greg Kimble and Christopher Husted, has inspired me to warm to the film a little more and further appreciate its many felicities, albeit within its historical and stylistic context. By the way, I’m less enthusiastic about the second commentary track by Jeanine Bassinger and Kenneth Geist.

    But getting back to ghost movies: curious that so few reviewers and commentators note the obvious parallels to The Uninvited [2]. Both are gothicized tales set on the English sea coast, both have the requisite haunted house (and attendant film noirish look), both deal with issues of love beyond death, both are set in the early Twentieth Century [3], and, perhaps most important, both treat their subjects seriously (though Mrs. Muir has its share of lighter moments). Both films also reflect the unseen presence of Orson Welles, and both are obvious first cousins to the Val Lewton supernatural noir thrillers of the 1940s. But despite the similarities in content and even style, somehow the tone is different. Partly this is a result of director Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s emphasis on words and script, thus Mrs. Muir has a more writerly and dialogue-rich sheen, especially the snappy back and forth between Harrison and Tierney. As mentioned above, Mrs. Muir is almost a comedy, but, happily, not quite. It pulls off its comic elements with pitch perfect timing, never overstaying the welcome. In contrast, Uninvited’s attempts at humor seem heavy footed and out of place.
   

    In any case, the performances in Mrs. Muir are all right on the money. It took me a while to warm to Rex Harrison, but I think he got better as the film progressed and the character softened. However, it’s Gene Tierney’s movie and, for me, the performance of a career. Her Brit accent sounds authentic enough, and the subtleties she brings to the character are a wonder. I think her acting is even better as the elderly Lucy Muir, who gets more sympathetic as she ages while at the same time becomes crankier. And of course George Sanders is terrific in a very George Sanders type of role as the charming cad. That he could put across this kind of character in his sleep shouldn’t lessen our appreciation of his marvelous portrayal. Among the supporting cast especial mention must be made of Vanessa Brown as the adult version of Anna. Echt-English in appearance and accent, she’s just right, and I wish she’d had a bigger role. The short scene between her and Tierney is perhaps the most moving in the entire film. As Herrmann’s score wafts in the background, they talk about the ghost, life and love, and it’s hard to hold back the tears. Finally, amongst the supporting players, if you like, there’s the seemingly inevitable cute yorkie in a movie with this setting and era (there’s also a cute yorkie in Uninvited, by the way).

     Bernard Herrmann’s music for Mrs. Muir (reputedly his personal favorite among his film scores) has been praised to the skies, deservingly so. Alas, my DVD copy frequently minimized the music or in some cases rendered it inaudible, buried as it were beneath the dialogue. This is especially unfortunate since the obscured passages are among the most exquisite in the entire film. Anyhow the music’s low keyed eloquence suggests a longing for the infinite, a love beyond death that’s the raison dêtre for the entire story. Indeed it’s not too much of an exaggeration to say the music really carries the movie, more than any other element. There’s a feeling of melancholy that, if you’ll pardon the pun, haunts the entire film, and the music perfectly expresses and contributes to this sense of longing, regret and unrequitedness. In contrast, Victor Young’s lushly romantic score for Uninvited, perfect in its way, really can’t compare – in style or aesthetic merit.
    To summarize, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir is a perfectly wonderful movie: it brings together all the elements to form a near flawless work of art. In doing so it represents what was best about moviemaking in the studio era.   

[1]  As readers of this blog must divine, I’m a big fan of the above-mentioned Val Lewton psychological horror films from the 1940s, and though it’s a subtle point, I consider them a different animal from both Mrs. Muir and Uninvited: for all their spooky, ghost like ambience, the Lewton films have no ghosts, in fact only a couple of them have overtly supernatural elements, and even these are depicted ambiguously enough to be arguable.     
[2]  Another explanation for the similarity of the films, at least in their look, is the presence of ace cameraman Charles Lang, who did the cinematography for both. Even so, Mrs. Muir has somewhat lighter, crisper visuals than Uninvited, the gloomier look of which is very much appropriate for the dark psychological undercurrents. A personal note: I admire and greatly enjoy both films, but at the moment lean towards Uninvited, but only by a whisker.
[3] Yes, it’s pushing it to say both date from more or less the same era, since Uninvited is set in 1937 and Mrs. Muir ca. 1900. And yet, much of the culture, architecture, and Victorian/Edwardian attitudes are cut from the same cloth.

mimosa by starlight: the Lewtonian vibe of The Uninvited (1944)

 

*** MINOR SPOILERS in the comments below ***


“They call them the haunted shores. These stretches of Devonshire and Cornwall and Ireland which rear up against the westward ocean. Mists gather here. And sea fog. And eerie stories.”


The 1940s were the golden age of the cinematic ghost story. Two close relatives, the supernatural fantasy and the supernatural noir, also peaked in that decade. Audiences flocked to these new kinds of horror films. Battered by true and very violent horrors of world war, perhaps they were ready for something otherworldly, but presented in a quieter, more reflective manner. Whatever the ultimate explanation or aesthetic classification, arguably the best of the ghost movie lot is 1944’s The Uninvited, which has been described as the first movie to treat ghosts in a serious manner. The usual ghostly suspects are adapted and presented in surprisingly original ways to craft a story both conventional and offbeat, unsettling and ultimately not so scary after all. But the very fact that Uninvited mostly embraces the ghost story conventions, along with its quintessentially Forties black & white look [1], accounts for a great deal of its charm and continued appeal.  

At about the same time a group of horror films produced at RKO and helmed by maverick producer Val Lewton gently nudged the envelope even further, in turn creating and perfecting the aforementioned subgenre of supernatural noir [2]. It’s tempting to view the Lewton films, with their low-keyed thrills, minimalist sets and chiaroscuro lighting, as setting off a trend that peaked later in the decade as other studios brought forth similar products. But the Lewton canon exist in such a self-contained, sui generis world, that their unique alchemy could never be duplicated, and thus any idea of influence is tenuous at best.  Still … in some cases the resemblances are uncanny [3], and such is the case with The Uninvited. It’s in this context that we’ll note similarities in style and content to the Lewton films.

If Uninvited does not exactly invent the supernatural mystery overlaid with family secrets and aberrant pathology, it crystallizes all the elements in a way that previously had not been done, and does so with a deft touch that subtly mixes atmosphere, story and low-keyed acting, along the way sneaking in some surprising shadings of plot and character. Thus Uninvited is as much psychological drama as ghost tale, with much of the terror inflicted, sometimes self-inflicted, by living mortals with their own issues. Uninvited is also an old fashioned romance, even if it’s difficult to pin down the romantic protagonists, especially so, since, structurally and thematically, the romantic element is always subordinated to the eerie goings on.

And inasmuch as all the above-mentioned themes and stylistics are present in the Lewton films, it would seem a curious contradiction then that none of the Lewtons is of the haunted house variety, although two of them, Isle of the Dead and I Walked with a Zombie, contain characters that for all the world resemble spectral images. One might stretch the definition of a ghostly presence and also cite Simone Simon’s angel from the beyond in Curse of the Cat People. A mention is also due to Curse of the Cat People’s old Gothic house that’s gloomy and creepy, and certainly has a past, but is not literally haunted.

the ghost always rings twice ...

However, when considering similarities between the Val Lewton films and Uninvited, the inevitable starting point has to be mood and atmosphere [4]. Ultimately what binds the Lewton oeuvre and Uninvited is this less direct approach to shivers, most vividly expressed through the visual language. Most of the supernatural feel and general sense of unease is created by the gloomy lighting, minimal special effects and shadowy camera work that bathes the goings on in perpetual semi-darkness. This sense of never quite getting a clear vision parallels the inner motivations of the characters, which are often ambiguous and unclear. Special kudos then to Uninvited’s cameraman Charles Lang and Lewton’s favorite cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca.

But let’s move on to actors, and more important, characters and their various inter-relationships. First, to point out two relatively minor but not totally insignificant connections: that’s the presence of Lewton favorites Alan Napier and Elizabeth Russell. Napier takes the role of the kindly but mostly ineffectual doctor, and Russell – well, accounts vary. One is that she’s the sitter for the two large portraits of Mary Meredith, while other versions credit her as being the model for the ectoplasmic ghost image we see at the end of the film. Some sources credit the ghost as being played by Lynda Grey [5].

As for characters a good place to start is with nominal leads Roderick and Pamela Fitzgerald (Ray Milland and Ruth Hussey), a brother and sister pair easing into middle age. They have an unconventional sibling relationship that borders on the kinky: they live together in London, take vacations together, and eventually buy and reside in the haunted house. There’s no mention of parents or other living family members (note: their, presumably deceased, mother is mentioned, but only in passing), and when we first encounter them neither has any significant romantic attachments, that we know of anyway (except perhaps to each other). Since the story is set in the late 1930s one can only wonder what became of Roderick and Pamela during the war.

In any event the two siblings function more like husband and wife, down to the good-natured bickering. Pamela wins most of the arguments as she seems to be the dominant partner. Thus it’s natural for us to think she’s the older, bossy sibling, which she indeed may be in the story, but actually Ray Milland was about five years senior to Ruth Hussey.

Roderick and Pamela set the tone for several unusual family relationships in Uninvited, a dynamic not uncommon in the Lewton films, where incestuous, ossified human relations contribute to the moody atmospherics. Roderick’s and Pamela’s arrangement also foreshadows even more shocking, ‘unnatural’ revelations in Uninvited – but more on this later. The offbeat sibling dynamic is softened by the gradual pairing off of Roderick with Stella, and later, Pamela with the doctor, though even here we sense that something isn’t quite right: Milland was nearly twenty years Gail Russell’s senior – she was nineteen when she made the film and if anything looks younger – and his courting her seems just a bit creepy. Likewise there’s scant chemistry between Pamela and the doctor: neither has shown any romantic feelings toward the other. It’s just tossed out as the promise of a happy ending and hardly has the ring of truth.

In any case, other Lewton-like aspects of Uninvited include: the main character is a creative artist, in this case a music critic and composer; it takes a while for the thrills to appear, as there’s a fairly lengthy first act that sets things up; a diseased eroticism hovers, hothouse-like, over all the goings on; the sound of weeping emerges from the darkness from no discernible source; a somewhat naïve yet headstrong young woman ventures into dangerous territory – both literal and figurative – recalling the famed Val Lewton walks; Stella’s wafty persona suggests a memorable Lewton heroine, the enigmatic Jacqueline in Seventh Victim; gentle breezes and the nearby ocean assume prominence, if only as backdrop; personal inter-relationships are implied and incomplete, and thus plot threads are left unresolved; the scent of mimosa recalls Irena’s perfume in Cat People; the principal villain is a woman, two women actually if we count both Miss Holloway and Mary Meredith [6]; the women characters tend to be independent, older, dominating, or sinister (Stella being the exception), while the men are generally bland, passive or effeminate.
Moreover, all the characters exist in a self-contained, insular universe that never mentions events happening in the rest of the world. The elephant in the living room is the unseen presence of World War II, so responsible for the dark, melancholy atmosphere, especially in the Lewton films, but never referred to directly (since Uninvited is set in 1937, WW2 has yet to occur, though storm clouds swirling on the horizon, likewise not referenced in the film, are happening in real life).


‘large audiences of questionable type …’

There’s another aspect of Uninvited that makes it not only a ghost movie classic but a cult classic as well, and that’s the portrayal of the sinister quack psychiatrist Miss Holloway. She presides imperiously over a sanitarium for nervous (read: lesbian) middle-aged women, and her presence adds a welcome touch of danger and threat (primarily to Stella). Moreover, the character is a source of continued fascination and even debate. There’s a strong, not so subtle suggestion that Mary and Miss Holloway were quite a bit more than just friends, or in their case, something beyond caregiver and patient (Miss Holloway was Mary Meredith’s nurse). Naturally Miss Holloway’s institution is named – what else? – the Mary Meredith Retreat.

Thus Uninvited has attained the status of camp favorite, and it’s tempting to look upon the Sapphic undercurrent as being (re)discovered decades later by astute critics and film historians. But this is not necessarily the case: contemporary audiences were apparently in on the coded references too:

Father Brendan Larnen of the Catholic Legion of Decency wrote a complaining letter to Will Hays, head of the infamous Production Code Administration which censored Hollywood movies. Father Larnen noted that “… in certain theatres large audiences of questionable types attended this film at unusual hours, drawn by certain erotic and esoteric elements in the film.”

Yes, it was there all along, hiding in plain sight, and the audiences (at least those of 'certain questionable type') knew it. The relationship between Miss Holloway and Mary then has a not unappealing romantic tinge, a proverbial longing for the abyss and a state of transcendence, expressed via a love and fidelity that goes unto and beyond death itself [8].

Cornelia Otis Skinner’s brilliant camp take on Miss Holloway is one of the more overt portrayals of a lesbian in a mainstream film in the Forties, right up there with Judith Anderson’s unforgettable Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca. The irony is that, in our seen-and-heard-it-all Twenty-first Century world, Miss Holloway is likely to be viewed as an anachronism, a quaint, almost comic, relic from a more innocent age, and objections to her depiction would be along the lines that she’s a cruel caricature.

In any case, tradition dictated that the evil lesbian had to die or go mad at the end. In our case Miss Holloway is still very much alive when we last see her. She disappears from the movie with no further explanation as to her ultimate fate, but we can infer from her ramblings and the far off look in her eyes that she’s well on her way to going mad. 
[Trivia: Cornelia Otis Skinner is portrayed by Gail Russell, yes, Uninvited's Gail Russell, in the film adaption of Our Hearts Were Young and Gay (1944), a chronicle of the picaresque adventures of Cornelia and travel companion Emily Kimbrough in France in the 1920s. Considering Miss Skinner's intense performance in Uninvited of a more or less out-in-the-open Sapphic character, a nice, if unintended, ironic touch then is the word 'gay' in the book's title].

There are other unsung (and sung) heroes and heroines beyond character and atmosphere. Composers Roy Webb and Victor Young merit special mention. Young’s lushly romantic score for Uninvited contrasts with Webb’s low-keyed music for the Lewton films, and yes, we must give the obligatory shoutout to the haunting and unforgettable tune “Stella by Starlight.” The wardrobe designs by Edith Head in Uninvited and Renié in the Lewtons are unshowy and nondescript but get the job done. Much credit must also be given to the mise-en-scène, so kudos to the art directors and set designers, and just plain directors Lewis Allan (Uninvited) and Jacques Tourneur, who directed the first three, arguably best, Lewton films. But perhaps pride of place must go to a surprising contribution, and that’s the wise and witty scripts by Frank Partos and Dodie Smith (Uninvited), and Ardel Wray and Dewitt Bodeen (Lewtons). With no disrespect to atmosphere or the actors, which remain paramount, these films wouldn’t be what they are without the literate, incisive dialogue, always delivered spot on by well cast performers.

If there’s one weakness in Uninvited, it’s the far too many attempts at humor, most of which fall flat and impede the suspenseful narrative. This is one time where Uninvited parts ways with the Lewton films, which are conspicuously bereft of humor and bathed in unremitting moodiness and melancholy.

But such a minor quibble amongst the proverbial embarrassment of riches. If anything, the passage of time has only added to Uninvited’s luster. It looks back fondly to a quieter, less obvious time in Hollywood, and still beguiles with a sense of mystery and incompleteness.

However, and as much as Uninvited is a great, or near-great film, both differing from and also possessing the best qualities of its era, for me it doesn’t quite scale the existential heights of the best Lewton films. It’s difficult to put into words why this is the case. Paradoxically it might be the very fact that Uninvited is a full-on big budget production by a major studio, and as a result there’s a certain bloated, overbaked quality to its otherwise elegant veneer. By contrast the Lewton entries never pretend to be anything more, or less, than B movies, and thus they have a stripped down, to-the-bone gestalt that gets right to the matter at hand.

There may be another explanation, though it tends to contradict what I’ve written above. Despite all the spiritual shenanigans, Uninvited is at heart a romance presented in a romantic, old school way (Young’s melodious score is one tipoff). By contrast, the Lewton films are essentially dark, fatalistic meditations and most definitely not romances, the occasional Freudian undertones that spice up a love story subplot notwithstanding. Consequently, Uninvited is of its time, while the Lewtons have a timeless quality and have stayed fresh and modern.

Whatever their relative merits, both Uninvited and the Lewton films treated the subject matter – and the audience – with great respect, opting for intelligent stories and understated effects that leave much to the imagination. Uninvited in particular can be recommended as an old-fashioned ghost tale best viewed late at night, candles lit and fireplace crackling full blast.  


[1] Not so coincidentally, the Forties were also the summit of black and white movies. It was perhaps inevitable that supernatural films emphasizing mood and atmosphere went out of fashion in the Technicolor-drenched Fifties and Sixties. There were exceptions: schlockmeister William Castle’s House on Haunted Hill, from 1958, has such a camp feel to it that it hardly counts. Likewise the less-than-stellar 13 Ghosts. However, 1964’s The Haunting, a kind of homage to Val Lewton, must merit a mention. Haunting was directed by Robert Wise, who, not surprisingly, directed two of the Lewton films and was an admirer of the Lewton aesthetic.  

[2] The films are: Cat people, I Walked with a Zombie, The Leopard Man, Curse of the Cat People, The Seventh victim, The Ghost Ship, The Body Snatcher, Isle of the Dead, and Bedlam. To label these films supernatural noir is as good a moniker as any, but it’s somewhat inaccurate: at most only three of the Lewton films deal with overtly supernatural themes. The others might varyingly be described as domestic melodramas, adventure stories or historical dramas, all with a touch of horror thrown in.  

]3] Other Lewton-like films of the era include Alias Nick Beal, Jane Eyre, The Spiritualist, and especially The Ghost and Mrs. Muir.

[4] Interesting in the context of atmosphere is the film’s signature scene, which invokes a Lewton-like sense of unease. This is where Roderick and Stella visit the studio, and while he is playing the piano the candles turn dim and his playing takes on a darker tinge. Stella rushes to the cliff edge, apparently possessed by a spirit that wishes her ill. Similar tableaux of two persons, one playing the piano and one listening nearby, in which the music changes from mellifluous to sinister, occur in the horror films Dracula’s Daughter and House of Dracula. Another vintage Lewton-esque scene is when Roderick and Pamela first hear the ghost weeping while they listen atop the staircase, candles in hand.

[5] The redoubtable IMDB muddies the waters further: it confirms Russell as the model for the portrait, but lists both Grey and Russell as the Mary Meredith ghost.

[6] In the Lewton films, as well as Uninvited, the female villain is a mysterious Other (sometimes even a ‘monster’), defined by ethnicity (Irena in Cat People and Thea in Isle of the Dead), catatonia (Jessica in Zombie), superstitious beliefs (Kyra in Isle of the Dead), family rejection (Barbara Farren in Curse of the Cat People) or sexual orientation (Miss Holloway and Mary in Uninvited). The sympathetic Jacqueline in Seventh Victim is a kind of villain, living a bohemian lifestyle that’s far outside society’s norms. Even in Bedlam Nell Bowen is (mistakenly) labeled a ‘monster’ (i.e. madwoman) and confined to the infamous asylum. And of course Carmel, a foreigner, thus quintessentially Other, is initially taken to be the villain in Uninvited.
    Aside: Although she's obviously playing an English character in a very English setting, Gail Russell is the only character in Uninvited who doesn't speak with a British accent. Even with her cultivated American inflection, it would be a reach to suggest that Russell's accent is even mid-Atlantic. Still, it doesn't detract from her wondrous performance, especially praiseworthy considering Uninvited was her first substantial role in a major production.

[7] Homoerotic touches are present in several of the Lewton films, most prominently in Cat People and Seventh Victim, both of which have implied lesbian subtexts.

[8] Not for nothing that when we view Miss Holloway ensconced at her mausoleum-like retreat, the music in the background is Wagner’s ‘Liebestod’ (Love’s Death) from Tristan und Isolde. Aside: some sources cite Pamela and even Stella as also being gay. Perhaps. Perhaps not, depending on how one reads the clues. These were the censor-laden 1940s, when everything had to be viewed - and scripted - through a subtextual prism. So who can say? On the other hand, that such an obviously Sapphic character as Miss Holloway could be smuggled into the story, in the open as it were, is all the more remarkable.