by: Letitia
Posted on 12.16.09 in All Horror Films > Cult/Erotic
Release Date: 1962

For horror movies, sometimes cheap is good. And Carnival of Souls looks cheap in the best sense of the word—the film has almost no attempts at special effects, and the stark, pared-down settings and scenes lend to the overall effect of creepiness. Like Romero’s Night of Living Dead, black and white film, minimal effects, and minimal settings really work for this movie. And, like Night of the Living Dead, much more is going on under the surface of the film than you might expect.

Carnival of Souls begins abruptly, with no set-up, with a drag race that ends in a car full of young women plunging over a bridge and into a river. As locals gather after the accident, a young woman emerges from the muddy water, streaked with dirt and dazed, but otherwise unhurt. She is the only survivor.

This scene, which is almost silent, is one of the most effectively creepy moments I have ever seen in a film, and the mystery of the moment, the impossibility of her emergence from that shallow, muddy river, sets the tone for how this entire movie will unfold. The film doesn’t explain how she, out of all of the others, survives the accident, and she never discusses it. This silence around the inciting event of the film leaves an effective mystery at the heart of the story—what has happened to this woman? How did she survive, and why won’t she talk about how she made it?

We soon learn that this young woman, Mary Henry, is a church organist. This gives the movie an excuse to include an abundance of creepy organ music, but it also reveals some interesting points about Mary Henry’s character—she insists, several times, that playing the organ at churches is just a job to her and that she is not a “church person”. As Mary plays the organ and interacts with people around her, it’s clear that something is wrong with her—she speaks in an emotionless monotone and seems cold. It’s not clear if this is because of her accident or had been a part of her personality before, but either way, it creates a strange, stilted manner that immediately makes the viewer a little uneasy with her—she isn’t a particularly sympathetic character, and this makes our response to her accident more complicated.

I should probably stop here and say something about the acting in this movie. It’s obvious that most of the actors aren’t professionals. Almost everyone in the film (save Mary and her sleazy neighbor) speaks their lines with stilted, awkward inflection, as though they are reading straight from a cue card. At first, it seems that Mary speaks this way too, but her manner seems more calculated, more a part of her character than a failure in acting. Somehow, this stilted acting adds to the overall strangeness of the movie, but for modern viewers used to acting that looks like real-life interaction, this might be a bit grating.

When Mary leaves for a job in Salt Lake City, she begins to see visions—mostly they consist of a pale, old man who shows up in windows and mirrors. Mary also finds that she is obsessed with an old carnival ground site. Mary’s mix of horror and attraction to this place creates the primary tension and mystery of the movie.

At this point, what seems like a quiet, atmospheric, creepy little film becomes strange. Mary, though generally cold, and self-admittedly not very interested in other people, begins a strange flirtation with her obviously sleazy neighbor, Mr. Linden , played with slimeball panache by Sidney Berger. The movie hints that Mary’s vacillation between ice queen and vixen come somehow from her accident and from whatever connection she now has to death after her own brush with it. She also begins to experience strange spells where she is deaf and invisible. Mary’s terror and confusion in these scenes are genuinely frightening, and the lack of special effects increase the realism of Mary’s situation.

Although Carnival of Souls won’t keep you awake with nightmares, it is a psychologically interesting film that takes risks by presenting the viewer with a mysterious main character and a storyline that never neatly resolves itself or explains the mystery. I wish more contemporary horror movies would do the same.

• ★★★★★

  Acting:

• ★★★★★

  Blood:

• ★★★★★

  Violence:

• ★★★★★

  Partying:

• ★★★★★

  Language:

• ★★★★★

  Humor:

• ★★★★★

  Predictable:

• ★★★★★

  Girls:

• ★★★★★

  Gore:

• ★★★★★

  Sexuality:

• ★★★★★

  Torture:

• ★★★★★

  Overall:

Great points about the landscape--I wish I'd mentioned that. It makes the midwest look like the moon. Oh man, Eyes Without a Face is amazing. I just saw it last week.

Another thing that also makes this film impressive is the creative control of Herk Harvey. He both produced and directed the film and plays the ghoulish spectral visitor that torments Mary throughout the film. The American landscape has never looked so depressed and lifeless, and it leaves one with the sense that the real world is less alive than the gloomy carnivalesque afterlife the spectres inhabit.

Every time I watch this film I get the creeps. It's almost as if Mary finds her self and who she "is", in death. Still, any social or religious themes are ever so slightly hinted. It's hard to get a real feel for the film, and as a result, it deserves multiple viewings. I highly recommend this film and the French film, Eyes Without a Face. They have such striking comparisons and both classics are beautiful in every approach. I thought the acting was also fairly substandard. For the time, although wooden, still felt fitting and i enjoyed the performances.