CARNIVAL OF SOULS (1962)

I have had this film on a DVD of three public domain horror films sitting unwatched since 2003. I had long heard it was a unique and interesting horror film and having watched it I am glad I waited so very long to do so.  CARNIVAL OF SOULS manages to transcend its B-Movie origins and ends up becoming something altogether different. It is referred to as a cult classic but I think that does the film a disservice. It manages to take itself into a realm where it becomes simply a classic.

Mary Henry is the passenger in a car with friends. They take up the offer of a drag race but lose control and the car plummets off a bridge.  All appear drowned, until Mary miraculously emerges from the river. After recovering from the accident, Mary accepts a job as a church organist and moves to a new town. However, she is trailed by a strange spectral figure that seems connected with an abandoned pavilion by the sea.

I am not really sure where to begin with this film, there is so much to it. The script must not have looked anything special. The dialogue is reasonable if stilted and there is little in the way of characterisation.  The plot is essentially a reworking of Ambrose Bierce’s An Occurrence at Owl Creek Ridge. The main character narrowly escapes death and goes through a series of increasingly wild events only at the last to find that they died and all they experienced was in their minds. Recently BBCs Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes and JJ Abram’s Lost all reworked the concept. It is not in the script where the magic of this film lays.

Mary Henry is played by Candace Hillgloss, an actress with an unremarkable career. Her only other film of note appears to be The Curse of the Living Corpse another drive-in B-Movie.  She is not by any definition a good actress; she is stiff and her speech leaden. Somehow this adds to films sense of dislocation. Mary is an isolated figure throughout and her performance gives a very strange feeling to the whole piece.

The rest of the characters are better but only marginally so. A series of ciphers whose characters can be described by their job titles acted out like a local Am-dram play.  This unusually artificial sensation somehow makes it seem slightly more real. As if the camera is following actual people rather than actors. It is hard to define the sensation it creates except there is a bold sense of terror and tension running throughout the film.  It looks more like a French New Wave film than an American B-Movie. It has the same air of narrative ambiguity and subjective realism.  The film marketed itself with the tag line “A New Wave picture you CANNOT forget” If this was just marketing or a deliberate intention by the film maker I don’t know but it fits as New Wave cinema in France would not end until 1964.

It is the direction which really sets this apart. The cinematography has a strange, dreamlike air to it. It creates a sense of water and fluidity throughout. I do not know if this was intentional but as Mary drowns in the film I like to think not. The director Herk Harvey mostly worked in educational and public information films so even with its dreamlike atmosphere it feels very real. It is an incredible trick to pull off. I suspect this film was a major influence on David Lynch. His films Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me and Mulholland Drive have the same tone as CARNIVAL OF SOULS.  The audience are shown a dream as a documentary. I also detect an influence on George A. Romero from this film. The spectral figure which haunts Mary at one point arises from the water. Romero would shoot an almost identical scene in Land of the Dead with his zombies replacing CARNIVAL OF SOULS’ ghosts.

CARNIVAL OF SOULS is not just a cult classic it is a classic. This film deserves preservation as it is quite astonishing. It creates a sense of dread and unease in every part of the frame and note on the soundtrack. In any discussion of the influence of French New Wave cinema in America this should be the first and last example. Somehow what could easily have been a creaky B-Movie becomes art. It has stepped beyond the confines of its commercial format into something altogether different; it is like opening a Superman comic to find it has been drawn by Picasso. I say to everybody to see this film and you are in luck. As so often happened with B-Movies the copyright was not maintained properly and it has fallen into the public domain. So I present to you now CARNIVAL OF SOULS, “A Sensation About  A New Dimension”