Friday Night Flicks: Carnival of Souls
Like most B-horror classics of the sixties and seventies, Carnival of Souls suffers from several common pitfalls of the micro-budget.
The acting is choppy, over-exaggerated, and unconvincing at times, the special effects are mediocre, the camerawork is shaky, and the film’s supposedly undead antagonist just looks like an un-terrifying cross between Bernie Madoff and Dave Vanian.
But these shortcomings somehow work in the film’s favor; rather than depend on over-indulgent spooks and professional studio-gimmickry, director Herk Harvey is forced to get creative and find more subtle ways of inducing terror. Carnival of Soul’s hallucinatory cinematography, unsettling church-organ score, and artistic-feel all result in a mood and atmosphere that feels more slow-burn psychosis than ghost story, like a Fellini-directed episode of the Twilight Zone.
Candace Hilligoss stars as Mary, the film’s emotionally-detached lead, who - after miraculously surviving a car incident that leaves two of her other friends dead - makes a cross-country move to Salt Lake City. She finds work as a church organist, moves into a rented room, and attempts to resume life as it was before the incident, although nothing is quite as it was; with each passing day, she feels increasingly disconnected from reality. Each night, she is haunted by Harvey’s character - named simply “the man” in the film’s script - whose omni-presence in her life drives her to a point of near insanity. Stranger yet is her inexplicable and foreboding attraction to the abandoned carnival on the edge of town, past the salt flats, past past the point of no return, and beyond the realm of the living…
Carnival of Souls is this week’s Friday Night Flick, a French new wave-influenced masterwork in low-budget horror. —Jackson Todd
Watch Carnival of Souls in its entirety here:
