Carnival of Souls

I've never heard of this movie and came upon it only while flipping channels. This is a great movie but it's one of those movies that grows on you. At first I thought it was dumb and I just didn't get it. It's very eerie and has somewhat a dreamlike quality to it. This was in the '60s so the movie depended on fright-makeup and really ugly people for special effects.

I appreciated the movie beyond its celluloid being. The filmmakers threw in every idea they had in their heads into the movie. No line was drawn. Nothing was unassailable. It didn't have to make sense as long as an idea was weird and creeped out someone on the set. To some people this might seem senseless but for some strange reason I got it. The innocent quality of the movie is a breath of fresh air. No hidden messages. No untruths to be uncovered from the facts.

While watching the movie I thought about directors whose work I love. Films whereby passion outweighed everything else. Did Ed Wood had some influence on Herk Harvey? Was David Lynch inspired by Carnival of Souls?

Watch it without prejudice and you'll see the simplicity and brilliance the filmmakers were trying to acheive. Watch it with a jaded, pretentious eye and you could be missing out on a movie that was more thought provoking than it intended to be.

When I saw a copy of Carnival of Souls together with Night of the Living Dead for a measly buck, I figured I would go ahead and take advantage. After all, I could always use a backup copy of Night of the Living Dead, and this Carnival of Souls looked good for laughs. So I bought the set, having a bit of change on me, and that night I readied myself for some fun.

When I put Carnival of Souls into the player, I was at first a bit unimpressed. I mean, nothing really happened that related to any sort of plot. Then, about 25 minutes into the film I started feeling very uneasy, a feeling I was unfamiliar with in film with the exception of Stanley Kubrick's 'The Shining'. the story is simple, to put it short a woman survives a car accident, and delves into a dissolute surrealistic nightmare.

The surreal atmosphere, the sudden realizations of fear, and the general feel of the film gave a VERY foreboding atmosphere, which haunted me the entire following week. The film is just so foreboding, I could not help but remain uneasy, even the second time around.

The film also was also fairly technically impressive, at least more so then I thought. This film had come six years before George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead, but the use of camera is very similar, and it is very evident that Romero has been influenced by this film's direction. It is a shame that Herk Harvey did not expand on his talent, this is his only feature, yet there is nothing amateur about it. It is very advanced considering what it is, and I was overtly impressed with it.

I suppose Carnival of Souls could, and maybe should warrant an 8/10, I gave it 7/10, but it is truly an original film, and one that I feel holds up very well in the present day. I think it is a must see for fans of surrealism, horror, or just experiences.

Not many people know of this film, surprisingly--this is one of the most intelligently constructed and atmospheric horror (for lack of a better term) movies of all time. Whenever I do run across someone else who has seen this film, there is an instantaneous, unspoken understanding in regards to the enduring creepiness of this film.

My first viewing of COS occurred when I had inexplicably awoke in the middle of the night as a boy and switched on the TV. I had missed the opening minutes, but was powerfully drawn into the story. I sat transfixed until the shock ending, and think I just stared until after the sign off and following screen static. The next day I was not entirely sure I had actually watched this film or dreamed it--nobody else had ever heard of it and I never did catch the title (for some reason, its never shown much). Needless to say I was creeped out for days! Films that can affect one's sensibilities like this are golden! Find it and watch it in the middle of the night--alone.

After viewing this legendary flick for the first time, I have to say that the quality they achieved on a shoestring is still impressive today. Every penny spent on this little film makes its way before the viewer, which is something that can't be said of most major budget films then or now. Corman used "getting the money up on the screen" as his yardstick for his own success as low budget producer and director. But while I like the Corman cheapies, like Bucket of Blood and Little Shop of Horrors, and acknowledge that they possess a relatively high level of workman-like resourcefulness, it's hard to deny that Carnival makes many of Corman's films look slapped-out and unimaginative in comparison. Corman usually steered clear of anything poetic, dabbling with it most pointedly in the dream sequences in his first Poe adaptations. In contrast, this films makers are quoted to the effect that they were inspired by Bergman and Cocteau. Now, with such heroic ambition, Carnival could have turned out a laughable mess. But the films dark waking dream atmosphere is well realized. They had some really great locations– the pavilion, the wooden bridge, the organ factory and the church with the "casting out demons" stained glass. The actress playing the heroine is lucky (or skillful) casting, too; she doesn't look or act quite like the average person, which is perfect for the story. If I picked one thing to complain about, it would be the interlude with the guy from across the hall in the rooming house, about the writing of that section and especially about the actor who played him. But I won't. There's just too much good to be said about this small masterpiece of independent film making.

Ten stars. See it.

Carnival of Souls (from 1962, not the unrelated 1998 movie with the same name) is an (admittedly obscure) art-house classic. Shot in high-contrast black-and-white, on a miniscule budget, it has an eerie, dreamlike quality throughout perhaps reminiscent of Roman Polanski's "Repulsion".

Although the lead Candace Hilligoss had acted before, many of the supporting players were not professionals and some of the locations were worked into the film simply because they were available (for example the deserted funfair, apparently located in Salt Lake City). The director Herk Harvey, who had worked on educational shorts before directing this feature, makes a cameo appearance as one of the "dancing dead" at the funfair towards the end of the movie.

One of a kind, and recommended.