One evening in 1962, director Herk Harvey was driving
past Salt Lake when he spotted an abandoned amusement park by the beach. It was
a most unusual-looking pavilion, almost Eastern-looking in design, with big
round domes and a long pier stretching out towards the horizon. The sight,
especially striking at sunset, struck Harvey as “the weirdest looking-place
[he’d] ever seen” and after a short walk inside, the man knew he had found a
perfect location for a horror film. Once home, he called writer John Clifford
and asked him to write a script that would revolve around the building.
The place was an old Mormon resort named Saltair, and the
film that would subsequently immortalize it was Carnival Of Souls.
At first glance, Carnival
Of Souls looks and sounds little different from the dime-a-dozen
black-and-white B-movies that would usually play after the main feature: Unknown
actors, small-town setting, visibly dubbed dialogue in exterior scenes… Indeed,
the opening drag race scene initially looks like it could have been lifted from
one of the many Wild One knock-offs
that populated drive-ins in the 50s and 60s. But as the race goes on, the
film’s identity slowly takes shape in conjunction with that of its protagonist
Mary (Candace Hilligoss), a quiet,
pensive-looking blonde, initially indistinguishable from the other two members
of her girlfriend trio until close-ups of her worried, uneasy face start
drawing the contours of a personality. By the time she has emerged from the
river, a lone figure covered in sand, she appears to us fully-formed, seemingly
reborn from the crash, framed in both the revealing frontal rise and the wider
reverse-shot as a periurban Venus.
From this point on, Mary is identified apart from her
surroundings – apart from her fellow victims, none of whom are mentioned again,
and apart from a physical world which will incessantly crush, dominate and
erase her until her identity is no more. The entirety of her ensuing journey to
Utah as a newly-hired church organist is a continuous battle for her existence,
autonomy and integrity – not only against the strange invasive foreign bodies
only she can see but also the plurality of the people she meets.
And so Harvey instils within us a growing sense of unease
by consistently underlining the alien-ness of Mary’s environment as well as her
own disharmony with her fellow humans. Observe the shots of her life after the
crash as an organist inside a factory (!), see how the pipes closer her in and
fragment the frame into a mosaic. Pay attention to the positioning of her arms,
the vacant expression in her eyes and the way her body slightly twists and
bends as she plays, like an articulated porcelain doll. And note how the
low-angle reaction shot of workers listening curiously to her music echoes an
earlier shot of pedestrians on the bridge witnessing her rebirth. Now that she
has gained an identity of her own, Mary is a curiosity, subject to the
oppressive gaze and invasive bodies of others. Even seemingly ordinary
interactions with other people – bosses, landladies, doctors – are tinged with
unease; her rapport with male characters in particular is consistently defined
by their attempts to control her. Some examples are obvious, such as the doctor’s
paternalistic treatment of her fears or her creepy neighbour’s persistent
disregard for her personal space or expressions of sexual disinterest. Others
are more insidious, subtly emphasized by Harvey’s framing, composition and shot
length; it’s in the stillness of Mary’s torso as her old boss touches her
shoulder from behind and advises her to “put her soul” into her church work
instead of seeing it as just another job, or the ever-so-slightly uncomfortable
close-up of the minister’s expectant face as he assesses his candidate’s job performance
before beaming with satisfaction. It’s in the way Harvey holds the camera on
the church cleaning lady’s gaze for an unnaturally long time as she listens to
Mary playing outside the frame.
Throughout the film, Mary is in constant conflict with the
people and society around her, pressured to assimilate and conform, be it by
worshipping at the church she works, accepting men’s advances or simply seeking
out the company of others. Ever since rising from the scene of her accident and
not acting like the traumatized victim everyone expects her to be, she has
marked herself out to be corrected or – as she first experiences traumatically
in a shopping centre – annihilated altogether. In that respect, her interactions
with her neighbour are surprisingly profound: Initially coolly resistant to his
sexual harassment, she becomes more tolerant of his presence and flirtations
following a night of terror while nevertheless establishing clear boundaries
that he continually dismisses. As her dissociation with reality grows stronger,
she chooses to attach herself further to him, right until her panicked reaction
to the apparitions around her scare him away. Not only is this a stunningly eloquent
dramatization of how we shape our very existence and identity through the gaze
and approval of the other, it’s also a relationship anyone knowledgeable about
survival mechanisms in especially patriarchal environments will recognize with
grim familiarity.
None of this, of course, means Carnival Of Souls should be seen as a feminist film but it adds
further texture to Mary’s nightmarish experiences by implicitly connecting them
with her stubborn individuality, to the point where the final plot twist –
which I shall not reveal – feels more allegorical than literal. The horror
derives less from the ghoulish apparitions stalking Mary than from the growing
sense of dissociation Herk Harvey creates before unleashing them on his
heroine’s psyche. Closer in style to the French New Wave experiments of Alain
Resnais than the splattery schlock of William Castle, it signifies Mary’s spatial
and temporal disconnection through ingenious match-cuts and Gene Moore’s eerie funerary
organ score, which subconsciously links her chosen vocation to her ghostly
stalkers and the world they entice her to. This is especially well-illustrated
in a remarkable nocturnal driving scene during which Mary unsuccessfully tries
to change radio channels when her upbeat jazzy tune is slowly replaced by Moore’s
now-diegetic score. As the titular carnival, Saltair becomes a physical
embodiment of Mary’s non-belonging, an expressionist beacon of unconscious intuition
and dreams, dominating her with empty spaces that nevertheless feel more
welcoming than the human world she endures more than lives in. By the time the “real”
world has truly rejected her, its atemporal, spatially abstract darkness feels more
concrete and somehow less hostile than the vast, populated world of indifferent
humans outside.
Carnival Of Souls
was the only feature film Herk Harvey ever made. The film passed without notice
at the box-office and fell into the public domain, gaining a cult reputation
only thanks to late-night television airings and subsequent festival
screenings. Harvey, who had since returned to making educational shorts before
retiring in the early 1980s, lived just long enough to see it justly recognized
as the landmark in psychological horror that it is.
