"Carnival Of Souls"

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.