You can see where this is going from the outset but that doesn’t stop it being a brooding entertainment, the kind of cinematic compulsion that invokes the likes of Alain Resnais Last Year at Marienbad (1961) and has enough in the cuckoo tank to be keep us engrossed. You can see why it’s become a cult number with shades of The Twilight Zone and in keeping the main character trapped in the camera headlights conjuring up Hitchcock.
Professional church organist Mary (Candace Hilligoss) should have drowned after a drag race went wrong. Instead, she emerges from the river, the only survivor of the cash, and heads off to a new job. She’s not the type of woman given to fancy, she plays the organ as a profession, not because she immerses herself in music. She’s chastised for not showing enough soul in her playing. But she’s haunted by her imagination, a ghoul appears in her car passenger window, and she imagines an abandoned building, previously home to a carnival, is full of dancing ghouls.
When she plays the organ in the church in her new job in a new town her hands stray to eerie keys. Strange men appear at her door. The world appears out of kilter. Half the time she’s in a trance or believes she’s passing through the world unseen and unheard.
Frightened of being alone she briefly takes up with a creepy neighbor. But him and virtually everyone else she meets seem to turn into ghouls and eventually she finds herself back at the carnival, welcomed to join the dancing ghouls, who chase her and when the next day the cops try to trace her movements outside the carnival her footsteps disappear. Back at the river, however, the crashed car is dredged up and Mary is one of the passengers.
It wasn’t considered desperately scary when it first appeared and even less so now, but it is hypnotic. When you see virtually everything through a character’s eyes, as Hitchcock did with Vertigo (1958), you are corralled into their world view and there’s no escape. You don’t know what’s real any more than Mary does.
Interestingly, this gets along fine without that major trope of the horror picture – the scream. And not just any old scream but the female scream. Although there’s no doubt Mary is very disturbed by what transpires she’s not driven so wild with fear that she resorts to screaming her head off all the time.
The fact that this is a low-budget number works in the movie’s favor. There’s no reason to rack terror up by artificial means as we can see the shock and confusion writ large on Mary’s face. If the director needs to ramp anything up, he merely focuses on her eyes. Much of what takes place appears removed from reality as far as Mary is concerned and even the dancing ghouls are initially seen in long shot. Just about the creepiest scene is when Mary imagines that her organ playing is making the ghouls dance faster.
This didn’t result in Candace Hilligoss receiving any career recognition. In fact, for her next picture The Curse of the Living Corpse (1964) she was demoted to supporting player and that pretty much spelled the end of her movie career. Carnival of Souls turned out to be a career cul de sac for director Herk Harvey who otherwise only had The Reluctant Witch (1971) on his CV. John Clifford, who co-wrote the piece with Hervey, didn’t have another movie in him.
But you can see why it’s thrived on cult.
You can catch this on YouTube.
