Critics reviews

Some scenes look Ed Wood cheap, and others are lit and framed with startling beauty. It's some kind of quintessentially American low-budget triumph, and it deserves its cult following. Herk Harvey stayed active but never made another feature film (his last directing credit was, curiously enough, an episode of Reading Rainbow). But for anyone who loves independent cinema, or the way cheap B-movies can touch on serious emotional ideas, it was enough.

It's nominally a horror film, but it's a story of mental derangement with a premise of metaphysical shock that's more or less detachable from its richly textured and disturbingly inventive cinematic essence.

The Catholic doctrine pertaining to purgatory holds that it is a state in which the soul undergoes purification. Mary Henry is clearly not a Catholic, and her defiance against religion is one of the film's central provocations. Part of the film's brilliance is its ambivalence about whether its topography is psychological or spiritual, which allows the film to linger with both religious and secular audiences.

The dilapidated pavilion of the film's title (actually Saltair, on the southern edge of Great Salt Lake) is rendered by Harvey with an evocative awareness of spatial emptiness that's both mythical and commonplace. Accompanying this imagery is Gene's Moore's poignant organ score, which strengthens the subtext of sexual repression and gives the film a lonely spectral quality. Carnival of Souls is an unshakable expression of estrangement.

Long embraced as a cult horror movie, Carnival of Souls might more provocatively be thought of as a surrealist woman's picture. Coincidentally, Harvey's movie was released the same year that Helen Gurley Brown's Sex and the Single Girl was published; Candace Hilligoss... even bears a passing resemblance to the storied editrix of Cosmopolitan. Despite these superficial similarities, Carnival of Souls proves to be the very antithesis of the mandate promulgated by Brown and her ilk.

In all its awkwardness, the film manages also to yank a heartstring or two: poor church-organist Mary may or may not have been a dead girl all along, but no one living seems quite as interested in her as those proto-zombies.

This miraculous motion picture is a dip into the Midwestern uncanny, ghosts haunting the long flat highways and abandoned amusements. It's one of the scariest movies I've ever seen, undoubtedly aided by viewing it on July 4th weekend, where bottle rockets were popping off behind my head every five minutes. I was too gripped to turn around and look at the firecracking kids outside, for fear I would see _that_ face reflected in the window.

'Carnival of Souls' is probably the first time a nightmare has been fully captured on screen, and Mary is every blighted traveler of the sub-conscious.

It offers uncanny echoes and premonitions of so many renowned films and filmmakers both past and future that it demands to be considered and appreciated on their level.

Aside from the music, the most artistically daring element of this film—one that defies a central convention of the horror genre—is its flight from romanticism, its concentration not on a foaming monster or on the hammering bosom of a Hammer heroine, but on a cold fish. If she is a magnet for the gothic, there is nothing exciting or sexy about it. The thrills of this carnival are cold ones, bits of death.

The main disappointment of this 1962 black-and-white cult horror film is that, despite the low budget, uneven acting, clunky editing, corny music, tatty ghoul makeup, and familiar story (one of many variants of Ambrose Bierce's "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge"), it still isn't very good even as camp.