Thanks to a the tiniest of oversights on the part of the filmmakers – a failure to include a copyright notice on the initial film itself – Herk Harvey’s 1962 cult horror film Carnival of Souls has lapsed into the public domain, and is, as a result, one of the most readily available movies of all time. The unfortunate clerical mistake that placed Carnival of Souls into the hands of the people has largely ensured that any and every fly-by-night home video production company will release yet another edition. You can see Carnival of Souls most often compiled with literally hundreds of other films in dirt-cheap multiple-disc DVD packs, usually available for purchase at drug stores. Night of the Living Dead, Reefer Madness, Dementia 13, and innumerable others have shared a similar fate.
This bandying about of Carnival of Souls has, over the years, cheapened it. Most video editions found in retail chasms look and sound terrible, and there is no mind given as to what the final edit of the film should be. Leave it to The Criterion Collection to choose to restore, clean, and curate Carnival of Souls as part of their amazing library of films. Not only is their new Blu-ray edition the best looking version of the film to date – I’m willing to bet even its master prints from 1962 didn’t look or sound this good – but they have managed, through their tenacity alone, to rescue the film from the dirt pile and make what can be considered a final authoritative edition.
It’s a good thing they did, too, as this now allows audiences to consider Carnival of Souls as great cinema, rather than just as a disposable and unworthy horror flick. Carnival of Souls is, one will find upon revisitation, one of the more gorgeously realized, strangely efficient, and downright spooky horror films of the 1960s. It’s a masterpiece of mood and dread.
Carnival of Souls is about a skittish blonde woman named Mary (Candace Hilligoss) who, at the film’s opening, barely survives a car crash into a river. Shaken, Mary moves from Kansas out to Salt Lake City where she takes a job as a church organist, despite her refusal to take religious matters very seriously. Mary’s organ music hangs over Carnival of Souls like a voyeuristic wraith, quietly expanding the audience’s ethereal unease. As we listen, we find there is something wrong in the world. Mary soon finds she is being stalked by a mysterious ghostly figure (director Harvey) who seems to be leading her to an enormous abandoned amusement arcade which rests in gorgeous and unsettling solitude, far from civilization.
Mary attempts to make friends – with her kindly landlady, with her priest boss, with the handsy and aggressive sleaze who lives across the hall – but her visions keep getting more intense, and she appears to be losing her mind. From time to time, for instance, she seems to vanish from the world entirely, unable to gain the attention of those around her. It’s unclear if she is losing her mind, if the accident had somehow unlocked Mary’s access to the supernatural, or if there is something thanatological happening. No points for guessing the truth.
The origin of Carnival of Souls is a fascinating tale. Director Herk Harvey was the in-house filmmaker for a company called the Centron Corporation, which specialized in educational classroom films, and cautionary scare videos. Harvey is behind classics like Shake Hands with Danger, None for the Road, Why Study Industrial Arts?, and Cheating. Several of his films have been famously included on episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000. With a budget of $17,000, and a crew of only six, Harvey took to the streets of Lawrence, KS and Salt Lake City, UT, and filmed Carnival of Souls in three weeks. The cathedral was a real burnt-out church-owned midway called The Saltair Pavilion.
Harvey’s background in industrial films is certainly what gives Carnival of Souls its blank, aggressive plainness. The black-and-white photography is so stark and straightforward, that the film begins to teeter toward an ecstatically dreamlike version of reality – it almost resembles David Lynch’s Eraserhead. The workmanlike approach only serves to highlight its spectral qualities. It’s like a kitchen sink version of The Shining.
Carnival of Souls was a flop when it was released in 1962. Harvey never made another feature again, and Hilligoss only ever had one other credited film role – in 1964’s The Curse of the Living Corpse. Souls eventually became a cult hit, thanks to a heavy rotation on late-night TV, leading to a restoration in the late 1980s.
Carnival of Souls is a film that refuses easy answers. It could be a straightforward ghost story, but many also see it as a careful study of an unraveling mind. It could be a timely and salient portrait of what fear and anxiety can do to the simple actions of everyday living; the world can seem like its falling apart and that you’re vanishing from it. On the most recent viewing, now colored by my knowledge of Harvey’s history of classroom scare films, I began to see Carnival of Souls as a religious cautionary tale about the dangers of turning one’s back on faith. There are even easily-read elements of Buddhist spirituality hanging over Carnival of Souls, although I think I doubt Harvey was a Buddhist.
Whichever of these things you see, Carnival of Souls still has the uncanny power to unsettle. There is an outsider poetry – and art, if you will – to its hasty, bare-knuckled straightforwardness. It cannot help but be honest. It hasn’t the pretense to be anything else.
Witney Seibold is a contributor to the CraveOnline Film Channel, and the co-host of The B-Movies Podcast and Canceled Too Soon. He also contributes to Legion of Leia and to Blumhouse. You can follow him on “The Twitter” at @WitneySeibold, where he is slowly losing his mind.
