Carnival of Souls is a drag race to a small town purgatory. It also races into the imagination with a great representation of death.
In celebration of Halloween, we are counting down the days with 13 of the scariest, creepiest, or simply unforgettably grim horror movies that ever crawled under our skin and never left. Join us each day as we look back on 13 horror movies that still know how to trick and treat viewers to their nightmares. Enter Carnival of Souls…
Carnival of Souls isn’t that scary, with the cheesy makeup and the carousel, but it is unsettling. As Mary Henry makes her break from reality, as death creeps into her daily life and peeks through her keyhole, we feel the shift in our own reality, and we merge with her encroaching madness. We dislocate along with her and become disincarnate. Who knows what shifting into death is like? For all we know, this could be a good representation.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Carnival of Souls starts out as a drag race movie. Crazy teenagers have been spinning their bitchin’ wheels since James Dean lost that game of chicken in Rebel Without a Cause. Yes, he lost, he jumped out first. Drag race movies go back before Fast & Furious. Carnival of Souls is the scariest drag race movie since Grease, which scared me quite a bit, but for entirely different reasons.
This is a dread picture. I love dread pictures more than I love straight out horror movies. Dread pictures create a subliminal atmosphere of tension that slowly creeps from your subconscious to your conscious and make you question everything you feel.
The first time I saw Carnival of Souls was at a revival house in Soho. When we left the theater, the streets seemed discolored. The lingering psychological effects of the danse macabre displaced the concrete with cobble stones and red bricks, yellowed with age as they fought their way out of the black and white netherworld of Mary Henry.
Candace Hilligoss plays Mary Henry with a mix of repulsion, fascination and a groundswell of sexual tenstion. She’s jaded. She’s faded. She is soulless and carefree. Hilligoss, who would star in the reading-of-a-will-in-a-creepy-mansion movie The Curse of the Living Corpse in 1964, unhinges herself from within to become one of the living dead.
As the arches of the bridge that the car went over merges with the arches of the church where she will be playing organ, professionally, for money and everything, a darkness creeps into Hilligoss’s eyes. She crawled out of those muddy waters in front of the search party and didn’t even ask what happened to her hot-rodding friends. Something is missing. But Hilligoss plays it ambiguously. It might have been missing all along. But at least she doesn’t lose her sense of humor. The first nod to the surreal comes when Mary Henry tries to turn off the movie theme music by changing the station on her car radio.
Music means a lot to Mary Henry. Even though you get a sense that nothing means much to her. But as she auditions for the organist position at the church, you see Mary Henry get lost in the music before she gets lost in the place between worlds. The spiritual chords give way to a sexy decadent carnival waltz and Mary starts to get an organ orgasm. Even the reverend gets too hot under the collar, throwing her out of the house of the lord like he’s casting out a demon harlot.
Mary is adrift in the purgatory of an ordinary town in Utah. The dusty desolation of the small town streets mirror Mary’s emotional and physical detachment, as she becomes emotionally and spiritually dead. The only thing that can still stir her soul is shopping. Oh and Merry-Go-Rounds. The woman is turned on by carousels and corpses. Much more than she is by Mr. Linden (Sidney Berger), the horny dweeb who is the only other tenant in the boarding house, run by the pleasantly feisty actress Frances Feist.
Carnival of Souls was made in 1962 in Lawrence, Kansas, on a shoestring budget that was mainly spent on gas. The car that goes over the bridge in the beginning? They had to fish that out of the water the same day to drive home. The director, Herk Harvey, did double duty as the ghost who tailgates Mary to Utah.
Carnival of Souls is equal parts Twilight Zone, Blue Velvet and The Night of the Living Dead, the supernatural parade in the middle of everyday life. It doesn’t have much in the way of special effects, some makeup and wavy lines straight out of The Outer Limits. It is brought together in nightmarish black and white and subtle acting. It gets under your skin, into your brain and becomes more frightening as you remember it back.
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