***1/2 (out of ****)
Starring Candace Hilligoss, Sydney Berger, and Frances Feist
Directed and produced by Harold “Herk” Harvey & written by John Clifford
1962
76 min NR
“Carnival of Souls” is a creepy-campy drive-in chiller that plays like a long-lost episode of “The Twilight Zone.” A young woman (Candace Hilligoss) miraculously emerges from a river hours after crashing her car into it. She’s a changed woman, sometimes craving human interaction and sometimes unblinkingly indifferent to it. As she takes a new job as a church organist and is beset by her horny neighbor, she has strange visions of a tall, pale man (the director, naturally) wherever she goes. In one of the movie’s many unnerving sequences, she suddenly finds herself unable to hear anyone or be seen by anyone, and she tears through town in a panic. We can tell she’s a smart woman, and she is perhaps unique among horror movie damsels, because she runs away from the scary stuff for the most part, instead of towards it.
As I’ve mentioned in my reviews of “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” and “Night of the Living Dead,” the B horror movie has some distinct advantages over the A budget horror movie. A lot of A chillers feel more interested in getting you to appreciate the scientific and mechanical achievement of effects. The B flick is, in a way, liberated from this, and the scratched up black-and-white images look like a dimly remembered dream from childhood. B-movie people don’t look like Hollywood people and B-movie places aren’t SoCal backlots. “Carnival of Souls” was shot in Utah, which up until the Mormon film boom of the last decade, was the last place you’d expect to see a movie. (The movie also has nothing to do with the Church of Latter Day Saints—when we hear the woman is getting a job in Utah as an organist, we expect Mormons, although the Episcopalian minister helpfully explains “we’re not the biggest church in town.”) An A-movie can be part of a marketing strategy, a good business decision, a way to fill a void in the studio’s calendar, or a way to promote a new star. But the B-movie is almost always the work of people who are driven to make a movie, even if they never make another one again. The good ones reflect this craving that borders on madness; Ed Wood movies can be faulted for everything but enthusiasm.
Of course, “Carnival of Souls” also has its shortcomings. Outdoor dubbing often sounds like it was recorded in a concert hall, and the script by John Clifford is either too wordy or doesn’t take into account the woodeness of some of the actors. Hilligoss is a classic B-movie actress, good looking but with a lazy eye, stiff but also capable of some great Shatner-esque trances and screams. How effective the movie is might be dependent on how little you are distracted by its production values. (Amazingly, my wife was actually less distracted than I was—possibly a first in our marriage—and said she felt uneasy and creeped out from beginning to end. Also, despite watching the movie late at night with a headache, she didn’t fall asleep once, rather a feat in our house.)
Director Herk Harvey (a great name for a B-movie director) wrings all the dread out of his locations and his leads. He knows how quickly we can walk from sunlight into the threatening shadows of an abandoned building, and he’s fearless in the jittery imagery of “Souls’” final act, in which the dead, limbs a-flailin’, reclaim what’s theirs. The movie’s surprise ending may be that it doesn’t have a surprise ending at all, but may well end in essentially the way you predicted from the opening sequence. But that doesn’t make it any less effective.
I picked this movie up from the library after hearing good things about it and having just seen “Chain Saw Massacre;” I was in the mood for more low-budget discomfort. I’m beginning to understand why Hitchcock felt that horror and suspense were the truest forms of cinema. “Carnival of Souls” is packed with questions about man’s place in the universe, and is open to a myriad of interpretations about the fate of the body and the fate of the soul. Yet it doesn’t actually make its characters articulate them—the questions are asked by the pictures, that is, cinematically. The young woman is alternately pulled by the grave, by human contact, by her desire for solitude, and by the community and ordered cosmos represented by the church where she works (she insists it’s just a business). “Carnival of Souls” predates the nihilism vs. meaning angst central to “Rosemary’s Baby” by six years, and, like that picture, it doesn’t so much provide an answer as exploit the fear which surrounds it.
Finished Sunday, October 23rd, 2005
Copyright © 2005 Friday & Saturday Night
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