Carnival of Souls (1962)

               I’m not going to pretend to fully understand the interest (bordering on fascination) that so many people have for ‘bad’ media. I know why I like to dig into these things, a mix of interest in unguarded and unpolished artistic expression and frankly amused schadenfreude, but I’m not going to assume reasons for everyone. This extends from the old-school appreciation of kitsch to the compiled reels of nostalgic commercials clogging YouTube. Entire books have been written trying to parse at exactly what point the crowds at the midnight screenings of ‘The Rocky Horror Picture Show’ went from pointing at the screen and laughing to starting to identify with the characters before making the film a part of their own identities. Just the phrase ‘so bad it’s good’ contains an incredible amount of cultural implications that could be and have been unpacked at outstanding length.

              By all objective measures, ‘Carnival of Souls’ should fall into the ‘bad’ category. It’s a slow, low-budget horror movie made up of a no-name cast written and directed by people who shot industrial films for a living. It was released to little to no fanfare and everyone involved never really made it anywhere in the industry. The actors were either civilians recruited specifically for the film or returned to regional theaters and small tv parts afterwards. The writer and director both went back to their jobs at the Centron Corporation. And yet. Somehow it made the art-house rounds in 1989 and started generating some interest. Roger Ebert wrote a three-star appreciation of it that year. Due to an error at the time it was produced the film immediately fell into the public domain in the United States, which meant while it was commercially unsuccessful at the time of its initial release it later became widely available on home video. It also became something of a late-night staple for independent tv stations since it was free to air. Criterion issued a two-disc set in 2000, then again on Blu-ray in 2016. It was even featured on ‘Rifftrax: Live,’ which actually argues against my point, so ignore that.

              I’m slightly torn at how much the appreciation for the movie is genuine and how much of it is “Aw, bless ‘em, they tried.” Because make no mistake, this is an amateur production. There’s a distinct lack of on-set sound, pick-up shots, and they clearly didn’t do a lot of takes. Not everything is rinky-dink, director Herk Harvey’s years of shooting industrial and commercial films stood him in good stead as the camera is always in focus, the framing is always clearly deliberate, the scenes flow together intelligibly, and there are no boom-mics in the shot or shadows of the crew visible in the scenes. All of that sounds like a low bar but it’s not cleared by most movies shot this cheaply under these conditions.

              The background of how this film came together is fascinating. I’m just going to cut and paste from the Wiki:

 Harvey was a director and producer of industrial and educational films based in Lawrence, Kansas, where he worked for the Centron Corporation. While returning to Kansas after shooting a Centron film in California, Harvey developed the idea for Carnival of Souls after driving past the abandoned Saltair Pavilion in Salt Lake City. "When I got back to Lawrence, I asked my friend and co-worker at Centron Films, John Clifford, who was a writer there, how he'd like to write a feature," Harvey recalled. "The last scene, I told him, had to be a whole bunch of ghouls dancing in that ballroom; the rest was up to him. He wrote it in three weeks."

               He took three weeks’ vacation from Centron, cast Candace Hilligoss to play the lead for $2,000, and shot the entire rest of the movie for an additional $28,000. For one scene in the movie a car drives off of a bridge, knocking off some guardrails. The locals let him use the bridge for the scene for free on the condition they fix the rails when they were done. This cost $12. They shot a lot of the scenes in public without a permit, including inside train stations and department stores. The crew worked seven days a week and the shoot was described as ‘brisk.’ They couldn’t afford rear-projection or compositing, so for driving scenes Harvey grabbed an Arriflex 35 battery-powered handheld camera and just shot in the car with the actors. It was a seat-of-their-pants operation however you describe it.

              The only part of the movie I feel genuinely falls down on a technical level is the vocal overdubbing, and even then an argument can be made for how it adds a dreamlike quality to the movie. The sound design in general is great, though, including a foreboding minimal score made up mostly of organ music for plot and thematic reasons. Several times during the movie the sound drops out except for the main character’s footsteps as she becomes out of sync with the rest of the world. It’s very well done. They clearly recorded a lot of scenes either without sound or without clean audio, however, and while the foley work is fine the ADR is often sloppy and seems hastily done. If I had to guess, which I do since I don’t know the answer, they only had limited access to the actors after filming was completed and had to grab what they could.

              There are various cuts roaming around the place due to the lack of copyright. The original version was 84 minutes, but the theatrical print was cut down to 78. This is the version I watched. Other copies were circulated among regional television stations as a late-night staple, and these can vary in time anywhere in between those two lengths. The Criterion releases include both versions. They don’t differ substantially but be aware if you’re interested in tracking down a copy.

              The movie itself is fascinating to watch but very simple to describe. The movie cold-opens with a trio of young women in a car at a stoplight, including our lead Mary Henry. A group of guys pull up alongside in another car and they decide to have a race. The light changes and they chase each other for quite a while, around corners and over dirt roads, before they cross a bridge and the car carrying the women plunges into a river.

              The locals are quickly on the scene and spend several hours looking for the car when suddenly Mary appears on a sandbank, muddy and confused. She has no idea how she survived and no one else can figure it out either. Hard cut to the inside of what seems to be some kind of organ factory where Mary is pounding away at the keys. I need to emphasize the sheer size and complexity of the machine she’s piloting. People hear ‘organist’ these days and think of an old Casio hooked up to an overhead sound system, but originally they were massive complexes of pipes and bellows that forced air through seemingly miles of tubes in very precise ways. Looking at the hulking mass of the thing it makes sense when it’s revealed through dialogue that Mary has been studying the organ for years, including some at college, and she’s now been placed at a church in Utah with a similarly massive pipe organ. One glance at it and you can believe that it takes years of training to make the thing sound in any way decent.

              Mary is an interesting character. We don’t really know her before the accident so we can’t say if the incident changed her, but she’s a very cold and distant character for the most part. She can be gracious to people depending on the situation, but as soon as anyone attempts to be familiar or suggest something she doesn’t want to do she instantly shuts them down. I’m torn on Candace Hillgloss’ performance because it’s often very effective, but just as often it’s very stiff and artificial. I have no idea how much of this is her and how much of this is the result of a first-time narrative director.

              While driving long-distance to Utah she sees the face of a ghoulish man reflected in the passenger side window and drives off the road in a panic. This will take up a lot of the action of the movie, by the way, Mary seeing this man in unexpected places and panicking. It sounds repetitive and to some extent it is but the methods and reactions vary enough (and frankly the movie is short enough) that I think it gets away with it. These figures are referred to as ‘ghouls’ in just about everything I’ve read about the film, but what they are are people in whiteface with spikey hair dressed in formal clothes. They’re just odd enough to read on camera as different and weird. This recurring figure is played by the director, which made me feel better when we got to the scenes where he’s underwater for extended periods of time. Can’t say he wasn’t willing to go the distance for his art.

              Soon enough Mary arrives at the town where she’ll be working. She checks into her room at a small boarding house and meets the landlady, Mrs. Thomas, played by Frances Feist. Aside from a handful of shorts in the 1950’s she doesn’t seem to have acted in anything else, which is a shame because she’s a delight. The best natural actor in the cast. Soon enough Mary is off to the church and meets the minister, who is exactly as weird as a Mormon minister in 1962 should be. He’s not unwelcoming, but he also very clearly lives in his own little world.

There's a decent amount of artistry to the film.

              The movie then becomes a series of events as the ghoulish figure begins appearing to her more and more and her world becomes increasingly dreamlike. She keeps seeing the man instead of her own reflection, and eventually starts seeing him in the real world. She brushes it off for a while. The first time she becomes deeply distressed is when, at the top of the stairs in the boarding house, she sees him calmly seated in a chair at the base of the stairs. He looks up at her, stands, and slowly begins to come upstairs. Nearly weeping in terror she goes back to her room, chains the door, and listens helplessly as footsteps approach. Turns out it’s the landlady bringing her a sandwich. Variations on this will happen several times over the course of the movie.

              I don’t want it to sound completely repetitive. As mentioned above, an abandoned salt air bathhouse is a major part of the movie. I can completely understand how Harvey saw the location by happenstance and became inspired. Mary first glimpses it during her drive to the town, then accepts an offer to accompany the minister on his rounds when he agrees to take her there as they pass. She can’t explain her attraction to it or why she starts to see it in her dreams, but she’s clearly drawn to it and doesn’t really seem to mind.

              The history of the actual location is fascinating. Called Saltair, it was originally built in 1893 on the edge of the Great Salt Lake as a tourist destination and amusement park. It was intended as a kind of Western counterpart to Coney Island. The first version burned down in 1926 and a second was built, but business suffered from the advent of motion pictures and the Great Depression. It turned to live bands and became rebranded as a dancehall. This gradually faded as the interstates bypassed it. Also, as we unfortunately know today, the Lake is not a constant size and eventually receded from the bathhouse, which along with closing during the second World War and the subsequent loss of regular business meant it finally closed in 1958. It had been deserted for several years by the time of filming, which allowed the movie to capture a very specific moment in time, when it was clearly neglected but still mostly intact. Separate instances of arson in 1967 and 1970 destroyed most of what was left. Various people and companies have tried to restore it over the last few decades to very little success

              I briefly want to focus on one other character, that of the other lodger in the boardinghouse, John Linden as played by Sidney Berger. Not because this character is essential to the plot, he’s really just there as a stressor for Mary, but because it was striking to be 63 years removed from a piece of media and so violently recognize a specific type of guy that’s still around. This shouldn’t be surprising, as Depeche Mode so eloquently put it ‘People are People,’ but what really knocked me back is how Mary kept reacting in ways that were almost unrecognizable to me as a human response.

              Roger Ebert referred to the character in his review as “a definitive study of a nerd in lust,” and with all due respect to the dead Pulitzer Prize winner that is not who John is. He’s a proudly uneducated, drunken manual laborer who pushes women around and gets angry when he feels inferior to anyone, which is most of the time. Just the way he arrogantly knocks on her door soon after she arrives makes me tense up. Their first interaction is when he barges into her room while she’s in only a towel fresh from a shower. It takes her forever to get him to leave, he’s picking up her social cues but just ignoring them. He brings her coffee first thing the next morning then tries to get her to spike it with some whiskey then gets defensive when she doesn’t. He badgers her until she accepts a date with him then snaps at her all night when she won’t drink the beer her bought her or pay him sufficient intention. In their final scene he’s clearly moving towards at least date rape before she panics at another sighting of the ghoulish man and he declares her crazy and storms off. He is a bad person.

              That all made me tense, but what made me confused was her various reactions to him, none of which were ones I expected. When she’s in just a towel and he’s not taking her hints to leave she becomes increasingly direct until he does, but she’s not nearly as upset as I wouldn’t expected. Once she gets dressed I even think she leaves her room to talk to him some more before she gets distracted by the man in spooky makeup at the bottom of the stairs. When John brings over the spiked coffee she’s friendly and downright flirty with him, and later in the movie after resisting his attempts at a date she turns on a dime and accepts. Every fiber of my being was urging her to buy more substantial locks for her door based on his body language alone and she was mostly unbothered by him. Weird.

              I’m not going to lie, your enjoyment of this movie is going to depend a lot on your ability to enjoy ‘boring’ cinema. There are a lot of long takes of not much happening, and if you’re not likely to appreciate a lot of atmosphere and implication you’re pretty much out of luck. There are long sequences where the point is made but the scene continues on and you have to be willing to trust that the director is doing this deliberately and not just leaving the camera running for too long. The ending isn’t a shocker, it’s thoroughly set up from the beginning, but that’s not the point, the movie is a long denouement from the opening scenes. It’s not scary per se but it is very unsettling with some decent tension. On a nice note, director Herk Harvey lived long enough to see his movie start to get appreciated. He died in 1996 just after the soundstage for the film school at the University of Kansas was renamed in his honor. Despite several attempts he never made a fictional movie again, but the recognition had to be immensely satisfying.