With the Carnival Of Souls remake by Wes Craven earning hisses from critics and fans, it's not a bad idea to visit the original Carnival, as Joe Romano does in...
By Joseph C. Romano
I watched Carnival Of Souls again last night — the first time in more than thirty years. Shortly before midnight I unwrapped the sealed video package, put the tape in the VCR, turned the lights off one by one, and let the eerie mood surround me. Within minutes the quirky movie had me under its dark spell like it did so long ago, taking me to a gray, somber world filled with macabre scenes from beyond the grave.
Not to my surprise, the movie scared the life out of me again! Just like it did when I was a boy.
Against my better advice, my daughter watched the video tape this afternoon, but her reaction was completely different from mine. The grainy images of ghoulish souls had no effect on her--not even a tiny bit. Worse than that, after finally watching the movie for the first time she did not understand why Carnival Of Souls has haunted me all of my life. Why I have visions of a dilapidated carnival pavilion every evening at dusk. Why I hear unearthly organ music when I close my eyes at night. Why I see the lost souls emerging from cold brackish water at twilight. Or why I see their dead bodies dancing faster and faster in the grand hall of the pavilion.
My daughter just doesn’t understand that Carnival Of Souls is the most terrifying movie I have ever seen.
And I don’t understand why she wasn’t scared by it at all!
Maybe it’s generational. I don’t know. She’s eighteen and I’m . . . I’m . . . Well, let’s just say I’m old enough to be her father.
I remember when I saw the movie for the first time — the only time, really, until last night. My own father and I were enjoying a dreary Saturday afternoon in front of the TV. It was late autumn and my brother was at a college football game with my uncle, watching Notre Dame pound the Pitt Panthers in the rain. Mom was shopping downtown. Dad and I were watching the old Saturday afternoon version of Chiller Theater on Pittsburgh’s Channel Eleven. That was before Chiller host, Bill Cardille, moved the program to Saturday night and became an on-screen phenomenon. Chilly Billy, as Cardille later became known, did voice-overs back then, limiting his work to announcing the feature presentation and doing a few of the commercials.
"This looks like a good one," Dad said, as Cardille’s baritone voice faded and the movie began. "Cheap ones like this always are," Dad continued, lowering his voice to match Cardille’s. "I bet it’ll scare the hell out of you."
Little did my father know . . .
Filmed on a shoestring budget of about $30,000, the story begins in a small Kansas town as two teenaged boys playfully challenge three young women to a drag race. The two cars race to the outskirts of town where the car with the women in it crashes through a bridge railing and plummets into the murky lake below. After nearly three hours, Mary Henry, played by Candace Hilligoss in one of only two movie roles she ever had, emerges as the lone survivor from the crash into the lake. She is confused and battered from her ordeal. As is to be expected, she is completely disoriented to her surroundings and is dumbfounded by what she has been through. When asked what happened to the other two women, she simply answers, "I don’t know."
Showing "no desire for the close company of other people," as she calls the daily flow of ordinary life, Mary takes a job as a church organist in Utah where she can start her life anew. Almost prophetically, she tells her current boss she is never coming back to Kansas when he says goodbye and wishes her well with the new job.
Driving late at night she crosses into Utah and senses an eerie presence. She is startled by the dark reflection of a ghoulish man in her side window and soon sees the same man standing in the middle of the highway as she passes an abandoned amusement pavilion in the desert.
So begins Mary’s descent into a living Hell as she is haunted by "profane, sacrilegious music" and stalked by the man she saw on the highway. Drawn hypnotically to the pavilion in both her dreams and in reality, Mary is eventually repulsed by what she finds in the sinister building.
Carnival Of Souls is filled with one chilling scene after another, most of which are related to the appearance of the ghastly, seemingly supernatural man. Mary is rightfully scared when she sees him in the hallway of the rooming house she lives in. I was scared, too, when Mary’s boorish neighbor tries to kiss her and the mysterious man’s image is reflected in a mirror instead of seeing the neighbor’s face. Mary and I both became hysterical when the man suddenly appears in the office of a doctor who befriends her. I screamed as loud as she did at the unanticipated manifestation of the demonic ghoul in the doctor’s swiveling chair.
This is definitely scary stuff--just the right mix of spookiness and creepiness to keep you on the edge of your seat for a short length of around ninety minutes. Carnival Of Souls is the kind of atmospheric story that rightfully claims its place in cinematic history as one of the best little films ever made. But I’m not alone in my love for this movie. Carnival Of Souls has become a cult classic over the years since its release in 1962. Although it was difficult, but not impossible, to find video copies until a few years ago, the movie tops the list of favorites for a slew of horror film fans, including moviemakers George Romero and Wes Craven. Craven, in fact, produced a remake last year that unfortunately failed to capture the imagination of the original. Craven’s movie was universally panned by horror fans and found itself relegated to direct-to-video bins instead of gaining distribution in movie theaters. Fans of the original film, like myself, are grateful that the remake is harder to find than the original.
Comparisons with other movies come easily for some classic horror films but are more difficult for others. While Carnival Of Souls is often credited with being the inspiration for George Romero’s Night Of The Living Dead, it is not fair to compare these two black and white, low-budget cult favorites. Although there are some similarities between the two movies--and Carnival Of Souls, like a lot of other films, obviously did have some influence on George Romero’s style--there are too many differences between the two not to question how much inspiration it actually offered Romero. Carnival Of Souls is more subtle, building slowly as the terror emerges from within your own soul. Night Of The Living Dead is more direct, stinging quickly with its terrifying vision of normal people trapped in an isolated cabin by the reanimated zombies outside. The characters in Night Of The Living Dead are passionate and earthy, the raw edges of their frazzled psyches exposed for all to see. The cast of Carnival Of Souls, on the other hand, is cool and dispassionate, at times exuding little more than a phantasmic presence. Like day and night, the movies are almost direct opposites.
What both movies do, however, is create a particularly dark mood through the development of a simple plotline and the exploration of key human emotions. Carnival Of Souls is frightening exactly because of its dull lucidity. Simple, gray images float across the screen to produce a worn path leading directly to the worst human nightmare. With dialog that is sometimes corny but never stupid, and recurring dream sequences that quickly unravel your grip on reality, there is a sense of quiet desperation under the surface. Coupled with a minimal storyline about loneliness and isolation, the stiffness of its mostly amateur cast brings a cold, stark reality to life.
For those of us who have been affected by Carnival Of Souls, those who have experienced the ghoulish nightmare and unwillingly danced in the abandoned pavilion, the movie has truly become a part of whom we are. If we’re not careful ourselves, like Mary Henry we could easily slip permanently into this queer world that is merely a reflection of our own lives. We have all known people as lost and lonely as Mary, or Mrs. Thomas, her nosy landlady, or John Linden, her vulgar neighbor. They are all around us, forgotten by normal society but silently screaming for acceptance. When we look in the mirror we may even see these people instead of our own reflections.
Herk Harvey, the director of Carnival Of Souls, was an unlikely candidate for making such a weird movie--even though he directed or produced hundreds of films during his 35-year career. All but one, the film he is best known for, were industrial or educational films. Harvey was a fixture at Centron Films, an independent film company in Lawrence, Kansas, for most of his life. He also briefly taught filmmaking at the University of Kansas in the late eighties. Not only did Harvey direct Carnival Of Souls, he played the mysterious man who is Mary’s nemesis.
It is Harvey’s floating presence that makes the film a success by pulling us into his dark world. Harvey’s sinister face slides onto the screen conveying an ominous sense of dread for Mary Henry. The director’s strong performance in front of the camera, as well as behind it, carries the movie to its ultimate, but logical, conclusion. Harvey joined the real "Carnival of Souls" himself in 1996, dying at the age of 71.
Several hours after she watched the film, I asked my daughter once again why she didn’t like it. "It’s not that it’s a bad movie," she said, "but you’ve talked about it for years like it’s the most perfect horror movie ever made."
"But it is the creepiest movie I’ve ever seen," I tried to explain to her. "Its tone . . ."
"That’s the problem," she interrupted, hoping to avoid an unnecessarily lengthy discourse on what makes a scary movie. "You’ve built it up too much. It’s creepy, for sure, but the creepiest movie you’ve ever seen? C’mon, Dad, that’s an awfully tall order."
"You might be right," I said, knowing the hype for most cult classics is often too strong for what the movies sometime deliver. Maybe that’s the problem here. I’ve heard other people ask what’s the big deal with Carnival Of Souls, too. Perhaps Carnival Of Souls isn’t the greatest horror movie ever made, but a long time ago it touched a callow nerve inside me, a dark nerve hidden deep in the lowest recesses of my brain. It created a gloomy world within my imagination and left a lasting impression of a place whose music calls me, lingering in my soul, tormenting me like it did Mary Henry.
Can you hear it, too? The music is playing, the dancers have arrived . . .
I know I won’t sleep again tonight.
Probably won’t sleep for weeks.
Thanks, Joe! The original Carnival is a haunting reminder that talent, not dollars, produces classics. Cheers!
Article copyright Joseph C. Romano.
"...Why I have visions of a dilapidated carnival pavilion every evening at dusk. Why I hear unearthly organ music when I close my eyes at night..."
"...Not to my surprise, the movie scared the life out of me again! Just like it did when I was a boy..."
