‘I don’t belong in the world…’
Sometimes the story behind the movie is almost as compelling as the movie itself. Carnival of Souls is the only feature film credited to director Herk Harvey. It pretty much bombed the career of Candace Hilligoss whose agent promptly dropped her after Carnival of Souls was released. The concept for the movie came to Harvey after he drove past the abandoned Saltair Pavilion in Salt Lake City and imagined the kind of terrible ghosts that must haunt that ghoulish site. And so, Harvey spent $50 to rent out the Pavilion, filmed the rest of the movie without permits and set to work creating something troubling and unsettling.
Church organist Mary Henry (Hilligoss) is involved in a car accident right before she takes a job in a new church in a new town. Upon arrival, she has to deal with a creepy neighbour, the lure of an old run-down pavilion and the unwanted attentions of a strange man who appears at the most inopportune moments.
Taking its cues from German Expressionism and Ambrose Bierce’s famously chilling short story An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, Carnival of Souls combines visual scares with an extremely unnerving score to produce something that somehow feels both arty and trashy at the same time. It’s easy to see why it was ignored on release but found an audience years later due to repeated showings in the Halloween season, and Harvey’s film more than holds up almost six decades later.
Carnival of Souls is a film defined by its show-stopping conclusion, but the journey isn’t half bad either. A horror classic deserving of the name.