This year marks the sixtieth anniversary of a film many people will certainly never hear of unless they somehow came across it in midnight screenings. Or, if you’re like me, you heard of it through Criterion and you wonder what the heck is this film with no names to it. Who is Herk Harvey? What type of film is this? Why did this film influence David Lynch and George A. Romero? Carnival of Souls did not get much of a reception at the time of its release, but only in later years did the movie establish itself as a cult classic and carry characteristics that have been seen in later horror and surrealist films.
A Woman In Trouble
The film follows a young woman (Candace Hilligoss) who somehow survives a car crash and moves to Utah to restart her life. After starting her new job as a church organist, the woman finds herself interested in a large, abandoned building on the salt flats. However, she is constantly haunted by the following ghost ( Harvey) and cannot get herself acclimated to her new surroundings. Even in another place, her past threatens to engulf her through strange hypnosis of what lies in the tent.
The atmosphere throughout the movie is a steady tremble following the woman’s path post-accident. She is innocent in the opening seconds until the car falls into the muddy river; emerging from it, she is a completely new person with no memory of what happened. The mysterious ghoul symbolizes the death that somehow she has escaped from. Throw in the never-ending organ score, played by a local organist named Gene Moore, which implants a carousel of horror that sticks in her mind as she tries to rediscover who she is.
Building A Haunted House
Carnival of Souls was the only feature directed by Herk Harvey, who worked for the educational film company Centron. Based in Lawrence, Kansas, where Harvey was studying at the University of Kansas, Centron produced many short films on low budgets that were mostly aimed at students on various subjects. One of its documentary shorts, Leo Beuerman, would get nominated for an Oscar in 1970. Through his time at Centron, Harvey learned how to shoot films on tight budgets with good quality, giving him the creativity he would need to shoot Carnival.
Driving back from California after shooting a film, Harvey passed through Utah and saw the abandoned Saltair Pavilion, which had been built in the late 19th century. It was a resort to attract Mormon church members that had closed in 1958 and the Great Salt Lake it was built on had drastically receded underneath the building. This inspired Harvey to make his own film and called his co-worker, John Clifford, to write a script around the abandoned pavilion. Candace Hilligoss, a new actress who studied at the Actors Studio in New York, was cast in the lead role. The shooting took three weeks on a budget of $33,000, roughly $314,000 in 2022 today.
Unleashing The Ghouls
The film was released in September of 1962 in Lawrence and was forgotten overnight. Worse for Harvey, while he obtained the television rights, he did not copyright the movie for distribution, and it would become available in the public domain later on. When a small distributor took the film, Harvey would not see any money from them as it was sold by bootleg and the distributor fled to Europe. However, it was those who saw the film on TV and through bootleg versions that would keep Carnival relevant until the late 1980s when it was reconstructed and shown in horror film festivals to build a bigger cult following.
When it was broadcast for TV, the film was slightly cut from 80 to 78 minutes; later, the film was restored as Harvey initially intended it to be at 84 minutes. Thanks to VHS, LaserDisc, and now DVD/Blu-Ray, the distribution is much bigger than what Harvey imagined, who got a second chance at fame when the film was resurrected. He never made another movie after Carnival but was happy to spend the rest of his life visiting various cities where the film was shown. Along with Lynch and Romero, directors James Wan and Lucrecia Martel also cited the film as influential to their movies. In 2008, a loose remake was made in Germany, Yella, written and directed by Christian Petzold.
For Souls, it remains a cult film for those who appreciate the genre of forgotten films and the hidden qualities they retain. It is very much like the films of Ed Wood, which played a role in Tim Burton’s upbringing. This is a taste outside of art and mainstream films that only a few can really look at and find the hidden power it has. Horror is a genre with the power of metamorphosis, changing its appearance all the time and approaching stories in all new directions. Carnival of Souls is no different than any major studio and its sense of direction.
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