CARNIVAL OF SOULS – I suppose everyone’s got one of those all-time horror top tens that often shifts around but somehow stays the same – ‘Carnival Of Souls’ is always near the top of mine. It’s such a classic, but also a total outlier, a true indie from a time when that kind of thing had a very marginal presence in horror. It tells the story of Mary, a church organist who we first meet when she’s about to be run off the road during a car race with the wrong hicks in the wrong backwater. She surprises her rescuers when she emerges from a lake after her car takes a plunge, and then she quits her place with a shrug and a bit of cold shoulder – she’s not the sentimental type, it seems. But when she hits the next town, even she starts to shudder after a spectre appears and follows her around… ‘Carnival Of Souls’ is a film that nails a very definite kind of mood, one that follows from its theme of gradually retreating reality, and its adoption of a noirish, expressionistic tone. Its nearest precursors must have been things like Jacques Tournier and Val Lewton, maybe also that tenebrous piece of American surrealism, ‘Daughter Of Horror’; I think director Herk Harvey said he was into Bergman and Cocteau. The shadowy photography is backed by a creepy, fogged over organ score that is similarly evocative, poised midway between the church yard and the end of the pier. But the main power within ‘Carnival Of Souls’ belongs to Candace Hilligoss. Her face, anguished but frosty, permeates the whole film and is partly the cause of its relentless claustrophobia. There’s no sultry noirishness going on with her performance, it has an eerie magnetism that feels very singular, the embodiment of someone not really there. Harvey keeps things anchored by introducing characters such as a sleazy lech played by Sidney Berger, and an oblivious landlady Mrs Thomas, but, as per JPS, hell is other people, and Harvey cleverly uses them to build the sense of a real world that is at least as oppressive as the spectral domain that seems to beckon Mary away. The scenes of her wondering the abandoned carnival or drifting through the streets of a world she seems no longer part of are enough to set my hair on end. Although apparently obscure for decades, I can’t imagine that a good many genre and arthouse practitioners never saw it, for there are echoes there from ‘Messiah Of Evil’ to David Lynch. These days, COS is venerated and regarded as pretty much the pinnacle of vintage atmospheric horror. It’s as vivid to me now as it was when I watched it on Alex Cox’s ‘Moviedrome’ all those years ago.
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