Carnival of Souls (1962)
Directed by Herk Harvey
Mary Henry ends up the sole survivor of a fatal car accident through mysterious circumstances. Trying to put the incident behind her, she moves to Utah and takes a job as a church organist. But her fresh start is interrupted by visions of a fiendish man. As the visions begin to occur more frequently, Mary finds herself drawn to the deserted carnival on the outskirts of town. The strangely alluring carnival may hold the secret to her tragic past.
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What critics compared Carnival of Souls to
Just think of Jack-’o-lanterns and the Joker, or the leer that flashed across the mottled face of Linda Blair’s Regan MacNeil, or the rictus grins in a movie like “Insidious” or the movie that inspired it, the great 1962 low-budget freak-show classic “Carnival of Souls.”
If all the parts are not piecing perfectly together for the viewer, it’s not for a lack of originality, where the soundtrack is included into a unique vaudeville set piece, where Sandie dances to Sandie Shaw’s “Puppet On A String”, which hints at Wright having inspirations of Pinocchio , mixed with the ghostly terrors of Herk Harvey’s Carnival of Souls .
You see Herk Harveys blanched ghoul from Carnival of Souls, pass the scampering little It from Dont Look Now, then enter an entire wing devoted to Poltergeist, with Dalton the imperiled child stuck between worlds, and an intervening medium who guides us through the rules of the supernatural game.
Wan drew on movies like the great oddball 1962 indie chiller “Carnival of Souls” to create a film that coaxed its fear out of the poetry of horror-movie faces.
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Recent 1960s films which paved the way for NotLD - Psycho, making the locale for the horror contemporary America; The Birds (1963), providing a model for the NotLD situation; H.G. Lewis's Blood Feast (1963), the original splatter/gore movie; and Henk Hervey's Carnival of Souls (1962), providing a model for the ghoul make up - are alluded to.
I had seen it once before, on a laserdisc after the 1989 theatrical re-release, and thought it an amusing cult film not far away from Night of the Living Dead (1968).
Made for peanuts by director Herk Harvey and scripter John Clifford, two employees of the Kansas-based Centron Corporation (producer of industrial films), this is one of those unique movies, like 1968's Night of the Living Dead and 1974's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, where the low budget, gritty footage and rough performances combine to create not only an unsettling atmosphere of dread but also a study of existential angst in the face of unimaginable horror.
Its minimalist merits shouldn't be oversold, however: Though visually suggestive of the eeriness of the everyday (it is almost self-evident that David Lynch saw this movie before making "Eraserhead" and "Blue Velvet"; George Romero has confessed to being inspired by it for "Night of the Living Dead"), the 85-minute film is quite slight in the story department.
A moody, atmospheric combination of Alfred Hitchcock, Roger Corman and "The Twilight Zone" by one-shot filmmaker Herk Harvey, "Carnival" in many ways actually more resembles a movie that came along some years later George Romero's "Night of the Living Dead."