Herk Harvey (1962)

When a car carrying three young women plunges from a bridge into a deep river the locals are surprised to see one of the passengers emerge apparently unscathed.  (The other two girls and the car sink into the sandy riverbed.)  A few days later, the wan, withdrawn survivor, whose name is Mary Henry, drives to Utah to take up a new job there (she’s a professional church organist, although not religious).  It’s en route that she sees for the first time in her car window the face of a man, even paler than her own, who flashes glittering eyes and a morbidly inviting grin at her.  After a while, Mary can’t get the man out of her sight, whether she’s playing the organ or alone in her room.  She feels increasingly drawn – and she increasingly relates the deathly man – to a deserted carnival on the local seashore.  As if this wasn’t enough, Mary also has to contend with spells during which she becomes invisible and inaudible to the rest of the world, and with the nervously lubricious attentions of the man who’s her fellow-roomer in a lodging house.   The combination of these two difficulties presents Mary with a dilemma:  although she wants to be alone (to a seemingly pathological degree), she also becomes more and more terrified of solitude.  For most of Carnival of Souls, the viewer wonders whether Mary’s weird experiences are going to yield a supernatural explanation or if the director, Herk Harvey, is using the horror movie form to provide a comically macabre illustration of the perils of being unsociable.  Because it sustains an unaccountably witty tone so well, Carnival of Souls is disappointing only when Harvey decides to resolve this uncertainty – but perhaps this emotional letdown is unavoidable.

This remarkable black-and-white film, co-written by Harvey and John Clifford, was made for $18,000[1].   The low budget is integral not only to the design and style of the picture but also to its distinctive scariness.  Economic as well as artistic considerations dictate that the locations used by Harvey (including the large department store in the Utah town where much of the story is set) are bleakly, eerily under-populated.  Even if it’s a requirement of the genre that a lodging house shouldn’t have many guests, there are sound financial reasons for Harvey’s keeping the household down to three, including the landlady.  In addition, the actors in smaller roles are so lacking in conventional technique that they’re unpredictable:  we don’t know what they’ll do next because sometimes they don’t seem to know either.  Flatly unconvincing one moment, they are startlingly believable the next, before reverting just as quickly to uninflected woodenness:  the effect is highly disorienting.  Candace Hilligloss in the main part is more skilful but her fretful, dissociated presence makes the closed-off Mary Henry a very peculiar leading lady.  Hilligloss sometimes evokes Audrey Hepburn mannerisms and speech rhythms, sometimes Rosanna Arquette’s fey disaffection, but she hardly seems to exist on the screen in her own right.  (She’s strikingly well cast.)  The silent emptiness of Mary and of her surroundings means there’s no normal heroine or normal world for the audience to identify with – so we can’t be moved by Mary’s plight or by a loss of reassuring normality.  Yet even without any such empathy, we share her sense of being trapped and powerless.  Indeed, Mary’s weightless, zombie anonymity heightens the viewer’s feelings of alienated claustrophobia.

Herk Harvey himself is the increasingly ubiquitous phantom.  Sidney Berger is Mary’s worrying neighbour in the lodging house.  Frances Feist is the landlady.  Art Ellison is Mary’s boss, the local minister.  The organ music is another illustration of a horror cliché transformed by the director’s imagination and his thrifty determination to make everything count.  This isn’t just atmospheric decoration:  the heavy grandeur of the organ music is expressively incongruous with the physical and spiritual lack of substance of the girl playing it.  The moment when Mary’s state of mind causes a slithering transition in the music from church into fairground mode is an alarming highlight.

[1990s]

[1] Information about its availability in the years following its original release and its preservation can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnival_of_Souls#Preservation_and_archival_status.