Carnival of Souls
HORROR-THON 2023 • IT’S ALL IN YOUR HEAD
10/10
DIRECTOR: Herk Harvey
STARRING: Candace Hilligoss, Frances Feist, Sidney Berger
RELEASED: 1962
RUNTIME: 1 hour, 18 minutes
WATCH ON: Tubi, Pluto TV, Criterion Channel, HBO Max, MGM+, Prime Video
SCARE LEVEL: Few jumps, maximum creep
ORGAN MUSIC: Haunting, literally.
A pale man with dark-ringed eyes keeps showing up in windows and reflections. He never says a word. He doesn’t need to. I loved this movie.
Mary’s car goes off a bridge into a Kansas river during a drag race. Everyone assumes the women inside are dead. Hours later, Mary walks out of the water alone, muddy and dazed, with no idea how she survived.
She moves to Salt Lake City to take a job as a church organist and start over. But something is off. People stop seeing or hearing her for minutes at a time. The pale man keeps appearing. And she feels pulled toward an abandoned lakeside pavilion out on the salt flats.
MY HUMBLE OPINION
The plot is really interesting, and it feels like a great Twilight Zone episode. It’s black and white, it’s a little uncanny, and something about the world is quietly wrong. You keep waiting for Rod Serling to step out and explain it.
It’s just creepy enough. Nothing jumps out at you. It’s the organ music, the empty pavilion, and that pale face in the window. It stays with you without wrecking your sleep.
It cost about $33,000. Director Herk Harvey made industrial training films in Kanasas made this one feature, and played the pale man himself. It’s often cited as an influence on the Night of the Living Dead, which I watched for the Horror-Thon 2021.
FUN FACT FOR YOUR NEXT DINNER PARTY
The original theatrical release was a box-office failure, but once it started airing on late-night television, it started gaining a cult following. Carnival of Souls is now widely regarded as a landmark movie of psychological horror.