Carnival of Souls is a 1962 American neo-noir psychological horror film produced and directed by Herk Harvey in his sole feature film directorial credit. The screenplay was written by John Clifford, and the film stars Candace Hilligoss. Its plot follows Mary Henry, a young woman whose life is disturbed after a car accident. She relocates to a new city, where she finds herself unable to assimilate with the locals, and becomes drawn to the pavilion of an abandoned carnival. Herk Harvey also appears in the film as a ghoulish stranger who stalks her throughout. The film is set to an organ score by Gene Moore.
Filmed in Lawrence, Kansas, and Salt Lake City, Carnival of Souls was shot on a budget of $33,000, and Harvey employed various guerrilla filmmaking techniques to finish the production. The film is loosely based on the French short An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (1961), an adaptation of the 1890 story of the same name by Ambrose Bierce, and Harvey was inspired by the visual style of filmmakers such as Ingmar Bergman and Jean Cocteau. Carnival of Souls was Harvey's only feature film, and did not gain widespread attention when originally released as a double feature with the now mostly forgotten The Devil's Messenger in 1962.
Since the 1980s, the film has been noted by critics and film scholars for its cinematography and foreboding atmosphere. The film has a large cult following and is occasionally screened at film and Halloween festivals.
Plot
In Kansas, Mary Henry is riding in a car with two other young women when two men challenge them to a road race. During the race, the women's car is nudged by the boys' car and plunges off a bridge into a muddy river. Three hours after the police start dredging the water to look for them, Mary miraculously surfaces on the river bank, but cannot remember how she survived.
Mary moves to Salt Lake City, where she has been hired as a church organist. While driving near an abandoned pavilion on the shores of the Great Salt Lake, Mary begins experiencing visions of a ghoulish, pale-faced figure (referred to as "The Man" in the credits). A gas station attendant tells her the pavilion was first a bathhouse, then a dance hall, and finally a carnival before it was abandoned. In town, Mary rents a room and visits the church where she will be playing the organ. Mary takes a ride out to the pavilion at the lake with the church's minister who stops her from entering, warning that it is against the law.
Mary continues experiencing visions of The Man and also rejects the repeated advances of John, a socially awkward neighboring lodger. Mary goes to the pavilion by herself to investigate but does not find anything. Later, Mary begins experiencing terrifying interludes when she becomes invisible and inaudible to the rest of the world. During one of these episodes, Mary meets Dr. Samuels, who offers to help her while acknowledging he is not a psychiatrist. Mary returns to the church by herself to practice the organ and finds herself shifting from a hymn to eerie music. In a trance, she sees visions of The Man and other ghouls dancing at the pavilion. The minister, hearing the strange music, denounces it as sacrilege and insists that Mary resign.
That night, Mary accompanies John to a bar. Terrified of being alone with her nightmares, Mary tells John she wants his company, although he has little sympathy for her obvious distress and is only interested in sleeping with her. When they return home, John tries to convince Mary to let him stay the night; however, Mary becomes hysterical when she sees The Man in the mirror. John leaves, believing Mary to be insane. The following morning, after moving out of the boarding house, she gets the transmission on her car checked; while doing so she believes she sees The Man and runs away in a fright, abandoning her car. She frantically runs around trying to escape town, but the locals do not acknowledge her and she only encounters more ghouls. Upon visiting Dr. Samuels once again and seeing he is also a ghoul she wakes up in her car, revealing the previous scenes to be merely a nightmare.
She is later drawn back to the pavilion, where she finds the ghouls dancing, with a ghoul version of herself paired with The Man. She tries to run away but is chased by the ghouls onto the beach, where she collapses as they close in. The following day, Dr. Samuels, the minister, and the police go to the pavilion to look for Mary. They find her footprints but note that she has otherwise vanished. Back in Kansas, the submerged car is finally pulled from the river. Mary's body is seen in the front seat alongside the other two women.
Cast
Production Development
Harvey was a director and producer of industrial and educational films based in Lawrence, Kansas, where he worked for the Centron Corporation. While returning to Kansas after shooting a Centron film in California, Harvey developed the idea for Carnival of Souls after driving past the abandoned Saltair Pavilion in Salt Lake City. "When I got back to Lawrence, I asked my friend and co-worker at Centron Films, John Clifford, who was a writer there, how he'd like to write a feature," Harvey recalled. "The last scene, I told him, had to be a whole bunch of ghouls dancing in that ballroom; the rest was up to him. He wrote it in three weeks."
The screenplay is loosely based on the French short film An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (1961), an adaptation of the 1890 story of the same name by Ambrose Bierce.
Casting
In New York City, Harvey discovered twenty-six-year-old actress Candace Hilligoss, who had trained with Lee Strasberg, and cast her in the lead role of Mary Henry. Hilligoss had been offered a role in the Richard Hilliard-directed horror film Violent Midnight (1963), but opted for the role in Carnival of Souls. She stated that at the time, she took the role as a "take-the-money-and-run type of situation"; she was paid approximately $2,000 for her work in the film.
Filming Harvey shot Carnival of Souls in three weeks on location in Lawrence and Salt Lake City, after taking three weeks off from his job at Centron in order to direct the film, and starting with an initial production budget of $17,000. He raised the $17,000 cash budget by asking local businessmen if they were willing to invest $500 in his production. The other $13,000 of the total $30,000 budget was deferred. Harvey was able to secure the rental of the Saltair Pavilion for $50, and several other scenes, such as the scene featuring Mary in the department store, were shot guerrilla style, with Harvey paying off locals to allow the crew to quickly film. Hilligoss described the filming process as brisk, with the cast and crew working seven days a week.
Harvey aimed for the film to have "the look of Bergman and the feel of Cocteau," and employed techniques he had learned in his work on industrial films in order to limit production costs. There was not enough money for a process screen to create a rear projection effect, which was the method typically used at that time to create the impression that a scene was taking place inside a moving car, by combining footage shot inside a static car with separate footage of a moving background. Instead, Harvey used a battery-powered hand-held Arriflex camera to film the shots inside moving cars, removing the need for compositing. The Arriflex, which was at that time more often used by cameramen filming newsreel footage, also allowed them to use a moving camera in other scenes without the need for gear like dollies or cranes.
Harvey's assistant director was Reza Badiyi, a young Iranian immigrant who was just beginning his film work in the States. At this time, Badiyi had been second-unit director on one other film, Robert Altman's directing debut, The Delinquents, but would go on to make (amongst other notable work) some of the best-known, iconic television series openings and montages, including Hawaii Five-O, Get Smart, and The Mary Tyler Moore Show. The shot in which the face of The Man appears in the car window was accomplished through the use of an angled mirror placed on the far side of the window. The scene at the start of the film in which the car goes off the bridge and into the river was filmed in Lecompton, Kansas. The town did not charge a fee for the use of the bridge, only requiring the film crew to replace the bridge's damaged rails once they were done filming. This was done, at a cost of $12 for the repair.
Musical score
Carnival of Souls features an original organ score by local Kansas City organist and composer Gene Moore. Film and music scholar Julie Brown comments on the score, noting: "The organ is one of the spectral presences in Carnival of Souls, summoning, or being summoned by, the various allusions in the film to cinema's past." Screenwriter John Clifford has stated that the locations Harvey chose for the film (particularly the Saltair Pavilion, and the grand church organ) influenced the decision to use an organ score. The onscreen depiction of the organ played by Mary was implemented by Harvey to add to the film's "Gothic look."
An original soundtrack album for Carnival of Souls was released in 1988, featuring Gene Moore's original musical score.
In 2023, Waxwork Records licensed the soundtrack rights from Peter Soby and Matthew Irvine and released Carnival of Souls as part of the Rob Zombie Presents soundtrack series. It was pressed on colored vinyl and housed in special packaging featuring artwork by Graham Humphreys.
Release Carnival of Souls had its world premiere at the Granada Theatre in Lawrence, Kansas, on September 26, 1962.
While the US release of Carnival of Souls failed to include a copyright on the prints, automatically placing them in the public domain, the foreign release marketed by Walter Manley did contain a copyright card and was protected for overseas sales. The 35 mm theatrical prints were cut by Herz-Lion to 78 minutes,Letterboxd which trimmed the camera original. However, the 16 mm television copies were printed complete and individually cut by each station to fit their time slot, which is why they vary in length.
WOR-TV in New York City used to broadcast the film intact in a late-night time slot in the 1960s. The scenes cut by the theatrical distributor include a scene where Mary stops at a gas station and discusses the carnival building with the attendant, a longer dialogue sequence between the organ factory boss and a carpenter, and an extra scene where the doctor talks to the landlady. In 1989, the film was screened at festivals across Europe and the United States, affording it renewed public interest, and it has subsequently appeared at numerous Halloween film festivals.
Prints of Carnival of Souls vary in length, from 78 minutes in the theatrical release to 84 minutes in the original cut. While some sources have erroneously listed the film at a 91-minute-runtime, Michael Weldon stated in The Psychotronic Video Guide to Film that the original theatrical cut of the film ran approximately 80 minutes. He also stated that the director's cut, which runs 84 minutes, is "the best and most complete version we'll ever see."
Reception and legacy