Very rarely, a film-making talent appears out of nowhere, makes one extraordinary film, the vanishes back into the ether, never to work in features again. One such was Herk Harvey who had been toiling for many years as the director of industrial and educational films for Centron Corporation before raising independent capital to make the remarkable Carnival of Souls, his sole contribution to the history of the horror film. But what a contribution it is. Raw, unpolished but telling an imaginative story in a vivid and haunting way.
In Kansas, a car carrying three young women is forced off a bridge by a car full of yobbish men during a drag race. One woman, Mary Henry (Candace Hilligoss – fantastic, with a genuine haunted quality about her) emerges from the river apparently unscathed but with no memory of how she survived the crash. She later moves to Salt Lake City to take up a position as a church organist but is haunted by visions of white-faced man (Hervey) and is intrigued by a sprawling, abandoned pavilion on the shores of the Great Salt Lake. She finds herself suddenly invisible to others (“I don’t belong in the world. That’s what it is… something separates me from other people”), gets little help from her doctor, Samuels (Stan Levitt) is fired by the minister (Art Ellison) when she’s overcome by visions of dancing ghosts and fails to impress would-be suitor John Linden (Sidney Berger) who goes cold on her as her behaviour becomes increasingly unpredictable. She tries to flee town only to find herself on a bus full of zombie-like ghosts. At the pavilion she witnesses the ghosts dancing and then… In a twist ending we finally get to understand something of what’s been going on.
There had been little quite as surreal and quietly unsettling as Carnival of Souls in horror before. It plays out in an everyday world of small-town banality from which Mary increasingly finds herself adrift, lost in an ethereal limbo between the worlds of the living and the dead. That combination of the very ordinary and the increasingly surreal builds a slow accumulation of palpable dread while dripping with symbolism.
It’s not just a common or garden ghost film (though it works marvellously on that level of course) – there’s obviously some thought in the screenplay written by John Clifford, one of Hervey’s co-workers at Centron. The film has been embraced by both feminist and queer film academics and certainly it’s full of moments where Mary is bothered and menaced by men, from the boy racers whose macho antics set the whole tragedy in progress to the leering, voyeuristic Linden, from the priest who fires her after she whips herself into a frenzy while playing the organ to the ghoulish “the man,” one of the most striking characters in 60s horror cinema, a pasty-faced ghost whose sudden appearances are often quite startling and unexpected.
Where too many low budget film-makers of the time lacked the imagination or wit to overcome their technical and financial shortcomings, but Harvey is endlessly inventive and daring. He finds the most unexpected camera angle, never content to simply plonk his camera down and hope for the best which is what you suspect many of his equally impoverished contemporaries (and those that followed) were happy enough to do. Despite a budget of just $33,000, the film looks terrific and that’s due not only to Maurice Prather’s glorious black and white photography but also the marvellous location Harvey found for the latter half of the film. He was able to hire (for the princely sum of $50) the Saltair Pavilion, an abandoned resort on the shores of the Great Salt Lake in Utah, a striking building that features prominently in the memorable “dance of the dead” sequence. It had been while driving past the forlorn and unloved building that the core idea for the film came to Hervey and he makes excellent use of the structure in some of the film’s most iconic moments.
It’s not hard to see the influence of Carnival of Souls on subsequent films like George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968), and the films of David Lynch among others. From small beginnings (it opened in Lawrence, Kansas, home of Centron Corporation, to almost no attention from the press) it’s become a firm cult favourite, constantly being discovered by new generations of fans who fall for its offbeat charms. It exists in at least two known forms, one running 78 minutes and an 84-minute restored “director’s cut” (it had been cut by distributors Herts-Lion in 1962 to make it more double bill friendly, the missing footage being restored in the late 1980s) and there has been a colourised version which, hopefully, no-one reading this needs to be advised to give the widest possible berth. It was “remade” in 1998 by Adam Grossman and Ian Kessner under the “Wes Craven presents” banner but it takes the name in vain – it actually has nothing whatsoever to with Hervey’s film and deserves the same treatment as the colourised edition.
Sadly, Hervey never directed a second feature. He tried several times to get a follow-up project off the ground (including an adaptation of science fiction writer James E. Gunn’s 1953 short story The Reluctant Witch which he started shooting but abandoned when the money ran out) but it wasn’t to be. He was kept busy though with his industrial film work at Centron. Hilligoss fared only a little better, appearing in two more horror films The Curse of the Living Corpse (1964) and an uncredited role in South of Hell Mountain (1971) (she turned down an offer to appear in the remake) which is more than the bulk of the supporting cast managed – for many of them, Carnival of Souls was simply a glorious one off.
Crew
Directed: Herk Harvey; A presentation of Herts-Lion International. A Harcourt production; Produced: Herk Harvey; Written: John Clifford; Director of Photography: Maurice Prather; Editing: Dan Palmquist, Bill de Jarnette; Music: Gene Moore; Sound: Ed Down, Don Jessup; Hair Styles: George Corn
Cast
Candace Hilligoss [Mary Henry]; Frances Feist [Mrs Thomas]; Sidney Berger [John Linden]; Art Ellison [Minister]; Stan Levitt [Dr Samuels]; Tom McGinnis [organ factory boss]; Forbes Caldwell [organ factory worker]; Dan Palmquist [gas station attendant]; Bill de Jarnette [mechanic]; Steve Boozer [man at juke box]; Pamela Ballard; Larry Sneegas [drag racer]; Cari Conboy [lake zombie]; Karen Pyles; T.C. Adams; Sharon Scoville, Mary Ann Harris [Mary’s girlfriends]; Peter Schnitzler [walking corpse]; Bill Sollner [lake zombie]; Reza Badiyi [bus ticket customer – uncredited]; Ed Down [man at bridge – uncredited]; Herk Harvey [‘The Man’ – uncredited]; Wayne Shmille [sheriff at bridge – uncredited]
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