Carnival of Souls (1962)
The lone survivor of a car crash takes an organist's job in a strange town, but a pale-faced man keeps appearing at the edge of her vision and an abandoned lakeside pavilion keeps pulling her back. Shot for pocket change by an industrial-film director, it drifts along on dread, church-organ drones and the logic of a nightmare.
A regional one-off that outlived its makers’ careers and quietly seeded everything from Night of the Living Dead to Lost Highway.
Background
Herk Harvey directed educational and industrial films for a company in Lawrence, Kansas, and made this feature on a tiny budget with a script by John Clifford. The location that inspired it was the abandoned Saltair pavilion on the Great Salt Lake in Utah, which Harvey saw while driving through Utah. Harvey himself plays the pale man who haunts the heroine. Candace Hilligoss plays Mary Henry, the organist.
What to watch for
The film did not make much of an impression on release, but it developed a following through television and was later restored and released by the Criterion Collection. Watch how the low budget works in the film’s favour: empty streets, cheap lighting and a spooky organ score create an uncanny mood that feels like a dream. Critics often see its influence in Romero’s Night of the Living Dead and in David Lynch’s films. If you like slow, atmospheric horror, this is a good film to discover.
