MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Carnival’ Profits From Its Limitations

“Carnival of Souls” is a genuinely creepy movie. Made in 1962 on a budget of $30,000, and directed by Herk Harvey, an industrial filmmaker from Lawrence, Kan., it’s a demonstration of how evocative a scare picture can be even when the production is strictly bargain-basement.

Harvey, who has never directed another feature film, shot and edited “Carnival of Souls” (Monica 4-Plex) in six weeks. It’s no use pretending the film doesn’t show its cheapjack origins--the acting, fairly amateurish to begin with, has a one-take-only quality, and the special effects consist primarily of wavy lines whenever the heroine goes into shock. The cinematography is highly variable, too. Sequences of extraordinary beauty alternate with scenes where the light meter must have been on vacation.

But such is the expressiveness of this film that these rinky-dink elements only add to the horror. The inept post-dubbing, so that at times the actors seem not to belong to their voices, works in the film’s favor, and so do the zombie-like performances. Harvey knew what he was doing in this film. He brings out the latent terror in his ultra-low-budget constraints in a way that George Romero would perfect six years later in “The Night of the Living Dead”--a film clearly influenced by “Carnival of Souls.”

The story begins when a car with three women inside skids off a narrow wooden bridge during a drag race and plunges into a river. The police, without luck, dredge it for survivors. Hours later, one of the three girls staggers ashore. Mary Henry (Candace Hilligoss), who works in the local organ factory, is a lanky, big-boned blonde who leaves town in a state of almost trance-like shock for a job as organist in a small-town church in Utah. En route, she keeps flashing on the spectral face of a ghoulish man (Harvey). Settled into a rooming house near the church, she is immediately, overwhelmingly drawn to an abandoned amusement park pavilion on the edge of town.

There’s hypnotic power in Mary’s compulsion to connect with this ghostly, uninhabited park, with its ramshackle Moorish turrets. When, in the daylight, she picks her way through the fenced-off area and wanders hurriedly through the funhouse, the dance hall, the concession booths, she’s like a phantom herself--a phantom on the look-out for her own fleshed-out phantoms.

At the church, Mary plays the organ as if under a spell; at the rooming house, she finds herself fending off the obnoxious attentions of a nosy boozer (Sidney Berger) eager to score. Throughout the film, she keeps breaking into a dreamlike surreality where her words, her very presence, go unnoticed by those around her. She’s invisible in these moments, and her hysteria is particularly shocking because no one can hear her.

We’re as unprepared as Mary is for these breaks in reality, and their appearances are truly disquieting. They give her horrors a psychological resonance. It’s this resonance, and not the horror thrills per se, which gives the film its truest frights. Mary’s disassociated states mimic the mental unravelings of dementia, and so the film can be experienced on several levels at once. In its own quietly lurid way, “Carnival of Souls” is a sophisticated piece of character psychology.

In the best horror films, it’s as if the filmmakers are consciously manipulating the audience’s unconscious dream states. The suggestiveness of the imagery in “Carnival of Souls” is closer to the subtle, evocative work of, say, Val Lewton (“Cat People”) than it is to the cheapo ghoulie movies it superficially resembles.

It’s a good thing, I suppose, that the film is finally getting a proper theatrical send-off after years of languishing on late-night television. But this is one movie that may be even scarier watched on a small screen in the middle of the night--preferably in a cheap, nicotine-scented motel room with stained mattresses and torn Naugahyde loveseats on the outskirts of nowhere.

Cult horror movies are generally those that touch off some private fear in audiences. To best experience Harvey’s small-scale shocker (Times-rated Mature), the privacy of a living room or a bedroom may be preferable to the communal privacy of a theater crammed with gabbers and gigglers. If you go to the theater playing “Carnival of Souls,” I recommend you sit off to the corner, unattended, far from the exits.