I remember seeing this on TV in the 1970s and the final scene shot at Saltair in Salt Lake City is a classic of camp horror that seeps into your subconscious. With a motivation of nostalgia I attended the revived film festival screening in 1989.
"Carnival of Souls" has become a cult classic and the DVD release contains everything you could possibly want to know about the film and then some. How director Herk Harvey got the original idea based on the Saltair locale, and how John Clifford wrote the script. As a low budget film it succeeds on many levels, the story being a version of the '40s Mercury Theater episode "The Hitchhiker" and the '50s Twilight Zone treatment. Candace Hilligoss was a Lee Strasberg method actor when she got the offer to star in this film set in Lawrence, Kansas and Salt Lake City, Utah. She was paid $2000, the only member of cast or crew to see any real money from the original film.
The amateurishness of certain aspects of the film also are part of its charm. The beginning uses voice-overs that are completely out of sync and you can see the car is empty as it goes over the bridge, but when the lead character Mary comes up on shore after the car/bridge accident the otherworldly feel of the film starts to take over. The Gothic pipe organ building sets the atmosphere, and as she makes her way to Salt Lake City the ghoul (Herk Harvey) starts to appear. Also of interest is the in town scenes where we get a good glimpse of 1961 street scenes. One scene doesn't quite gel with the rest of the film, namely the scene where Mr. Berger (John Linden) brings Mary coffee in the morning. She is so bubbly with dialogue such as, "You're just what I needed this morning", that she seems a completely different character than that in the rest of the film. But as the ghoul keeps appearing and she keeps getting drawn to the carnival the scenes of mysteriousness that make this a great film get underway. The Saltair building scenes are classic, an abandoned dance hall and amusement park full of ghoulish ghosts. The fast-motion dancing ghouls and the end where they run past and jump up in front of the camera predate the same feel of Night of the Living Dead by 7 years. As Mary wanders through the abandoned park, the true atmospheric essence comes to the fore.
Much can be read into the theme of someone caught in a dimension between life and death, from the quantum theory of Schoedinger's Cat to the Many Worlds theory to ideas of purgatory, etc. However as the writer admits the deeper aspects were not considered by him. In the many world's theory we die in one dimension, but not in another. If the dimensions overlap the death dimension can influence and change the life one.
A few things to watch for: When Hilligoss is running from the ghouls at the end she is happily smiling the whole time. At the end you can see how the girls in the car, supposedly dead, are twitching (look for the middle one twitching her eyes)...then again they were in cold water. Its weird because in an outtake scene they are not moving. The priest fires Mary because her playing is "profane". Well the playing doesn't really sound profane to me, and either way it's not a convincing reason to fire someone. The DVD outtakes contain some good extra scenes of the ghouls in the bathhouse, and some extra footage of Mary wandering through Saltair. If you're into 1960s horror films with substance and atmosphere, this is at the top of the list.
"Carnival of Souls" has become a cult classic and the DVD release contains everything you could possibly want to know about the film and then some. How director Herk Harvey got the original idea based on the Saltair locale, and how John Clifford wrote the script. As a low budget film it succeeds on many levels, the story being a version of the '40s Mercury Theater episode "The Hitchhiker" and the '50s Twilight Zone treatment. Candace Hilligoss was a Lee Strasberg method actor when she got the offer to star in this film set in Lawrence, Kansas and Salt Lake City, Utah. She was paid $2000, the only member of cast or crew to see any real money from the original film.
The amateurishness of certain aspects of the film also are part of its charm. The beginning uses voice-overs that are completely out of sync and you can see the car is empty as it goes over the bridge, but when the lead character Mary comes up on shore after the car/bridge accident the otherworldly feel of the film starts to take over. The Gothic pipe organ building sets the atmosphere, and as she makes her way to Salt Lake City the ghoul (Herk Harvey) starts to appear. Also of interest is the in town scenes where we get a good glimpse of 1961 street scenes. One scene doesn't quite gel with the rest of the film, namely the scene where Mr. Berger (John Linden) brings Mary coffee in the morning. She is so bubbly with dialogue such as, "You're just what I needed this morning", that she seems a completely different character than that in the rest of the film. But as the ghoul keeps appearing and she keeps getting drawn to the carnival the scenes of mysteriousness that make this a great film get underway. The Saltair building scenes are classic, an abandoned dance hall and amusement park full of ghoulish ghosts. The fast-motion dancing ghouls and the end where they run past and jump up in front of the camera predate the same feel of Night of the Living Dead by 7 years. As Mary wanders through the abandoned park, the true atmospheric essence comes to the fore.
Much can be read into the theme of someone caught in a dimension between life and death, from the quantum theory of Schoedinger's Cat to the Many Worlds theory to ideas of purgatory, etc. However as the writer admits the deeper aspects were not considered by him. In the many world's theory we die in one dimension, but not in another. If the dimensions overlap the death dimension can influence and change the life one.
A few things to watch for: When Hilligoss is running from the ghouls at the end she is happily smiling the whole time. At the end you can see how the girls in the car, supposedly dead, are twitching (look for the middle one twitching her eyes)...then again they were in cold water. Its weird because in an outtake scene they are not moving. The priest fires Mary because her playing is "profane". Well the playing doesn't really sound profane to me, and either way it's not a convincing reason to fire someone. The DVD outtakes contain some good extra scenes of the ghouls in the bathhouse, and some extra footage of Mary wandering through Saltair. If you're into 1960s horror films with substance and atmosphere, this is at the top of the list.