Monster Island Theater presents
Carnival of Souls (1962)

Director - Herk Harvey
 

The Monster Island Theater Carnival Recipes...

The Plot
Commentary
Ingmar Ozu-Bresson on Carnival of Souls
Cast and Production Credits

The Plot

Mary Henry and her two gal pals are drag racing against some boys. The wild fun goes crazy wrong when their car crashes off a bridge into the river. All three girls seem goners, but then Mary walks out of murky waters and it's time for something new. It's time to leave her little town so she accepts a church organist job in a small city in the middle of NoWheresville (actually Utah).

On her journey to her life anew, she passes a god-forsaken cast-off carnival on the outskirts of the city. The dilapidated carnival and random sightings of a grotesque zombie-like man haunt her days and nights as she tries to bring her life to some kind of normality. Meanwhile, a hungry minor league lothario and a well-meaning doctor enter her story and attempt to lead her to new beginnings. But it's the Carnival of Souls that becomes the main attraction.

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Film Notes

Herk Harvey's One Shot

Low rent industrial film director Herk Harvey decided to get into feature films. He managed only one low budget effort - Carnival of Souls. But though it's certainly a film filled with flaws and then some, it never-the-less has a strange power that is not accidental. Mr Harvey had something very ambitious in mind, and as time passes, his ambitions seem to be more and more apparent and realized.

A Poetic Horror Show

Carnival of Souls is something like the sorry love-child of an Ingmar Bergman film and a high-school Driver's Ed movie. There's a no-name cast, sound that is barely (or badly) synced, music that sounds like a roller-rink on an acid trip and dialog that makes the old language lab exercises sound like T.S. Eliot.

...But still...

There are many, many images in this film that grab the viewer by the frontal lobe and then won't let go. Scene after scene proceeds flatly along, and then suddenly angles get extreme and it's all mirrors, jukebox hydrogen and Church of Christ Without Christ high-anxiety evoking a very dark night in the carnival of your own soul.

Though not as viscerally shocking, if there's another film that Carnival of Souls could be compared to, it would be George Romero's Night of the Living Dead, filmed in Pittsburgh six years later. Romero was also a veteran of the industrial film industry.

What's the Matter with Utah?

The abandoned carnival that Herk Harvey found in the desert outside Salt Lake City was breathtakingly (sur)real, but all the other settings within the film - the rooming house, the main street, the bar, the church - are somehow, through the camera eye of Harvey, equally as strange. And by the time the dead begin rising in the land that Brigham Young built, it all adds up to as disturbingly profane a film-going experience as you'll ever encounter.

Candace Hilligoss We Hardly New 'Ya

She was born in South Dakota in 1935, studied acting in New York in the 1950s and did some small parts in late Golden Age TV. She starred in Carnival of Souls and Curse of the Living Corpse. Then this Hayley Mills-on-ice-look-alike disappeared from the screen.

-- Ed Schneider - Alameda TV

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Ingmar Ozu-Bresson on Carnival of Souls

"J'ai examiné le carnaval de ma propre âme et y trouvé les ombres des viandes dansant agités sur les tombes des religions antiques et de leurs indulgences plénières."

("I looked into the carnival of my own soul and found the shadows of meat products dancing restlessly upon the graves of the ancient religions and their plenary indulgences. ")

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Cast

Production Credits

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For more on...

Carnival of Souls
Pipe Organs
George Romero
Salt Lake City

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