Post by Sham on Oct 24, 2004 19:39:42 GMT -5
Carnival of Souls [1962]
****/****
****/****
Carnival of Souls isn’t just adept through methods of apparitional competence and detailed vision of the hereafter, but it’s also a vivid approach of what happens when accidents become a person’s destiny, and when destiny becomes a resolution of the unexplained. With ideas that are more provocative and intriguing than they were probably meant to be, Carnival of Souls is a cult classic that remains to this day one of the most genuinely harrowing and original horror films ever made.
Mary Henry (Candace Hilligoss) is a soon-to-be church organist who is suddenly trashed by the hand of fate. Thrown off of a bridge along with her car and two friends, the police and investigators search frenetically for the car and survivors. When their worst fears are almost realized, Mary walks out of the river in a state of unawareness to what had happened. She is the only to outlive the car accident. Hoping to continue life as she had hoped, she consents a job at a church as an organist. But as her life continues, new and eccentric happenings become disheveled with her routine, and a strange man begins to appear wherever she goes. Watching. Waiting. Who is he, and what does he want with her? The man ultimately leads to Mary’s fascination with an abandoned carnival. Do the secrets lie there? Will the carnival reveal the man’s true identity?
That I will not say, for the mere elucidation to who he is and what he wants from Mary is not the case in point. Carnival of Souls, while dripping with atmosphere and supplicating for the climax of an inscrutable mystery, is a thinking-man’s horror film. Long debated by countless viewers of its final moments, it’s the type of film that stays with you long after your initial watch, and just for good measure, it makes you question its intentions. It’s one of the only movies I know of to where the viewer has to figure out what is of truth and what is of fiction, and it saves that entirely captivating interrogation until the last frightening shot. By the time Carnival of Souls was over, my feet were off the edge of the bed and tucked under my legs, and my bedroom light wasn’t anything but shine. It really frightened me, and some of the simplest images in the film have sustained a primal disturbance that I will never forget.
For being a film with an infinitesimal budget, I was amazed by its potential to tell a good story without coming off as too forceful or tedious. Its events are played with a flow of sincerity that is completely believable as it compiles that story’s entirety. Much of its realism is due to the performance from Candace Hilligoss, who plays Mary with sympathy and compassion for what she has to work with. She is extremely under-developed, which is effective, because the audience then has to figure out who her character is just as much as she has to. When she finally grasps what’s going on, it’s too late for us. When we least expect it, Mary becomes a plot device on her own, and the film ends with a fantastic effectual climax that has been talked about for over forty years.
So what is it that makes Carnival of Souls such a brilliant film? The answer is simple: the director uses visuals to tell his story rather than discourse. It’s a subtext, and an inspired one at that. Sometimes I wonder why this film isn’t a silent one, because the dialogue here is so negligible that it merely develops the story rather than actually establishing it. But then it all comes down to the leading character’s emotions. Without the dialogue, the sentiment wouldn’t be as evocative.
Carnival of Souls’ aging is inevitable, but remarkably effective, and that’s what makes it such a perpetual classic. Whether you admit to recognizing the countless films that borrowed from its climax, it still remains to be imaginative and somewhat shocking. This is what horror is all about, and this is one of the best you’ll ever see.
