The German word unheimlich means, strange, or eerie, or uncanny, and literally translates as “unhome-like.” So something that is strange or eerie is something that is not home. And I can’t really think of a better word to describe Carnival Of Souls, an early-60s oddity that’s earned cult classic status over the years. It’s definitely strange, still pretty eerie in the modern day, and it’s very much a film about someone who doesn’t feel at home where she is, and why that might be the case.
The film opens cold on a group of three women riding together in a car. They stop at a red light, where two men in a neighboring car challenge them to a drag race. Against all good sense, the woman driving the car meets their challenge and they peel out when the light turns green. Soon enough, they come to a narrow bridge over a river. There’s just barely enough room for two cars to run abreast, and in jockeying for position, the car with the women in it gets nudged just enough at speed to send it through one of the flimsy wooden guardrails and into the river below. The car immediately begins to sink. The opening title and credits play out over the rushing water.
Some time later, one woman…only one…crawls out of the river, dazed and covered with mud.
To the extent that this film works (which is pretty well, all told), it’s because it’s a very, very strange film. It was clearly shot on a small budget, but what it lacks in technical sophistication, it makes up for in sheer uneasiness. I think some of this is attributable to the film itself and some of it to the period when it was made. The dialogue and performances are as stilted as you’d expect from a film made in the late 50s-early 60s. with all the verve and polish of an industrial training film (which makes sense, since that was the director’s stock in trade, and the format to which he returned after making this, his only feature film). It’s shot entirely in black and white, equal parts mundane everyday life and noirish chiaroscuro, with sort of a similar vibe to Night Of The Living Dead in that respect. The soundtrack does a lot of work toward the overall mood, consisting of periods of shrill, dissonant organ music, alternating with complete silence. But even beyond that, everyone feels a little…off, from the tremulous, easily flustered landlady to the furtive, weaselly neighbor, to Mary herself, aloof, brittle and remote, constantly driven by the urge to get away, to separate herself, to be alone. And you don’t really blame her, given that everyone around her seems bent on inserting themselves into her life and her business. It doesn’t have the bug-eyed intensity of something like Messiah Of Evil, but it does have that same sense of a world where everything is just a few degrees left of center.
It’s also a film that’s willing to do the unexpected cinematically. Since the director’s background was in industrial training films, there’s a plain, workmanlike feeling to the cinematography that contrasts with the fantastic subject matter. There are some instances of clever editing and moody, haunting composition, but these just stand out even more against the dry mundanity elsewhere. And there are some definite eccentricities at work here - close-ups get held a little too long or are placed where you wouldn’t expect a close-up to be, and other shots get cut off mid-sentence, so it never really falls into a predictable rhythm. For every sequence in broad daylight, in the waking world, there’s another swallowed by shadows, but one thing that distinguishes this film from a lot of other horror films is that the bad stuff doesn’t just happen at night - as the film goes on, Mary’s visions are as likely to intrude on her waking life as her nightmares, which adds to the overall off-kilter feeling of the film. It skirts convention in how it tells its story and how it conveys it visually, not so much defying expectations as disregarding them.
There’s not much of a story here, really - the film is mostly just Mary going from strange incident to strange incident until it ends, though there is a definite sense of escalation as the film moves along. Her start in a new town seems normal enough, but then the nightmares start, and then the hallucinations, and then there are periods where she seems to slip out of sync with the world altogether, and it does start to wear on her more and more over time. And honestly, her interactions with her lecherous neighbor were as uncomfortable and unsettling to me as anything else, if not more so, but I think a lot of that is the combination of the unsubtle performances and the gender norms of about sixty years ago. Still, it ends up adding a whole other layer of unease to the proceedings. The more supernatural elements are conveyed economically, but effectively, using simple makeup and slightly undercranked shots to give everything an unnaturally hastened feel. Between its theatricality, the soundtrack of spooky organ music, and the simplicity of the makeup effects, the climax reminds me of nothing so much as German Expressionism, crude but still effective.
The ending probably isn’t going to surprise anyone in a modern audience, since films with a similar conceit have become more common since this was released, but I bet this blew minds back in the day. Home is someplace comfortable and familiar, and Mary can’t feel comfortable anywhere anymore. Nowhere is home, and as an audience, we’re equally denied the comforts of familiar, predictable horror storytelling. Her experience and ours are equally unheimlich.
IMDB entry
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