Carnival Of Souls is in the absolute tip-toppest tier of late-night horror flicks. If all you want to do is watch something till you fall asleep, you'll be hypnotized by the dreamy pacing, by the lonely score (all pipe organ; more on that in a sec), and most of all by the near total lack of room tone in the audio. You know how when you're drifting off in front of the TV and you've shut your eyes for what seems like only an instant but it turns out later it was ten whole minutes, and all the voices and sounds you hear coming out your speakers seem like they're echoing completely out of a blank white void? This whole movie sounds like that no matter when you're watching it. And I actually wouldn't talk you out of watching this on a late afternoon sometime; just about every spooky thing that happens in this film takes place in the cold bright sunshine.
The film cold-opens in Kansas, where a playful drag-race between a car full of men and a car full of women ends tragically with the ladies' car crashing through the side of a bridge and sinking into a murky river. The authorities search the area and trawl the river bed for what must be hours, when suddenly Mary Henry (Candace Hilligoss) crawls, wet, muddy, and all alone, onto a sandbar. The voices of her rescuers, and even her own voice, echo out from another plane ("like black and white TV with the sound turned low", as Motorcycle Boy in Rumble Fish describes it), and the ringing in Mary's ears is ringing in ours as well. Fade to black.
The film advances rather rapidly through the next couple scenes of Mary going back to work (pipe organist; she's very, very good at it), and then later announcing to her boss that she's taking a job as a church organist in Salt Lake City. I liked how trim this part of the movie is. There's a very specific destination waiting for Mary and for us, and why waste time putting us there?
Passing through the outskirts of Salt Lake, Mary sees the burnt out husk of an gigantic recreation center off in the distance, and seduced by its strangeness and grandiosity, she winds up there over and over throughout the film. And seriously who could blame her? Look at this friggin place.
This is a postcard of the original structure, called Saltair, which has had three different iterations on the eastern side of the lake about 20 miles from downtown SLC. The version as it exists today, known as Saltair III, hosts occasional concerts. Saltair and Saltair II were large scale entertainment meccas for the city dating back to the late 1800s when Salt Lake was still, yknow, a *lake* and not miles of salt-flat with a lake way off in the distance. The film was shot guerilla-style in the corpse of Saltair II, and 8 years later like its predecessor, the whole structure burned to the ground.
Most of the screen time is spent here, with Mary drifting through the ruins in a reverie, and why not? Saltair II is absolutely the sort of entity a filmmaker finds on a scout and realizes immediately the kind of movie that needs to be made there.
There're more to talk about but I can't get into the rest without getting sort of spoilery, or at least what passes for spoilery in a movie that's as free-flowing as this. Meet me after the jump.
of entity a filmmaker has an immediate reaction to.
"I'm making a movie. You'd be perfect as a fucking douchebag."
According to Wikipedia, the story is loosely based on Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge, which is already a spoiler because anyone who's read or seen that could easily guess that Mary is already dead before the opening credits. As it happens, before I read that reference in the synopsis, I was already comparing it to another one-time Twilight Zone mini-film called The Hitch-Hiker in which a woman keeps seeing the same phantom hitchhiker at impossible intervals while on a drive to the west coast; and I think that the latter is a better comparison, and in a key way that itself makes Carnival Of Souls great for late night viewing: I actually don't think we're supposed to be scared. Or maybe *we* are, but *Mary* isn't.
If you're already dead, those phantoms you keep seeing on the side of the road, and in the window, and in your dreams -- you're one of them. They understand you, and they want you to understand too. They don't mean you any harm. In fact, all the harm you're ever going to experience is over. And what else is there to do now but put on your best suit or dress, and dance yourself into infinity in a luxurious dancehall that's every bit the ghost that you are?
I swear I almost gave this five stars, because while it's really just a mood-piece, it's delicious as a mood piece. I'm reminded of Octo's line in his Night Of The Living Dead review, "it's eye candy, all right, but a strange pepper-flavored candy you find in Japan". The settings, the angles, the lighting and shadows, the sound; everything about this is entrancing.
