Cinema is, perhaps, the most elaborate trick ever played on the human mind. Movies transport us and elicit emotion because we believe the things we see on the screen to be real, at least on some level. Movie-makers are the magicians, and those who have some of the toughest acts are those working in the genre of horror. As the audience gets more and more jaded, the tricks seem to get more and more complicated and, in turn, more expensive. So, what if the magicians are on a severe budget? Keep it simple . . . and defy convention. Never reveal your tricks, right? Wrong. Tell the audience exactly what you’re doing and make sure the trick is so primally terrifying that recognizing the emotional puppetry is of little to no consequence. And so the makers of Carnival of Souls (1962) carry off one of the simplest, heart-jolting horrors of all time.
Our protagonist, Mary Henry, is the sole survivor of a car accident on a bridge. For three hours, locals search for the car and its three inhabitants, but to no avail . . . until Mary staggers onto land, smeared with mud and looking barely human. The trauma is too much for her, so she leaves to take a job as an organist in another town, and that’s when the magic begins. During her twilight drive, she looks through her windows at the passing new landscapes of Utah. But one glance through the passenger window reveals a ghastly countenance quite unhuman. Once she catches her breath and focuses back on the road, a white-faced, dark-eyed man stands before the car, looking like the corpse of John Lithgow. Just simple faces made up look ghoulish and cut to with such sharp unexpectedness that it throws off our conscious mind completely . . . and runs Mary off the road.
She eventually makes it to her new room for rent with a squat landlady of suspicious benevolence and a lecherous drunk warehouse worker living across the hall. She ends up being fired from the organist job for playing sacrilegious music, and all the while she is haunted by the presence of the ghoul, when she least expects it. In the end, the (un)dead claim her soul to its rightful place among them. As it turns out, when they pull the car from the river, the dead Mary is in the passenger seat. (Booyah, Sixth Sense!)
As I said, there’s no hiding the tricks. The movie takes multiple opportunities to underscore the power of imagination to warp the simplest of things into nightmarish fantasies . . . and that’s exactly what the movie is doing. Dr. Samuels, who wants to help the nerve-ridden Mary, very carefully and logically explains to her how the mind defies the truths presented to us in the corporeal world. The landlady chides Mary for letting her imagination run away with her, and even though we too have been presented the unsettling images, our increased heartbeat is a tell-tale sign of our minds busy at overwork. Even Mary herself says, “It's funny... the world is so different in the daylight. In the dark, your fantasies get so out of hand. But in the daylight everything falls back into place again.” And so it is for us in the dark of the cinema; the post-credits daylight can restore reason (with varying efficiency depending on the power of the film).
The budget for the film is estimated at $30,000, so some make-up and all the fear-inspiring qualities of a human face, I suspect, had to be put to maximum use. And they are so effectively woven into the visual narrative that you dread their inevitable reappearance with a visceral fear. The scenes of the reanimated dead rising from their underwater slumbers are like macabre fairy tales come to life, and when the corpses dance, there’s a morbid elegance that puts us and Mary in a trance, no matter how much we might like to look away. Low effects equals high fear.
And more than fear, this film has atmosfear. The Saltair Pavilion in Utah is one of the best uses of location shooting I can think of in horror film, maybe in all of film. The decadent decay and stark isolation against the horizon highlight its utter abandonment. A curiosity of manmade achievement, the Pavilion lures us all in, Mary included, to discover what secrets may lurk at its heart. One of the absolute scariest scenes in the entire film is when Mary enters the abandoned Pavilion to explore the carnival attractions from yesteryear. While standing at the bottom of a large slide, quite alone and in silence, from nowhere an empty pad for carnival-going patrons of the slide whooshes a foreboding descent of its own accord to rest right beside a waiting Mary. Such a simple “gag” that it’s not a gag at all (undoubtedly inexpensive)--but it’s horrific. And it’s possible because of the fantastic locale.
The film is wonderfully identifiable from its era but feels fresh on every viewing. There’s a quiet bravado in its fright factor. It says, “Don’t let your mind play tricks on you,” and then repeatedly pranks your conscious mind. And just when the trick seems trite, it pulls a dead rabbit from the hat, and instead of saying, “Look what I can do,” it challenges, “I dare you to look at what I can do.” And with gleeful resistance, we look.
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