Carnival of Souls
Directed by	Herk Harvey
Produced by	Herk Harvey
Written by	John Clifford
Starring	Candace Hilligloss
Distributed by	Herts-Lion International Corp.
Released	September 26, 1962
Running time	84 min (director's cut)
Language	English
Budget	$30,000
IMDb profile

Carnival of Souls is a horror cult film released in 1962. Produced and directed by Herk Harvey for $33,000, the movie, which varies in length from 78 to 84 minutes depending on the edition, never gained widespread public attention when it was originally released, and today is still a very obscure film. The basic plot is a variation of the classic Ambrose Bierce short story An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge. Set to an organ score by Gene Moore and shot in a surrealistic style reminiscent of the work of Jean Cocteau, Carnival of Souls relies more on atmosphere than on special effects to create its mood of horror. Image File history File links Carnival_of_Souls_DVD.jpg Summary Carnival of Souls colorized DVD cover. ... Harold A. Herk Harvey (June 3, 1924 – April 3, 1996), was an American film director. ... Harold A. Herk Harvey (June 3, 1924 – April 3, 1996), was an American film director. ... John Clifford (born October 16, 1836 in Sawley (Derbyshire); died November 20, 1923 in London) was a British Nonconformist minister and politician. ... September 26 is the 269th day of the year (270th in leap years) in the Gregorian Calendar, with 96 days remaining. ... 1962 (MCMLXII) was a common year starting on Monday (the link is to a full 1962 calendar). ... The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ... DVD cover showing horror characters as depicted by Universal Studios. ... A cult film is a movie that attracts a small but devoted group of fans, usually failing to achieve considerable success outside that group. ... 1962 (MCMLXII) was a common year starting on Monday (the link is to a full 1962 calendar). ... Harold A. Herk Harvey (June 3, 1924 – April 3, 1996), was an American film director. ... Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce (June 24, 1842–1914?) was an American satirist, critic, poet, short story (horror) writer, editor, and journalist. ... This article is in need of attention. ... An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge is a short story by Ambrose Bierce originally written in 1886. ... The Casavant pipe organ at Notre-Dame de Montréal Basilica, Montreal The organ is a keyboard instrument with one or more manuals, and usually a pedalboard. ... Jean Cocteau Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau (July 5, 1889 – October 11, 1963) was a French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, boxing manager and filmmaker. ... Special effects (abbreviated SPFX or SFX) are used in the film, television, and entertainment industry to create effects that cannot be achieved by normal means, such as depicting travel to other star systems. ...

Lawrence, Kansas-based Herk Harvey was a director and producer of industrial and educational films for the Centron Corporation. During a visit to Salt Lake City, he developed the idea for a variation of An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge involving the elaborate, abandoned SaltAir Pavilion, which made a strong impact on him. The Douglas County Courthouse anchors the south end of Lawrences downtown. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... Saltair is the name which has been given to several resorts located on the southern shore of the Great Salt Lake in Utah, about fifteen miles from Salt Lake City. ...

Hiring an up-and-coming actress (Lee Strasberg-trained Candace Hilligoss) and otherwise employing mostly local talent, he shot Carnival of Souls in a few weeks in Lawrence and Salt Lake City. Given the movie’s extremely low budget and Harvey’s inexperience with the genre, the film contains a considerable amount of plot problems, bad dialogue, cheap effects, continuity errors, and techniques that reveal Harvey’s industrial film background. Lee Strasberg (November 17, 1901 - February 17, 1982), was born Israel Lee Strassberg in Budzanów, former Austro-Hungarian Empire (now Budanov, Ukraine), to Ida and Baruch Meyer and became a Jewish American director, actor, producer and acting teacher. ... It has been suggested that Elements of plot be merged into this article or section. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... This article needs to be cleaned up to conform to a higher standard of quality. ...

Plot Overview

The film tells the story of Mary Henry, a talented young organist (Hilligoss). At the film’s beginning, the car in which Mary is riding, driven by a young lady who some boys in a nearby car challenge to a drag race, plunges off a bridge and into a river. Although the others in the car die, Mary, a mere passenger, mysteriously survives. Drag racing is a form of auto racing in which cars attempt to complete a fairly short, straight and level course in the shortest amount of time. ... This article is about the edifice (it is primarily an index to articles concerning specific bridge types). ... The Murray River in Australia. ...

Up to this point, the movie has all the appearances of being a picture-piece for safe driving, and how young men and women should not go racing. But then we begin to focus on Mary's character, first as she is drawn back to the scene of the accident, and then as she performs an impromptu concert in an organ factory. While she is obviously a gifted organist, her interaction with the factory supervisor is emotionless and even cold, and there is a suggestion that she has become this way since (and because of) the accident.

Mary then travels to Salt Lake City, where she takes a new job playing organ at a church. While driving there, she passes a large, abandoned pavilion (in reality, Salt Lake City’s Saltair amusement park), which seems to beckon to her in the twilight. Shortly thereafter, while driving along a deserted stretch of road, she sees an apparition: a deformed, ghoulish figure (aka the Man, played by director Herk Harvey) whose image replaces her reflection in the passenger window. He stares at her fixedly through the window of her moving car until her own image returns. The Salt Lake Temple of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is Salt Lake Citys top tourist draw. ... Harold A. Herk Harvey (June 3, 1924 – April 3, 1996), was an American film director. ...

As the film progresses, Mary becomes acquainted with her new landlady and a lecherous, sinister fellow tenant (played by Sidney Berger, now University of Houston School of Theatre[1] Director). Again and again, her reflection is replaced with the Man's image. At the same time, she continues to see visions of the Man that are no longer confined to mirrors or window reflections. Although no one else is aware of his presence, she begins to experience terrifying moments when she herself becomes invisible and inaudible to the rest of the world, as if she simply isn’t there. The University of Houston, often called U of H or UH, is a comprehensive doctoral degree-granting university[1] located in Houston, Texas. ...

The dynamic soon becomes one of her suspension between the regular world and the world of the Man, or, more bluntly, between the realms of the living and the dead. At times she holds herself aloof from her fellow boarder, clearly repulsed by his carnal desires; at others she seems to encourage his advances. At one moment she seems in control of her life, dismissive of anything supernatural (including the possible salvation of religion); at the next she is frightened of the unknown, beyond the help of science (in the person of a doctor from whom she seeks help) and religion (as represented by the minister of the church where she plays). For other uses, see Life (disambiguation) and Living (disambiguation). ... This page deals with the cessation of life. ... The supernatural (Latin: super- exceeding + nature) refers to forces and phenomena which are beyond ordinary scientific understanding. ... The scope of this article is limited to the empirical sciences. ...

After arriving in town, Mary starts to become obsessed by the pavilion, as if she is somehow tied to it in a way that she can’t understand. She is also haunted by the organ music she seems to hear along with the audience--organ music which, unlike the wholesome tunes she played in the film’s earlier scenes, grows darker, more sinister, and finally somewhat demented. (This devolution is heightened by the fact that the film's score is played not on a church organ but a theater organ, which is capable of producing many unique sounds that in the context of this film come across as quite eerie.) On her drive to Salt Lake City, she can find nothing on her car radio but this odd music. At one point, as she plays hymns on the church organ, her music turns eerie as (unknown to her) the Man appears below the organ loft; later, while taking a bath, she does a series of steps to the music in her head, a cross between playing the organ and dancing. A theatre organ is an organ installed in a movie theatre, most often modelled after the style originally devised by Robert Hope-Jones, which he called a unit orchestra. Such instruments were typically built to provide the greatest possible variety of timbres with the fewest possible pipes, and often had...

These latter sequences foreshadow one of the film’s eeriest, best-shot, and most classic scenes. While at first Mary was unable to connect to the “real” world, she suddenly begins to open up and connect all too easily to the world of the Man; this shift is ingeniously represented by her sudden metamorphosis, in this key sequence, from a prim church organist to a seductress, if—perhaps—an unwilling one. While practicing alone in church one night, she falls into a trance. She pauses briefly and then resumes playing; as she does, her music abruptly shifts from proper and respectable hymns to a weird, demonic melody. At the same time her body language turns darkly and unmistakably erotic, even as a sense of horror steadily heightens. Intercut with scenes of stained-glass windows and lengthening shadows, Mary begins to sway suggestively to her music, and her splayed fingers now caress the keys with expansive, openly sensuous gestures very different from any that she has used before. Also unlike her earlier organ performances, we suddenly see that she has kicked off her shoes and is playing barefoot, a surprising touch that makes her performance even more seductive and wanton. As she plays, her hands begin stroking the keyboards more urgently while her bare feet move dreamily on the organ’s long rows of pedals, her toes gently working them nearly en pointe in a coquettish ballet. It is obvious that we are seeing a seduction unfold, complete with a game of footsie, though it is unclear whether Mary is the seducer or the seduced. (This scene makes clear why Harvey chose the organ as Mary’s instrument; it has religious overtones and yet provides a sort of “whole body” playing experience that can best symbolize an almost literal dance of seduction, thus revealing how Mary is locked in a life-or-death struggle.) An altered state of consciousness is any state which is significantly different from a normative waking beta wave state. ... A hymn is a type of song, usually religious, specifically written for the purpose of praise, adoration or prayer, and typically addressed to a god or other religiously significant figure. ... This article is in need of attention from an expert on the subject. ... The term stained glass today generally refers to glass that has either been painted and fired or coloured by adding metallic salts during its manufacture and often both. ... A 12-year-old girl walks barefoot leaving footprints on the floor. ... Hello People who love keyboards!!!!!!!!!!!! Headline text This article is about keyboards on musical instruments. ... Note: This page needs to be cleaned up to be brought into conformance with the Manual of Style. ... cut away of a pointe shoe. ... The Waltz of the Snowflakes from Tchaikovskys The Nutcracker. ...

As Mary continues to coax her malevolent tune from the organ, she moves more deeply into trance, beginning to experience an extended impressionistic vision of a throng of ghouls emerging from the water to waltz to her music in the pavilion’s ruined ballroom. As the Man moves towards her and then reaches out for her while she watches in numb horror, her fingers spasm on the keyboards, signaling the approach of a not-too-metaphorical climax. But just before it occurs, the minister appears suddenly and wrenches her hands from the organ, furiously calling her music sacrilege. He "asks her to resign" because of her lack of reverence and awareness of things significant to the church and concisely laments her "lack of soul". Before she leaves he softens his attitude a bit and tells her that the church can offer her help. She departs in total, wordless dejection. At this point she seems to know that she is lost, and from here on her appeals for help to her acquaintances become at once more desperate and more despairing. A ghoul is a monster from ancient Arabian folklore that dwells in graveyards and other uninhabited places. ... Sacrilege is in general the violation or injurious treatment of a sacred object. ...

After the organ trance scene, the ghouls appear more and more often. In one later scene, Harvey blurs the distinction between the real and surreal still further, by showing us that Mary has, at least apparently, been asleep and dreaming some of the scenes involving the ghouls. Though Mary tries frantically to escape them--at one point boarding a bus to leave town only to find that ghouls comprise all of the passengers--in the end she cannot resist being drawn back to the pavilion one last time, where the they proceed to chase her down and spirit her away. The minister, the doctor, and the police, arriving at the pavilion to investigate, cannot explain her mysterious disappearance, as her footprints in the sand (the only ones) end abruptly, and her body is missing. The film’s final scene, however, shows us what had been hidden from Mary all along: a shot of her lifeless body in the car that plunged into the river. She has been dead all the while...

Remake

Before the film had lapsed into public domain, negotiations with the film's writer, John Cliiford, and the director, Herk Harvey, led in 1998 to a re-make directed by Adam Grossman and Ian Kessner and starring Bobbie Phillips. Not managing to secure theatrical release, it went straight-to-DVD. The remake also got marketed as Wes Craven Presents, 'Carnival of Souls' . Reviewed negatively by most reviewers, it has little in common with the 1960s film, borrowing little more than the ending of the film which revealed that, as the first film, much of the action had occurred within the mind of a drowning woman. Sidney Berger, who had appeared in the original film as John Linden, appeared in a cameo in the re-make, as a tribute. The film makers had asked for Candace Hilligoss, the star of the first film to also appear in it, but she declined, feeling that Clifford and the film makers of the re-make had shown disrespect to her in initiating the film without consulting her or considering her treatment for a sequel to the 1962 version. The public domain comprises the body of all creative works and other knowledge—writing, artwork, music, science, inventions, and others—in which no person or organization has any proprietary interest. ... 1998 (MCMXCVIII) was a common year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar, and was designated the International Year of the Ocean. ... In cinema, a remake is a work that has the same story, and often the same title, as a work that was made earlier. ... Adam Grossman was the guitarist and singer for the Texas Industrial metal band Skrew ... Bobbie Phillips Bobbie Phillips is an American actress born 29 January 1972 in Charleston, South Carolina. ... A film that is released direct-to-video (also straight-to-video) is one which has been released to the public on home video formats first rather than first being released in movie theaters. ... The 1960s decade refers to the years from 1960 to 1969, inclusive. ...

Trivia

• If Mary drives from Lawrence, Kansas, where the first part of the movie is made, to Salt Lake City, she is likely to drive into the city coming from the east. She would not pass Saltair, which lies west of the city.
• The church in Salt Lake City where Mary plays the organ today is a sushi restaurant.
• The colorized DVD release has the ghouls remaining in black and white, while everyone (and everything) else has been colorized. The DVD also features a humorous audio commentary track by comedian Mike Nelson, who mocks the low budget film's flaws.
• The uncredited "main ghost" that Mary frequently sees is played by the film's director, Herk Harvey.

In Japanese cuisine, sushi (most commonly 寿司, but also 鮨 or 鮓) is a food made of vinegared rice combined with various toppings or fillings. ... Colorization in Sin City Film Colorization is a film alteration process that involves adding color to a black and white film. ... DVD-R writing/reading side DVD (also known as Digital Versatile Disc or Digital Video Disc) is an optical disc storage media format that can be used for data storage, including movies with high video and sound quality. ... A major selling point of DVD video is that its storage capacity allows for a wide variety of extra features in addition to the feature film itself. ... Mystery Science Theater 3000s Mike Nelson (left) and Kevin Wagner Murphy, at Exoticon 1 convention panel in Metairie, Louisiana, November, 1998. ...

Other uses

• Dark music group Miranda Sex Garden entitled a 2000 album, Carnival of Souls.
• A limited release of a 1989 Jane's Addiction concert was also title Carnival of Souls.

In music, a band is a group of musicians, or musical ensemble, usually popular or folk, playing parts of or improvising off of a musical arrangement. ... This article is about the year 2000. ... Janes Addiction was an American band, named in reference to Jane Bainter, a (now ex-) heroin addict who was a housemate of the band. ...

Images

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External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to:

Carnival of Souls

• Carnival of Souls (1962) at The Internet Movie Database
• Carnival of Souls (1998) at The Internet Movie Database
• Download Carnival of Souls at the Internet Archive
• John Clifford essay at criterionco.com
• Bruce Kawin essay at criterionco.com