A drag race turns to tragedy when one car, with three young women inside, topples over a bridge and into the muddy river below. The authorities drag the river, but the search is fruitless and the girls are presumed dead until a single survivor stumbles out of the water with no recollection of how she escaped. Mary Henry (Candace Hilligoss) decides to forget her strange experience and carry on with her plan to move to Utah to accept a job as a church organist. She rejects the notion that because her profession leads her to work in the church, she is obligated to worship as part of the congregation, and this cold approach to her work unnerves many around her. While driving to the new city, she experiences weird visions of a ghoulish man who stares at her through the windshield, and passes an abandonded carnival on a desolate stretch of highway outside of town to which she feels strangely drawn. Mary tries to live her life in private, ignoring invitations to worship by the minister of her church and the leering propositions of a neighbor in her rooming house. Soon the ghostly apparition from the highway is appearing more often, and she experiences eerie spells in which she becomes invisible to people on the street. A doctor tries to help, but he too is rejected, and eventually Mary realizes that the deserted carnival holds the secret to her destiny. ~ Fred Beldin, All Movie Guide
Review by All Movie Guide
All Movie Guide
is neutral about it.
In the 1960s, there were dozens of regional filmmakers cranking out low-budget horror and sci-fi pictures, but while most of them were hoping to become the next
Roger Corman or
William Castle,
Herk Harvey obviously had something more grand in mind. Kansas-based Harvey fancied himself an artist, and if his only feature, Carnival of Souls, is more than a bit pretentious, it's also strong and stylish enough to support his ambitions -- Carnival of Souls has a look and feel decidedly different than that of any horror movie of its time. Concerning itself with a woman caught in a spiritual netherworld between life and death, Carnival of Souls has a cool, slightly forbidding tone and a desolate beauty in its visual style that stands apart from most B-horror pics of the period (or A-horror pics, for that matter), and the icy emotional remove of leading lady Candace Hilligoss suggests a character out of
Ingmar Bergman rather than the usual screaming damsel being chased by monsters who graced drive-in screens of the period. Harvey's years in industrial filmmaking certainly served him well while making Carnival of Souls, which looks surprisingly glossy and distinctive given its shoestring budget, and if some of the material seems just a shade overdone, more than enough of it hits the target (especially the slightly surreal dance of the ghouls, and Hilligoss' panicky final reel) to make one wish Harvey had been able to make a few more features before retreating back to movies about proper classroom etiquette. Carnival of Souls is that rare cult movie that truly deserves its reputation; while the film is available on home video from a number of sources thanks to its public domain status, the double-disc Criterion Collection DVD is certainly the best way to go, offering a pristine transfer that makes the most of the film's excellent camera work, and plenty of bonus features which tell you everything you might want to know about the making of Carnival of Souls, its locations, and the career of
Herk Harvey. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide