7 Days of Halloween: Carnival of Souls

"Carnival of Souls" is a horror film with the same production DNA as "The Naked Kiss" from 1964, which was released two years after this Herk Harvey eerie independent horror film. Eerie is a word I worried I would use often in this review, and I can't be blamed: an eerie vibe is constituted throughout the entire film. The opening sequence features a car crash off a bridge and the search for survivors as Gene Moore's constant carnival music from an organ plays in the background. Eerie indeed, but good? I'm not so sure.

"They may never find that car," a man mutters shortly after the accident. Two once-rowdy boys are misleading the police about the cause of the accident; they insist they had nothing to do with it, though we've seen how untrue this really is. Suddenly a woman stumbles about completely shell shocked, but her female companions are nowhere to be found. From here there's no in between; the very next scene involves our survivor, Mary (played by Candace Hilligoss) driving through the night.

"Carnival of Souls" is not the first horror film to be created on a low budget, but it is one that was more or less successful in creating some thrills with such limited money. Last month, on an episode of NPR's "Planet Money" (titled "The Scariest Thing in Hollywood"), the show discussed the somewhat recent phenomenon of funding low-budget horror films (like "Paranormal Activity" and "Insidious") and making huge profits. It's a fairly economical way of looking at movie-making. Director, producer, and writer Herk Harvey, who also appears as the haunting ghoul identified in the credits as "The Man" (I prefer "the Man Who Smiles"), probably did not view "Carnival of Souls" this way, but he could be seen as the godfather of this modern day horror trend, as many American horror films were seen more as silly fun than scarefests back in the 1960s.

If you haven't been to any abandoned and/or haunted park, believe me, they are undeniably spectral, or at least the one that I visited five years ago was. After touring the wonderfully green tea fields of sunny Boseong, I met up with a pal in sunny Busan, the coastal port city in the southern part of South Korea, where we stayed at a youth hostel and woke up to have fish head soup for breakfast before going our separate ways. I took a ferry to the nearby Geoje Island, where I spent the sunny afternoon touring a former camp that housed prisoners during the Korean War. The sun, though, slowly vanished as I made up my way to the forbidden Okpo Land, a low-key abandoned amusement park on the hill where two young girls were killed in the 1990s. The owner disappeared, and the park shut down overnight. I went there in 2010; apparently, a year later, the park was demolished.

Okpo Land might be unsettling, but it has nothing on the utterly abnormal and dilapidated look of the park or carnival Mary sees often in town. The law has forbidden anyone from entering it. The minister at the church where she plays the organ agrees to take her to see it but advises her from entering it. Park or no park, Mary begins to see strange things, like the man who periodically pops up with a grin that could give the Joker a run for his money. A doctor tells her it's all in her head, and so logically this persuades her to go to the maybe-haunted-maybe-not pavilion. As she goes on her own self-guided tour, objects in the park start moving on their own. (Seeing all these faces and flying objects take a long time to really have any effect on Mary.) She later somehow becomes possessed and starts playing a demonic-sounding tune on her organ, summoning the spirits.

The scary stuff here to me is not the shadows or even the Man Who Smiles; it's instead the same elements that have been the scariest parts of movies since the beginning: characters who see things and they're not sure if it's mental illness or not. One way or the other, Mary's peers aren't providing much help. Sometimes no one can see or hear her, and at one point she (in the film's creepiest scene) enters a bus filled with these ghouls, all trying to get her.

This is a movie that hasn't dated as well as "Night of the Living Dead," released six years later, but that doesn't mean its production is bad, per se. But the poor acting and lame screenplay undoubtedly hurt "Carnival of Souls." It's a film that likely was petrifying in 1962, and I think I would have enjoyed it very much back then. Now, not so much. Certainly it has effective makeup and sound effects, and the score augments the thrill. I can appreciate it for what it was back then, but I can also say that you'd be more entertained watching "Night of the Living Dead."