Screen Picks

by Sam Adams

Carnival of Souls ($39.95 DVD) One of your more insane B-grade horror movies, Carnival of Souls is vintage 1962, a roughshod, often amateurish spook story set in Salt Lake and filmed mainly in Lawrence, KS. Shot by industrial filmmaker Harold "Herk" Harvey (who, believe it or not, came up around the same time in around the same place as Robert Altman), the film has little structure to speak of — a brief prologue and then a rush to the inevitable end — and the transitions between scenes sometimes happen in the middle of a line, as if the negative were cut with a pair of garden shears. Still, Carnival is as scary as a motherfuck, mainly because of the awesomely creepy apparition that haunts Mary Henry (Candace Hilligoss) after she is the only survivor of a drag racing accident which sends a car plummeting into the river. Played by Harvey himself, the apparition (known only as "the man") first shows up as a reflection in Mary’s car window: Pale, gaunt, with black-circled eyes, black lips and caked white hair, he’d call Grandpa Munster to mind if he weren’t the very image of death. (George Romero admitted he stole the look for the zombies in Night of the Living Dead from Carnival.) Though Harvey and screenwriter John Clifford failed miserably in their attempt to emulate Bergman and Cocteau (thank God!), Carnival, once a midnight movie favorite, is unsettling in the way that only bad movies can be: At a certain pitch, amateurishness verges on dislocation, and the film’s feverish intensity hits you like a blunt stick. The Criterion Collection’s two-disc edition is almost absurdly embellished: not only the 78-minute theatrical cut and 83-minute director’s cut, but a half-hour featurette on the 1989 reunion of the cast and crew (shot for Lawrence TV news, and thus amateurishly unsettling in its own right); a tour of the movie’s locations by the same awkward talking TV-head; 45 minutes of silent outtakes accompanied by Gene Moore’s shrilly monstrous organ score; audio commentary by Harvey and Clifford; print interviews with the principals; even an hour of excerpts from industrial films made by Clifford and Harvey for Lawrence’s Centron Corporation. What were they thinking? Who could possibly want this much information? Don’t ask. Just revel in the sheer excess of it all, and give thanks that someone thought to preserve the movie at all.