Film Fatale: Carnival of Souls and Lamenting and Anxiety in the American Midwest
Wasted potential is a terrible, terrible thing. Especially when the talented director, Herk Harvey, with hundreds of ideas brimming under the surface of his independently funded B-movie, makes one film and one film only. The enigmatic leading actress in the film, Candace Hilligoss, retires from the spotlight with only two films under her belt, and the screenwriter of the film, John Clifford spent the rest of his career writing documentary films rather than subversive, experimental horror. A cursed production maybe?
Carnival of Souls (1962) is a spooky, Southern Gothic (Midwest Gothic technically) inspired film with a foreboding atmosphere and a psychedelic, carnival influenced organ score. Mary Henry, played by Hilligoss, is a young church organist in a small Kansas town survives a bizarre drag race accident with a Faster Pussycat Kill Kill! (1965) vibe, and then agrees to take a job in Salt Lake City in an attempt to distance herself from the accident which has clearly shaken up her mental state. As she leaves a country bumpkin mentions to her;
“Good luck, Mary. Stop by and see us the next time you're in.”
Mary replies with a fluoride stare deadpan gaze
“Thank you... but I'm never coming back.”
___STEADY_PAYWALL___
She is skipping town and wants nothing to do with her past life. This is a Hitchcock film directed by David Lynch. A gorgeous, icy, cold blonde who can’t relate to most of humanity, quaint and simple small town folk, a foreboding atmosphere, a haunted abandoned fairground pavilion and a strange apparition with ghoulish makeup that nobody but Mary can see. The apparition compels her toward an abandoned lakeside pavilion. She’s drawn to the promenade but she’s not sure why. She knows deep down she needs to look further to find the truth in the hope that it’ll sate the emptiness she feels in her soul.
But nobody in the film understands Mary. From the overly friendly boarding house owner to the co-worker priest to one creepy man who won’t stop pestering her, everyone is obtuse to Mary’s anxiety and depression. Mary is seemingly trapped in a waking nightmare and spirals deeper and deeper into her anxiety as she’s too straight laced to confide in these well-meaning strangers.
“I have no desire for the close company of people,” she notes.
Mary is shutting it all out, shutting down and going full self destructive sigma female mode.
The film depicts anxiety and depersonalization in such an relatable way for a film made in the 60s. Like Carol in Todd Haynes Safe (1995) who’s completely ignored by the world around her when she speaks out about her anxiety, or Mad Men’s Betty Draper crashing her car because her hands stop working, Mary experiences the same, female specific, disassociation. Suddenly stopping her organ playing to gaze out the window, unable to get her words out in public, questioning why nobody can hear her, existing out of her body for moments at a time. A literal Woman on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. The episodes get more and more frequent as the film progresses and Mary feels completely insane and misunderstood. Mary yells into the void:
“Why Can’t Anybody Hear me!”
The film reflects real life too: Director Harvey took a restrained, classically trained New York actress and dropped her in the middle of nowhere with a bunch of well-intended yet unsophisticated Midwestern actors. This personal loneliness for Hilligoss heightens the sense of the main character’s extreme alienation in the film. Life imitates art!
Completely self-funded, shot in Kansas and Salt Lake City on a budget of $33,000, director Harvey employed various guerrilla filmmaking techniques to finish the production including paying off the locals to let him film on location. The DIY aspect of the film is what makes it shine. Sequences have French New Wave vibes where Mary manically runs through the streets of Salt Lake City, there’s shaky handheld camera shots that feel straight out of a John Cassavetes film and the makeup of the creepy man stalking Mary has the feel of a silent German expressionist film. It’s giving The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920). Roger Ebert accurately described the film as a “Lost episode from ‘Twilight Zone’, it places the supernatural right in the middle of everyday life and surrounds it with ordinary people.”
The naive approach to filmmaking and the hashing together of multiple influences and references give the film a completely unique cinematic experience. Every shot is so unique and the atmosphere created is unparalleled. The wind whistles over the haunting church organ score and Mary’s anxiety builds and builds. The film feels alive, electric and tense. Overstimulated - just like a real anxiety attack. Pure lightning in a bottle. The filmmakers had absolutely no idea what they were doing, throwing multiple references at the wall and hoping that something stuck, and yet they managed to create something spooky, special and completely unique that would influence many for years to come and then just abandoned it all. A mic drop of a film. How beautiful is that?
The popularity of the film can be traced back to several directors, including Lynch, naming it as a huge influence on their work. You can feel Twin Peaks hiding in the rotting rafters of Carnival of Souls. A once forgotten film has been re-released and included in the Criterion collection. It’s also free to watch on YouTube. Thank god that this truly unique slice of cinema has been preserved and remained within the public domain. The endless motivation the film provided for other directors is unparalleled, but the films influence lives on as inspiration for other mediums too. Phoebe Bridgers was inspired by the intense makeup look in the music video for Smoke Signals and Lana del Rey sampled dialogue from the film in her song, 13 Beaches;
“I don't belong in the world, that's what it is
Something separates me from other people
Everywhere I turn, there's something blocking my escape”
Carnival of Souls wasn’t made by the girlies, but it is evident that it is for the girlies. Female anxiety, lamenting and a hopelessness with life are all represented. Carnival of Souls is a film for the women who feel fed up; the girlbloggers, the My Year of Rest and Relaxation fans. It would be amusing that this weird slice of almost forgotten cinema can still speak to the women of today, if it wasn’t so frustrating that these feelings have been haunting us for decades.
Words: Eden Young
