‘CARNIVAL OF SOULS’

As I’m going to be cavalier with PLOT SPOILERS here I’m just going to assume this classic horror film doesn’t need much introduction from me. Besides, it’s become public domain so can be watched on-line by anyone who has a mind to. Here’s the edited highlights… 1962… American independent feature… produced not so much quickly as guerrilla style… no success even as a B feature… director, producer and co-writer Herk Harvey consequently never made another feature… later became cult classic… powerful cinematography… eerie and atmospheric… all of that.

Clearly this is not a film that’s about its plot or even its themes, they’re really just a means by which it might evoke its creepy atmosphere. Something that’s very often true of good films, which will create their own world rather than mimic an existing one, but more true of a film like this. Its mood haunts you as much as it does its chief character. However, as a holder for that mood it does create a mystery.

And there’s a predominant theory for deciphering it. The majority of the film is a dream sequence that, in a pre-echo of ’Inception’, plays outside of clock time, between the crashing car hurtling off the bridge and hitting the water. Which is why we return to the bodies in the car at the end, after the character Mary had initially seemed to somehow escape.

Seen this way the menacing Man who Mary keeps seeing (above) is Death. Self-described as “a person of strong will”, she attempts to impose her own death-defying narrative where she not only defies the crash but starts a new life in a new town. Death, inevitably enough, catches up with her. While, already touched by death, she can’t make any real contact with the living.

And there’s certainly arguments for this. She’s horrified by and runs from him. Yet at the same time she’s drawn to the liminal space of the lakeside Pavilion. At one point at a bus station she can hear nothing save for a distorted tannoy announcement that a bus is leaving. She boards it, to find it full of ghouls welcoming her aboard. In the well-known climactic ballroom scene, the ghouls dance in couples while the Man stretches out his hand to her - as if this is the company in which she belongs. Even as she runs from Death she’s drawn to him, in a sublimated death drive.

There’s also the recurrence of both water and the spectral, swirling organ music. In fact the film seems to associate the two - we first hear that music as the camera moves into close-ups of the river. In Freudian psychology, often beloved of horror films, both bridges and water occupy a liminal space between life and death.

And if there’s two hallucinatory scenes within the main film they’re normally regarded as, in a further pre-echo of ’Inception’, a dream within a dream. (At least one isn’t actually a dream, but that’s how they’re commonly referred to.)

All of which is laid out with rather witless literalism by the poster tagline “she was a stranger among the living” (above). Later reissues came complete with “is there death after life?” and “she escaped death, now it wants her back.” Though all this telegraphing may well not be Harvey’s intent. Distribution rights soon fell outside his control. And with at least one poster which went for the absurdly salacious (below), it seems reasonable not to take them as authorial statements.

But…

‘Invaders From Mars’ (1953) is another American independent production built around a film-long dream sequence. But it’s noted for the “dreamlike Surrealism” of its design. While the majority of ’Carnival Of Souls’ is set in an ostensibly ‘real world’. (Filmed on location in Lawrence, Kansas and Salt Late City.)

For example, the petrol pump attendant who describes the Pavilion to her is assigned the horror movie role of the Harbinger. But his description is simply informative. (And remarkably close to the actual history of the place.)

If the film’s conceit is that this is all a dream or hallucination Mary’s having, which we get to experience, then to include scenes she’s not present in is a strange decision. Admittedly there aren’t many of these, but they occur. In one, almost at the finale, her final footprints are traced by a cop. The ghouls pursuing her, being spectral things, have left no marks - while hers just end, as she’s taken. Which ‘makes sense’, within the narrative logic of horror films, of what’s just happened. Which would be a peculiar scene to insert if Mary was imagining the whole thing, Pavilion setting and all, from inside a car currently striking a lake.

And more importantly, if the main part of the film is a dream sequence, why are the dreams-within-a-dream so distinct from it? They’re as ‘dreamy’, as disruptive of narrative rules, as it is naturalised.

In a famous quote Mary says “I don't belong in the world - that's what it is. Something separates me from other people.” And she’s often shown literally shutting people out, from her room in the boarding house or locking her car doors. You could picture a scenario where she seemingly escapes the crash, yet is heartbreakingly invisible to her friends and family. But that’s not the film we see.

The “something” that separates seems there from the beginning. The film starts with another girl driving the car she’s in, eagerly accepting the boys’ challenge to a race. Yet when we cut to Mary she looks at first detached and then apprehensive.

Her work as a church organist is partly devised to mark her out as alongside but not part of the congregation, turning down a social invitation to meet them. Yet she seems to have the job lined up before the accident, and travels off to it very shortly afterwards. And another character confirms: “She’s always kept pretty much to herself.”

And if it’s not death that prevents her from belonging, that would seem to work better the other way around - it’s this detachment from life which pushes her towards death.

Seen this way, the Man isn’t death so much as… well, man. There’s times he just appears, at the car window or in the boarding house hallway. But he will also displace, and be displaced by, other male characters. This includes, in a bit of a cheesy shock, the Psychiatrist in his office. But she also imagines the Man’s hands grabbing hers over the organ, which then transform into the priest’s. (A moment captured on the film poster.)

Look again at the opening. Boy racing is a staple of films from this era. But they will almost always involve girls as passengers, choruses to the action. Here a car of boys races a car of girls, which more accurately sums up the teen years when the two sexes start to take a sideways interest in one another.

Which seems to conflate the near-universal wish for a place in the world with the desire for a man. Mary claims to have no such desires, and with her work as a musician seems set on financial independence.

This was a time when ‘nice girls’ were supposed to have no sexual yearnings of their own. Yet at the same time a rejection of male desire was medicalised as ‘frigidity’. Which seems something of a Catch 22.

The film would make an interesting compare and contrast to Polanski’s ’Repulsion’ (1965). Which creates a paradox. We watch a woman succumbing to hysteria, where the more she cracks the more thrilling the film becomes, her hysteria equalling our enjoyment. Yet in both films we don’t just take on the protagonist’s perspective, we see the world quite literally through her eyes. (Apart from Mary, it’s only us who see the Man.) So both films are structured in such a way as to invite sympathy for her.

Take for example Mr. Linden (above), who literally sticks his foot in her door and continually tries to ply her with drink, is clearly presented as a louche, predatory creep. It’s not our seeing him that way with hindsight. Yet, rather than responding like a smalltown innocent, Mary’s immediate response is to keep trouble at bay. This is shown less as ‘frigidity’ and more as levelheadedness. She does consent to go out somewhere with him, but that’s an indication that she’s so desperate for human company that even he’ll do. Any louse in a storm.

So despite the archetypal hysterics perhaps we could see her as a pre-feminist heroine. The impossibility of her situation becomes a microcosm of a woman’s place in this era. Alone in a man’s world, effectively deprived of solidarity from other women, she inevitably cracks under the pressure. Yet, a person of strong will, she goes down fighting. Which would be a tempting line to take. It would mean that, while the film may trade in sexist tropes, it also challenges them.

However, there’s multiple problems with this. First, Mr. Linden seems more a detail of the film than a component. It would be relatively easy to edit him out without leaving much of a hole. (One reason he may loom larger in the film than he might is that Sidney Berger’s smarmy, hyperactive portrayal is so effective in a film where wooden acting’s the norm.)

More interestingly, he’s very much the exception to a rule. While almost all the other men in the film are presented as reiterations of a type - someone older and not just unthreatening but relatively kindly. The Man therefore becomes something like their id figures. In short, the Man’s not just the Man, he’s the anti-Father.

There’s one passing suggestion she sees “her folks” before she leaves for the city, to which she gives the evasive reply “No, I can't. I.. I must hurry. I've got to leave.” Partially of course this refers to the classic fool’s errand of trying to outrun death. But why bring her folks into it at all?

That evasion, what if it hints at child abuse? This may sound like a lot of narrative weight to load onto what’s essentially an ellipse, but given the censorship rules at the time its something which could only be referred to obliquely.

Young victims can sometimes form a bifurcated view in which the providing parent and malevolent abuser are conceived as two separate people. Which would perfectly fit the succession of kindly father figures and their recurring ghoul-like shadow. Though, rather than retreat into ‘frigidity’, the abuse victim will more typically fall to the other extreme, failing to maintain non-sexual relationships. However, ‘frigidity’ does more match movie psychology - it takes well to the screen, doesn’t risk censorship and seems more sympathetic.

So is the film really about a woman’s mind trying, and inevitably failing, to rationalise child abuse? Has the real horror happened before the film starts, and Mary’s hallucinations manifest as some kind of post-traumatic stress disorder?

Perhaps. But when rival interpretations of an artwork prove persuasive our first question should be whether they really need to be seen as rivals, whether we have to choose between them. Is the Man Death, Man or Anti-Father? Maybe the best answer there is yes.