Carnival of Souls (1962): The Horror of What Lies Beneath

Credit: Harcourt Productions. Distributed by Herts-Lion International Corp.

Carnival of Souls (1962) is a film with style—miles and miles of it. Director Herk Harvey intended it to have the look of Bergman and the feel of Cocteau, and he succeeded admirably. It’s easy to see why it has been an influence on filmmakers like David Lynch and George Romero.

While Carnival of Soul’s masterful expressionistic style is much of its appeal, the film has sufficient depth to have led to considerable commentary—both academic and popular. As I see it, that commentary fails as much as it succeeds, and that is its success.

Plot

Carnival of Souls doesn’t give us much time with Mary Henry (Candace Hilligoss) before she is shown crashing off a bridge during a drag race. Mysteriously, while the other passengers die in the crash, Mary surfaces out of the water unharmed and unruffled. From there, the film picks up a few weeks later as Mary, a professional organ player, moves to Salt Lake City, where she has a job lined up playing organ for a church. She takes a room in a boardinghouse and resists the pushy advances of her sleazy neighbor, John Linden (Sidney Berger). As she adjusts to life in her new city, she begins having strange visions of a ghoulish man (played by Harvey himself) following her. She occasionally becomes invisible and experiences a bewildering, powerful attraction to a deserted pavilion. By the film’s end, it is revealed that she had in fact died in the car accident, and the final scene is of her in the car with the other drowning victims.

Carnival of Souls has a lot of weird quirks. Even by the standards of dated gender norms, the other boarder, John, is particularly dishonest and creepy. At one point, Mary has an episode in a park that leads a doctor (Stan Levitt) who happens to be passing by to treat her with therapy despite acknowledging he’s not a psychiatrist. At the end of the film, for some strange reason, the local sheriff thinks to call that doctor, as well as the priest who had previously employed her, to join him in investigating Mary’s disappearance.

Credit: Harcourt Productions. Distributed by Herts-Lion International Corp.

Interpretations

Carnival of Souls has spawned a respectable little literature for an obscure B-movie that flopped on its initial release. I remember once reading the crack somewhere or other that Shakespeare’s work has been so heavily mined by other writers that soon all that will be left unpilfered are the punctuation marks. Carnival of Souls gives a similar impression of having been milked for everything it can give.

For example, a convincing thread of literature addresses Mary as struggling with the stifling conformity of her era. In that spirit, some have provided a queer reading of the film. Psychoanalysis has been a useful register for commentators in this camp, and some have offered striking Freudian and Jungian readings, drawing occasionally on Julia Kristeva’s discussion of abjection to illuminate the terms of Mary’s gendered experience. Similarly, the centrality of the (male) gazeturns up in a number of readings.

Interestingly, some readings have treated Carnival of Souls as a road film and addressed its handling of car culture, sometimes treating the film as a vehicle for addressing broader societal discomfort around auto deaths and others zeroing in on Mary’s road trip as itself indicating cultural anxieties regarding changing gender norms by unwittingly expressing bias aimed at “women drivers.”

Carnival of Souls traffics heavily in religious imagery, and of course, Mary’s experience as a type of zombie has led to purgatory being a central theme in the secondary literature. In that regard, I had expected to see more direct comparisons between Carnival of Souls and Jacob’s Ladder (1990), which covers similar thematic territory while reaching a seemingly less bleak conclusion.

Wrapping up our whirlwind tour, some viewers have seen the film as a metaphor for the psychology of trauma. Other accounts have focused on the centrality of organ music. Still others have paid particular attention to the carnival itself by drawing on figures like Bakhtin when accounting for the fact that the pavilion is a former carnival site and that the film culminates with something of a dance celebration (carnival) of the dead.

Credit: Harcourt Productions. Distributed by Herts-Lion International Corp.

The Student Eyeroll and The Horror of What Lies Beneath

I’m sure there are more readings out there, but those are what stood out to me as the primary threads in the literature. Many focus on my pet themes and fixations, and I had expected to riff like crazy on Carnival of Souls—a film I adore and could watch time and again.

But I couldn’t find my way into this territory. Somewhat hilariously, it was an undergrad’s dismissive blog post from 2012 that triggered my thinking. The author of the post, Christine Sellin, asks: “Does this film [Carnival of Souls] really provide intelligent commentary on societal issues (particularly feminine) of the 1960s, or is it less than what we make it out to be?”

The psychology of the teacher-student relationship leaves the eyeroll one of the student’s main self-defense weapons. Sometimes it’s used well, and sometimes it’s not. In this case, Sellin has used it to good effect. One of the more indulgent forms the student eyeroll can take is the genre of term paper that either overtheorizes a pet interest or shoehorns a pet interest into a discussion of unamenable material.

To me, some of the literature on Carnival of Souls might have a little bit of that going on. I don’t say that to disparage the literature, however. Somewhat puzzlingly, it’s a testament to its applicability. As I see it, both psychologically and epistemologically, what this failure indicates is our attempt to scratch at the horror felt in response to the invisible below the visible—or the invisible that makes possible the visible.

In a psychoanalytic sense, you could see this as horror regarding particular psychological impulses that are below the surface just as much as the fact that it’s creepy that we are creatures with submerged psychological impulses in the first place. It feels weird when we sense both the darkness of the impulses themselves and the more foundational fact of things being obscured.

In a broader epistemological sense, some element of obscured or curtailed view is necessary for our perceptual faculties to work—we can’t perceive everything at all times, and there has to be that which we don’t directly perceive for there to be that which we do. It’s eerie when these things peak through and we find ourselves thinking of the element of the world that inevitably goes unseen. This is doubly true when those things themselves are disturbing.

Like much of David Lynch’s best work, Carnival of Souls hints at the inevitable darkness that lurks below the world of appearance. We intuit it on the edges of our experience. It’s weird and frightening and can lead us to pin whatever we can on it to make sense of it.

Proust said that putting an idea in fiction is gauche in a way akin to leaving the price tag on an item. But there are autochthonous ideas in every work. The text’s plot is an idea. Its style is an idea.

Indeed, its style is an idea, and Carnival of Souls is a film with style—miles and miles of it. And we feel that style tighten around our throats when we squint to see the invisible below the visible.

Selected Bibliography

Brown, J. (2010). Carnival of Souls and the organs of horror. In N. Lerner (Ed.), Music in the Horror Film: Listening to Fear. Routledge.

Monteyne, K. (2018). From the question of soul of a carnival of souls. Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, 58(1), 24-46.

Murphy, Bernice M. (2017). “‘Wheels of Tragedy’: Death on the Highways in Carnival of Souls (1962) and the Highway Safety Film”. FORUM: University of Edinburgh Postgraduate Journal of Culture & The Arts, no. 24 (May). https://doi.org/10.2218/forum.24.187

Olson, C. (9 December 2013) Carnival of Souls and emergent feminism in the early half of the sexual revolution. Seems Obvious to Me: Adventures in Pop Culture Studies. https://seemsobvioustome.wordpress.com/2013/12/09/carnival-of-souls-and-emergent-feminism-in-the-early-half-of-the-sexual-revolution/

Riley, J. (2007). Have you no respect? Do you feel no reverence?’: Narrative and Critical Subversion in Herk Harvey’s Carnival of Souls. In M. Goodall, J. Good, and W. Godfrey (Eds.), Crash Cinema: Representation in Film. Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Shaffer, B. (2024). Carnival of Souls as seen by its creators. In L. Broughton (Ed.), Reappraising Cult Horror Films: From Carnival of Souls to Last Night in Soho. Bloomsbury.