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ON THIS DAY IN HORROR - September 26th

"CARNIVAL OF SOULS" released in 1962

After a traumatic accident, organist Mary Henry (Candace Hilligoss) retreats to Utah and becomes drawn to a mysterious abandoned carnival on the shores of the Great Salt Lake, in Herk Harvey's cult classic, Carnival of Souls!

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Accepting the challenge to drag race against some men in another car, Mary Henry (Hilligoss) loses control while crossing a narrow bridge and plunges her car into the river. Although the police spend three hours dragging the murky, fast-running water without success, Mary later miraculously surfaces, but she cannot remember how she survived. Grieving for the loss of her two girlfriends who were also in the car, Mary retreats to Utah to take up the position of the church organist. Along the way she passes a large, abandoned pavilion sitting all by itself on the shores of the Great Salt Lake, which at a gas station later, the attendant tells her the pavilion was first a bathhouse, then a dance hall, and finally a carnival before shutting down. Shortly thereafter, while she is speeding along a deserted stretch of road, a ghoulish, pasty-faced figure replaces her reflection in the passenger window and stares at her. A split second later, The Man (Herk Harvey) suddenly appears in front of the car, forcing Mary to swerve off the road. Shaken, Mary finally arrives in town, Mary rents a room from Mrs. Thomas (Frances Feist) and meets the only other lodger John Linden (Sidney Berger). That night, she becomes upset when she sees The Man downstairs in the large house and retreats to her room. Mary questions Mrs. Thomas when she comes upstairs to bring Mary her dinner, but claims says she did not pass anyone. Over the next few days, Mary's experiences become more frequent and terrifying; her new employer, the Minister (Art Ellison) fires her after hearing her play "profane" music on the church organ that Mary does not remember playing, Mary starts to suffer interludes when she becomes invisible and inaudible to the rest of the world, and appearances of the Man become more and more frequent. Terrified of being alone, Mary agrees to go out on a date with Linden (although she has no romantic feelings for him), Mary later becomes upset when she sees the Man's reflection in her mirror and tries to tell Linden what has been happening to her. Linden leaves, believing she is losing her mind, and Mary finally turns to a kindly physician Dr. Samuels (Stan Levitt), where she slowly begins to realize she can't simply outrun the spirits plaguing her and in the end resolves to face them at the strange pavilion, that seems to almost beckon to her in the twilight!

Mary Henry: It's funny... the world is so different in the daylight. In the dark, your fantasies get so out of hand. But in the daylight everything falls back into place again.

Top and Above:   Mary Henry (Candace Hilligoss) miraculously survives a car crash

It was while working as a director and producer of industrial and educational films for the Centron Corporation, Herk Harvey first conceived the idea for Carnival of Souls while driving past the abandoned Saltair Pavilion in Salt Lake City, Utah (at the time he was returning to Kansas after shooting a Centron film in California). Harvey enlisted his friend, and co-writer, John Clifford to assist with the screenplay and raised the budget over a single weekend by Harvey asking local Kansas businessmen if they were willing to invest $500 apeice in Harvey's production. Starting with an initial production budget of $17,000, Harvey later deferred the remaining $13,000 of the total $30,000 budget, with he and Clifford both waiving any fees. Hiring an unknown actress, Lee Strasberg-trained Candace Hilligoss (in her film debut), the rest of the supporting cast of the film was made up of local actors from the Lawrence, Kansas area, where much of the film was shot.

Filmed in only three weeks on location in Salt Lake City, Utah, and in Lawrence, Kansas (with some interior shots at the Centron Studios in Lawrence and the shots of the 'ghouls' rising from the Salt Lake being filmed in an apartment building's swimming pool!), Harvey's entire crew consisted of only five other people besides himself, and all of them Centron employees. The bridge used in the opening of the film, the Lecompton Bridge (named after the nearby town of Lecompton, KS), was offered to Harvey at no cost, only requiring the film crew to replace the bridge's damaged rails once they were done filming - at a princely cost of $17. According to star Candace Hilligoss, the river water she was submerged in for the film's finale was frigidly cold, but she had to be placed in the water for several hours to get the final shots. In fact, one of the actresses lying next to Hilligoss can be seen trembling from the cold water in the final cut.

Mary Henry: I don't belong in the world.

Top:    Arriving in Utah, Mary meets with a kindly doctor, Dr Samuels (Stan Levitt);

Above:   She also attracts the unwanted attention of fellow lodger, John Linden (Sidney Berger)

Harvey employed techniques he had learned in his work on industrial films in order to limit production costs; not having enough money for a process screen to create a rear projection effect, which was the method typically used at that time to create the impression that a scene was taking place inside a moving car,  Harvey instead used a battery-powered hand-held Arriflex camera to film the shots inside moving cars, removing the need for compositing. The Arriflex, which was at that time more often used by cameramen filming newsreel footage, also allowed them to use a moving camera in other scenes without the need for gear like dollies or cranes. For the finale where Mary encounters the Man and the Ghouls, the Salt Lake City Chamber of Commerce charged Harvey $50 for the one-week shoot at the ruined Saltair Pavilion, with the dancers seen at the end coming from the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. Unfortunately, the Saltair that appears in the film actually burned down in the early '70s. In the early '80s another version of Saltair was rebuilt, although it was a much smaller design, but Shortly after it was built, the Great Salt Lake rose and flooded it out. In 1993, the building was remodeled and reopened, now it's mainly used as a small venue for musical acts.

As a running visual motif, portions of the movie were tinted in a manner similar to silent films - whenever Mary is in one of her altered mental states, the picture has a faint cyan tint, while all the "real" scenes are in pure black-and-white. Later in the film, the tinted segments also have distorted sound and picture. According to director Harvey, one reel of footage for the film was unfortunately ruined during processing. Harvey said it was a long series of shots that was suppose to take place just before Mary sees the "souls" dancing in the ballroom. In the shots the ghouls were supposed to slowly appear from behind the rotting dock pylons out on the salt flats and slowly walk across the prairie to the ballroom, where they would begin to dance. Sadly, the footage was overexposed during the processing and couldn't be included in the film.

TRIVIA:   At the "Carnival of Souls" 1989 reunion, director Herk Harvey wore the ghoul makeup that he wore in the film for interviews.

Top:   Mary continuously encounters a ghoulish figure The Man (Herk Henry);

Above:   Mary tries to flee town, but finds herself on a busload of ghouls!

Cut down from it's original 84 minutes to 75 minutes to accommodate more showings at the drive-in theaters, Carnival of Souls was a commercial failure on its release. In fact, star Candace Hilligoss' agent refused to represent her any further after seeing this film. While the US release of Carnival of Souls failed to include a copyright on the prints, automatically placing them in the public domain, the foreign release marketed by Walter Manley did contain a copyright card and was protected for overseas sales. After it's initial theatrical run, 16mm television copies were broadcast on WOR in New York City during its late night timeslot throughout the sixties. Its subsequent airings on late night television helped to gain it a strong cult following and today it is regarded as a landmark in psychological horror! Leonard Maltin gave Carnival of Souls 2 1/2 out of 4 stars, calling the film an "eerie" and "imaginative low budget effort." Roger Ebert awarded the film 3 stars out of four, stating, "Unlike most of today's horror movies, Carnival of Souls has few special effects – some wavy lines as we pass through various levels of existence, and that's it. Instead, it depends on crisp black-and-white photography, atmosphere and surprisingly effective acting".

In the late 1980s, Candace Hilligoss wrote a treatment for a sequel to Carnival of Souls and took it to associate Peter Soby Jr., who instead decided to produce a remake of the original film. Hilligoss had no part in the later production, feeling the filmmakers of the remake had shown disrespect to her in initiating the film without consulting her or considering her treatment. After negotiations with Harvey and Clifford concluded, the remake was directed by Adam Grossman and Ian Kessner and starred Bobbie Phillips in role of the haunted heroine Alex Grant. The remake would have very little in common with the 1962 film, borrowing little more than the revelation at the end, and was marketed as Wes Craven Presents Carnival of Souls. The new film received negative appraisals from most reviewers and did not manage to secure theatrical release, going direct-to-video. The original film resurfaced again in 1989 when it was fully restored and given a more proper release in New York. But the end result of the re-release - at least for the original filmmakers, Harvey and Clifford - was the same as the original release; with no money returning to them and no new film projects forthcoming as result. Sadly, Carnival of Souls would be the the only feature film that director and producer Herk Harvey ever worked on.

ROTTEN TOMATOES SCORE:   84%

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