The movie “Carnival of Souls“, made 50 years ago on a shoe-string budget, still offers some good visual impressions, and has such a clean storyline that even non-horror film addicts can enjoy it.
A short resumé of the contents is:
Mary (played by Candace Hilligoss) is believed to be a drowning victim when the car in which she and her two friends were riding was forced off a bridge. But wait – Mary later rises to the surface, moves to Utah, and gets a job as a church organist. All the while, she finds herself pursued by ghoulish apparitions. Later, when the car is recovered, Mary’s body is found in the car. A chilling ghost story.
(from FilmsAndTv)
It is an accurate description of what happens. Of course the actual movie contains more embellishments to the story. Not in the form of lots of other subplots, as the only plot we are presented with is the one centred on the character Mary. Therefore, the whole movie depends on how well this character is played, and the actor Candice Hilligoss does a good job at this. She has less than half a dozen entries in her IMDB listing of films she has participated in, so one could fear that she must have been a failure as an actor, and that therefore “Carnival of Souls” is a aalso failure.
"Carnival of Souls" movie poster.
But that is not so, for a number of reasons. Hilligoss does a very decent job at portraying the main character of the story. Specifically, she avoids over-acting in this role. Looking at the history of horror films, overacting is a big temptation that it is so easy to succumb to. By exaggerating bodily movements and facial expressions, one might think that the audience will get scared — but typically it just makes the audience feel embarrassed to look at such cheap tricks of the trade. So Hilligoss turns out to be a valuable asset of this movie.
Another reason is that the story is kept rather simple. It is not extremely convoluted, and does not get lost in lots of improbable and impossible complicated situations. The external, physical side of the story is not very emphasised, compared to the psychological dimension. There are more interesting and challenging things happening in the minds of the characters than to their bodies. So, the way the story is composed also contributes to salvaging the movie from being a disaster.
Mary sees something ghostlike outside the car window
There are some supernatural components to the story, as this is an horror movie, and it concerns the dead (or is it “the undead”?) Now, as dead persons, returning to our ordinary world, are supposed to be extremely frightening and horrifying, how does a horror movie director/producer choose to portray such “people” visually? We all know what the standard solution is — look at zombie movies (and there are lots of them). The director of Carnival of Souls takes another approach. He tries to do it as simple as possible. Dead persons look a little untidy, and they may have dark rings around their eyes, but that is very much all that distinguishes them visually. And the audience thanks the director for making is so simple. Again it is worth noting that the movie tries to create an uneasy psychological environment, rather that a disgusting physical environment.
The advantages mentioned above are mainly due to the concrete production decisions made when creating this movie. But, there is an underlying factor that very strongly contributes to shaping this movie. It concerns the actual budget of the movie. The budget for making the film was very small — numbers mentioned range from $17,000 to $33,000. To get some perspective on the size of this as a production budget, we can compare it to the following:
- 1912: From the Manger to the Cross, a typical Hollywood feature, had a production cost of $ 35,000.
- 1921: the average cost of a Hollywood feature was around $60,000.
- 1928: (end of the silent era): production cost of an average Hollywood feature from major film studios ranged from $190,000 (Fox) to $275,000 (MGM).
- 1930: the production cost of an average American feature film was $375,000.
- 1940: the average production cost of an American feature was $400,000.
- 1945: average B westerns from Republic Pictures had production cost of about $50,000.
- 1950: average U.S. feature production cost was $1 million.
- 1960: average U.S. feature production cost was $2 million.
- …
- 2005: average Hollywood film cost is $60 million.
In this perspective, the budget for Carnival of Souls is minuscule — one might even say ridiculously small. If it had been ten times larger, it would have made sense to professional movie producers. But in this case, the professional movie industry was not involved. This is a case of a really independent production, financed by loans from friends, family, business contacts, etc.
So what was the impact of the small budget? The interesting consequence is that there were not enough resources to have ambitious special effects in the movie. In reality, there was not even a real make-up group or make-up person involved. Everything had to be done in the most low-cost way possible. And this is what saved the movie. It keeps closely tied to the real world, as this is the only kind of prop that was cheap to use; it was, so to speak, really “off the shelf”. And having the story evolve in the real world is what makes the viewer feel uneasy — “this looks like it could happen in my world”.
There is another similar case of budget constraints in the more recent movie history. “The Blair Witch Project” was also made with practically no budget, so had to create the frightening effects with the simplest means (like piling up a few sticks on the ground). Its production budget was $60,000 (!), but generated a gross income of $250,000,000. Pretty good earnings!
The sequel — “Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2” — did not succeed as well, which I would say depends on the fact that they got a big budget and spent it on costly production activities aimed at creating the terrifying feeling. And that destroyed the creepiness that was so characteristic of the original Blair Witch movie. The production cost was $15,000,000 and the gross income was $50,000,000.
OK, the moral is that a big budget can ruin a horror movie. And a small budget can be an advantage.
Arriving at Saltair
Well, financially speaking, Carnival of Souls was not a commercial success. It played during a short period in drive-in movie theatres and other typical B-movie establishments, and then it was taken out of circulation. For twenty years it was never seen, until it resurrected as a cult movie in the late 1980’s. It was re-evaluated, and gained a growing community of admirers. It was later released — as a restored version — on DVD by Criterion Collection in 2000.
The abandoned Saltair amusement park
One of the inspirations for the movie was the Saltair amusement establishment outside Salt Lake City, Utah. The director had by chance passed by this deserted place, and got a creepy feeling from the big construction, empty but still standing. The ending of the real story line takes place in Saltair, as the location where the dead meet the living — just like contemporary (living) visitors met the dead building.
Saltair was long deserted, of a grandiose size, and located in an empty landscape, and this made it automatically a suitable setting that felt uncomfortable for the viewers. But the movie also succeeds in using real urban settings — populated by ordinary people doing ordinary things — to create a disquieting feeling. The main way of doing this is by manipulating the sound track, making the city silent. Again, the viewer is not served a straight answer to the question: is this real silence in the city, or is it only silence in the head of Mary, the main character? Such simple solutions to a production challenge are surprisingly successful.
In the scenes that are located in the city-scape of Salt Lake City, there is a definite feeling of a semi-documentary, improvised movie, creating a very direct connection between the viewer and the scenes viewed. It is easy to see some similarities with early works by John Cassavetes, like Shadows (1959), though the intimacy of Cassavetes cannot be seen in Herk Harvey, the director of Carnival of Souls.
But it is an indication that Harvey was familiar with, and inspired by some of the nouvelle vague movements in film creation in those days.
Conclusion
Astonishingly enough, the movie has production values far exceeding expectations. It is definitely not one of the run-of-the-mill horror movies that were produced en masse in the 1950s and 1960s. So go get a copy of it, and have an enjoyable evening!
Data
“Carnival of Souls” (1962). Directed by Herk Harvey; written by John Clifford & Herk Harvey; starring Candace Hilligoss (movie at imdb)
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