Cast: Candace Hilligoss, Frances Feist, Sidney Berger, Art Ellison
So yesterday I went on a little (?) shopping spree for Singin' In the Rain (1952 - review coming soon). Best Buy, Wal-Mart, and Target must have colds or something, because I couldn't find it anywhere (don't worry, Donald! You and I will be together soon!),
Anyways, while browsing in Best Buy for SITR, I stumbled across a horror classics collection that I had passed up for a sandwich last year (I was hungry, sue me). Naturally, I had to get it (it has 50 films on it, for crying out loud, and two Dwight Frye films), and the first film I watched was Herk Harvey's Carnival of Souls.
THE PLOT: Mary Henry (Candace Hilligoss) and her friends get into a drag race with some guys (it's 1962, give them a break). During the race, the girls' car crashes into a river. Mary mysteriously survives the crash and travels to Salt Lake City to start her career as a church organist. While driving, she passes an old pavilion that she learns used to be a carnival and a dance hall. Driving further, she encounters a character she calls "The Man" (director Herk Harvey), a ghastly man in a suit and tie that looks a hell of a lot like Heath Ledger as The Joker.
Mary makes it to town and meets her landlady, Mrs. Thomas (Frances Feist). And for some odd reason, horror filmmakers feel like there has to be a type of love story, so they make Mary meet her love interest, John Linden (Sidney Berger), though she doesn't seem to be that interested in him. I'm not going to talk about that because horror movie =/= romantic comedy.
So anyways, Mary becomes obsessed with the pavilion and The Man and the other ghouls begin to appear more often. One night as she is practicing the organ in the church, her music goes from hymns to a strange, demonic melody. Her hands and feet move slowly and caress the piano as she envisions a hoard of ghouls emerging from the water to waltz to her music. As The Man reaches out for her, the minister (Art Ellison) seizes her hands and tells her that her music is sacrilege. Before you ask, I doubt he's a Mormon.
Mary keeps experiencing the strange events. Those bratty ghouls even go so far as to distort the space-time continuum, making Mary experience a world where she is unseen and unheard by anyone else. The final time she goes back to the pavilion, she experiences herself as a ghoul waltzing with The Man. At the end, the ghouls continue cornering her, eventually chasing her out of the pavilion, in probably the most humorous chase scene ever. Nothing is funnier than seeing ghouls running halfheartedly after a mortal.
Anyway, the ghouls track her down and spirit her away (means you get carried off somewhere by magic) and Dr. Samuels (Stan Levitt, the shrink that was trying to help her), the minister and the police cannot figure out what happened to her.
The final scene of the film shows Mary's body in the car with her friends being pulled out of the river. All three girls are dead. Oooooooo. The End.
THE REVIEW: Every horror movie has a cliche horror plot. In this case, it's the cliche plot about the scary, old abandoned place that everyone tells you not to go to but something keeps dragging you back. Sometimes the confusion of events in a horror movie makes it a good film. In this case, it does. It wasn't as scary as I wanted and would have liked, and that love story was not needed. I surprisingly found myself a fan of the ghouls' makeup, even though, as I mentioned, most of them looked like Heath Ledger as The Joker. 3.5 stars out of 5. Good independent B&W early 60's horror.
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