The \u201cCarnival of Souls\u201d is a low budget horror movie that consists of the life of a woman named Mary Henry after she is in a car accident.\u00a0 She and two other women crash their car off a bridge into a river.\u00a0 The car disappears into the muddy river and is given up for lost but after three hours Mary Henry crawls out of the water and claims that she has no memory of the crash or her escape.\u00a0 She decides to take a job out of state as a church organist in a town next to the Great Salt Lake in Utah.\u00a0 Along the way she is haunted by the apparition of a man who looks like the animated corpse of a drowning victim.\u00a0 She is strangely attracted to an abandoned pavilion on the lakefront that had served as a carnival at one point.\u00a0 Her interactions with her minister employer, her landlady and the neighbor who attempts to interest her romantically are awkward and extremely detached on her part.\u00a0 And several times during her first few days in the new town she suddenly finds herself detached from the world around her.\u00a0 Specifically, no one seems able to see or hear her.\u00a0 Also, she cannot hear any sounds from her surroundings.\u00a0 Eventually she starts seeing visions of dead people rising out of the lake and dancing in the pavilion.\u00a0 These visions cause her to lose her job when the minister senses her morbid soul in her organ music.\u00a0 She turns to the young neighbor to try and ground her in reality but even his clumsy advances cannot spark any strong response from her.\u00a0 Eventually she is drawn to the pavilion and the drowned dead.\u00a0 She watches them dancing in the pavilion ballroom and finally they come so close to her that she panics and runs away.\u00a0 But they chase her onto the beach and finally catch her when she stumbles on the sand.\u00a0 They surround her and the scene changes to the next morning where a search party including the minister and a policeman look at some footprints on the sand and nothing more.\u00a0 She has completely vanished leaving just her car.\u00a0 In the next scene we are back in her home town and the crashed car has finally been located in the river and the bodies of the two women and Mary Henry are all in the car (and strangely not decomposed after all the time under water). \u00a0The End.<\/p>\n
There are a lot of things wrong with this movie.\u00a0 It was made on a very low budget without professional actors and it shows.\u00a0 I guess it would be called cinema verit\u00e9.\u00a0 But the amateurish quality of the cinematography and the flat recital of the lines makes you wonder why you would watch such a cheesy offering.\u00a0 But the nature of the scene at the end of the movie with the dance of the drowned corpses is the very essence of horror.\u00a0 It is almost iconic and I think it has inspired some later works that are recognized as successful, specifically I think the haunted house in Stephen King\u2019s \u201cThe Shining\u201d owes something to this movie.\u00a0 And there is at least one episode of the Twilight Zone that seems to borrow heavily from this story.<\/p>\n
So, there you have it.\u00a0 This is a cheesy amateurish film from 1962 that also contains an image that I think is authentically evocative of what we call horror in film.\u00a0 You\u2019ll have to decide if that makes it worth seeing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The \u201cCarnival of Souls\u201d is a low budget horror movie that consists of the life of a woman named Mary Henry after she is in<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[239,237,4,243],"tags":[200,354,38,1355,375],"class_list":["post-16379","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie-reviews","category-reviews","category-sff","category-sff-movie-reviews","tag-fantasy","tag-horror","tag-review","tag-reviews","tag-sff"],"yoast_head":"\n