Rent Carnival of Souls (1962)

Genuinely unnerving - mild spoilers. - Carnival of Souls review by NP

This is a modestly budgeted, black-and-white film directed, produced, written by and starring Herk Harvey. Often, when an entire production is placed in the hands of one person, the results can be questionable, with no-one available to advise the auteur that his ambition may need fine-tuning. Happily, this is far from the case here. 'Carnival of Souls' has gained a huge cult following over the years, and quite rightly: it is excellent.

The direction is first-rate. Not only is a seaside town given a genuinely unnerving atmosphere, but the finale, filled with stuttering, staggering undead figures emerging from the abandoned carnival stays in the mind long after the credits have rolled.

If you have an interest in horror, you owe it to yourself to see this.

Toccata and Refuge - Carnival of Souls review by CH

“These old houses creak as much as my knees.” So a landlady tells a young and fetching church organist (Candace Hilligoss) who has rented a room in a small town after, apparently, surviving a crowded automobile's plunge from a bridge into a river at the beginning of Carnival of Souls (1962).

Created and directed by Herk Harvey, who appears throughout as a ghostly figure, this film, rendered in effective black and white, does not succumb to gore but is continually unnerving, not least with the man (Sidney Berger) across the landing, a warehouse functionary creepily set upon deflowering her: he arrives at breakfast time with a jug of coffee laced with spirits (as it were): for which she supplies the wonderful term of “germkiller” (all this,after a classic bathtub scene).

Within and without, the film is stark, scantly populated. How many people know of it? How did it come to be made? Little funding was available, and yet it echoes across six decades, partly driven by music which riffs upon that modest church organ to summon the stuff of nightmare.

More titters than scares - Carnival of Souls review by Kurtz

A relic of the drive-in cinema age, released in 1962 by a director who had up until then majored in health education films, “Carnival of Souls” is interesting nowadays only as an indicator of how far film-making and acting has come since the early sixties, and as a blueprint for the “caught-between -two –worlds” type thrillers like “Jacob’s Ladder”and “The Sixth Sense”.Other aspects have dated horribly, the stilted acting and the leaden dialogue, particularly in the less “intense” scenes, proving particularly hard to forgive. When things start to unravel for our heroine, there is admiiedly a vaguely spooky feel and the “Carnival” of the title is not somewhere you’d like to wander at night, but eye-rolling close-ups of lead actress Candace Hilligoss have you wriggling more in embarrassment than fear.