Growing up, for some reason, my siblings and I would occasionally watch the trailer ads on the local cable company’s pay-per-view channel. Why? Part of me thinks it was due to expecting the commercials to end at some point. Obviously, that never happened. And while most of these movies were new releases to the service of recent movies, there was for a period ads for something called Carnival of Souls. It was clearly an older movie in black-and-white, and the unseen narrator kept saying how scary it was, even emphasizing there were no refunds to be had if you were too frightened by the movie.
You know, it didn’t look scary, and I was never quite sure why some 20-30 year old movie was getting this pay-per-view release, but apparently it is something of a cult classic that got a Criterion Collection release, so why not see if I would have needed that refund since it is currently included on HBO Max?
Young Mary Henry (Candace Hilligoss) and two friends are challenged to a drag race. Their car goes off a bridge, and sometime later, Mary staggers to shore. She heads into the nearest town, gets a job as a church organist, rents a room at a local boarding house, and seems intent on getting her life back together. However, something isn’t quite right. She keeps seeing this man following her, a dark-eyed fellow who never speaks. Who is he? Why does he sometimes seem to have company around the abandoned fair grounds?
Having seen the movie, I see the appeal. The horror aspects are creepy, especially for the period. Yeah, the “monsters” are just some regular-looking folks in pale make-up with dark eyes, but the movie finds a way of making them more effective by speeding up the film or cutting the sound for everyone but Mary when The Man (played by the movie’s director Herk Harvey). I was never really frightened by these things, but the movie was quite effective at evoking a mood.
If anything, there’s a lot of great shot composition, and the black-and-white cinematography really helps create a mood. Lots of black-and-white movies were shot that way because, well, color was expensive. But sometimes you get a movie like Carnival of Souls that actually knows how to use the shadows and lighting to great effect. Even if this wasn’t a big budget movie, the people making it clearly knew how to use what they had.
Worth noting the movie has a somewhat famous twist ending that I somewhat knew about (it’s over fifty years old, so it would have been harder not to know about the ending), I may not have been scared by Carnival of Souls, but I was rather impressed by it.
Grade: B
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