BY RAYMOND BENSON

“WE’RE NOT IN KANSAS ANYMORE”

By Raymond Benson

The Criterion Collection released Herk Harvey’s 1962 cult film classic, Carnival of Souls, sixteen years ago as a two-disk DVD set, but that edition has long been out of print. Now, a new Blu-ray restoration is available from the company, and it is worth upgrading even if you happen to own the original. Note that Carnival of Souls is a public domain film, so it is available on DVD from many inferior manufacturers in bad-to-okay quality versions, but the Criterion’s releases are the ones to grab.

Carnival is indeed an oddity. Harvey worked at Centron Corporation, a maker of educational and industrial short films based in Lawrence, Kansas. It was much like Calvin Films in Kansas City, where Robert Altman cut his teeth making shorts in the 1950s. Needless to say, Lawrence, Kansas is not Hollywood, and it was not a hotbed of feature filmmaking in 1961, when Carnival was shot.

Harvey had helmed many of Centron’s shorts and got the idea to make a horror feature when he was driving home from Salt Lake City, Utah. He noticed the ruins of the great Saltair, an entertainment complex that had been built by the Mormons on the edge of Salt Lake in 1893 as a family-oriented place for recreation. It was a sort of Coney Island for Utah residents. Designed in an incongruous Moorish style, the place looked like a palace for sultans. It was destroyed by fire in the 1920s and rebuilt, this time including a gigantic pavilion for dancing. Saltair burned down and was rebuilt again, but eventually by the 1950s it had become a derelict, spooky place due to the recession of the lake that left behind a dirty, polluted shore abutting the resort. After the film had been shot there, another attempt was made to restore the place, but that failed when the lake rose and demolished the resort for good. At any rate, in 1961, Herk Harvey thought Saltair would make a good location for a ghost story, and he was right.

Made for a final budget of only $33,000, Carnival of Souls looks and feels like it might have been a bad Ed Wood production—very cheap, with amateurish acting (all of the cast except the lead was pulled from local talent) and clumsy editing. But the black and white cinematography by Maurice Prather is actually quite striking, especially in Criterion’s new restored 4K digital transfer. The images are sharp and pristine, as if the movie had been shot yesterday. The all-organ score by Gene Moore adds another layer of originality to the proceedings, and it’s unsettling and eerie. Despite the cheesiness of the production, though, Harvey manages to evoke a genuinely creepy atmosphere throughout the picture. His multiple appearances as “The Man” (in ghoulish makeup) do provide some scares.

The story concerns Mary (played well enough by Candace Hilligoss, a newbie stage actress hired out of New York), who is in an automobile accident at the film’s beginning. She survives and is shell-shocked, but she manages to go on with her life as a church organist. However, she keeps seeing visions of “The Man,” a ghostly stalker who, of course, represents Death. At times she goes through mysterious fugues in which all sound drops out and no one around her can see or hear her. What’s going on? Well, it all becomes clear at the end, but most viewers should be able to figure out the Twilight Zone plot twist pretty quickly. In fact, the entire thing plays out like an extra long episode of that classic horror and science fiction television series.

Carnival of Dreams was not a success on its first release, but it gained a cult following in the 1980s and beyond, supposedly influencing the likes of David Lynch and George A. Romero. It is definitely an entertaining and somewhat scary picture, but personally I’m not convinced that it is the masterpiece some horror aficionados claim it to be.

The Criterion Collection’s new Blu-ray contains only the theatrical cut at 78 minutes. It has an uncompressed monaural soundtrack, as well as selected-scene audio commentary with director Harvey and screenwriter John Clifford. The original Criterion release featured the original director’s cut (84 minutes) as well, but apparently the elements of the edited scenes weren’t good enough for the new restoration, so they appear separately as supplements.

Some of the extras from the first release are ported over—The Movie That Wouldn’t Die, a 1989 documentary about the cast and crew reunion; The Carnival Tour, a 2000 update on the film’s locations; a history of the Saltair Resort; the theatrical trailer; and a selection of excerpts from shorts made by the Centron Corporation. There is also a long selection of silent outtakes, cut to Gene Moore’s eerie organ score. New supplements include an interview with comedian and writer Dana Gould on the influence and merits of the film, and an interesting new video essay by film critic David Cairns. The booklet contains an essay by writer and programmer Kier-La Janisse.

While the absence of the director’s cut is disappointing, the new Criterion Blu-ray is a welcome release mainly for its superb video quality. Carnival of Souls is worth a late-night viewing for its historical significance and moments of disturbing imagery, but I doubt it will give you nightmares.

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