Carnival of Souls (1962)

This drive-in horror flick from the early '60s begins abruptly with a car race. The viewer is thrown into the action so quickly that I almost wondered if Netflix had cut out a few opening scenes. But the jarring introduction sets the mood for the rest of the film, which can mainly be described as "disorienting." The race ends when the car full of girls falls off a bridge and sinks into a river. Some time after the crash, one girl miraculously climbs ashore. She then moves to a new town and takes a job as a church organist. But in this town, a mysterious man seems to follow her wherever she goes.


This barely financed film is from the same era of horror as the Twilight Zone, and the landmark television program's influence on the film is so staggering that it's arguably plagiarism. In fact, now that I think about it, the basic plot is pretty much exactly the same as one of my favorite Twilight Zone episodes, "The Hitch-Hiker." The film is so similar that I might recommend watching the episode to get a similar payoff with a much shorter time commitment. That aside, I enjoyed this film for the same reason I enjoy the less "intellectual" episodes of The Twilight Zone. The message is non-existent, the dialogue is awkward, and the twist is so obvious that it feels inaccurate to even refer to it as a twist. But this film succeeds in a major way on two levels.
1) The sound and cinematography combine in an interesting way to create a dreamlike effect that can't be paralleled in big-budget films.
2) It creeps you the fuck out.
One scene in particular encapsulates both of these points quite well. A little over halfway into the film the woman plays a particularly disorienting organ solo in which swirling, dissonant harmonies blur together and get buried beneath each other. As the organ music (which is beautifully used throughout the film, by the way) rises in intensity, the lighting in the church gets darker, and shots of the woman's blankly terrified expression get juxtaposed with nightmarish shots of the church, the moon, the mysterious man, and the activities at the "carnival" of the title.

I wouldn't recommend this film to most people, but there are some people who I would recommend it to without hesitation. If you, like me, are addicted to creepy films that are made creepy because of the sound and cinematography of old-school B-movies, then Carnival of Souls is for you. I would describe this movie as the feeling of the nightmare sequence from Vertigo stretched out over a 70-minute episode of The Twilight Zone. For this reason you may be better off just watching The Twilight Zone and Vertigo. But if you've seen those two and you're hungry for more black and white nightmare imagery, check out this cult classic.