Carnival of Souls 1962

You could have a solid debate that "Carnival of Souls" is the first truly post-modern horror film, the most existentialist horror film & even the greatest horror film ever made.

Following in the wake of Antonioni's Neorealism in Italy, Godard's New Wave in France & Hitchcock's game-changer "Psycho" in 1960, a modest independent filmmaker Herb Harvey crafted a superb mixture of these and more ("Dr. Caligari" & Maya Deren for sure). Carnival of Souls is a lyrical, minimalist tone poem about the inescapable, universal journey we all must make in losing our life.

Candace Hilligoss plays a woman who is going mad as it dawns on her that her life is over. She is a ghost who doesn't know it. This might not be the first story to use this plot but its certainly the first in cinema. Half a century has passed and the experience is still chilling and eye-opening because of the poetic way the theme is explored.She is pursued by a ghostly man, an angel of death come to "take her back" to the world of the dead. Harvey implies that death is a return or awakening and only a loss of a superficial existence, beautifully mocking the religious, militaristic, conservative conformity of the '50s era. Is life but a dream? Is American life a modern nightmare?

Candace's main relationship outside of this horror is more grounded but just as profoundly disturbing: a self-serving, lecherous male predator in her building. Harvey draws parallels clearly between the feminist struggle for respect, independence & peace with the victimhood of horror damsels. Her cries of oppression are ignored or dismissed by her society. The director's empathy with her and her hopeless sexual struggle lends a gay interpretation of the film as well. Eventually she is pushed to conform, give in to Death and (what has to be a metaphor for suicide) return to her watery grave.

The film romanticizes death in a way that is shocking then & now. The ghost that follows her is a lonely man in a carousel of coupled ghost romances. She belongs with him but is terrified of this notion. She tries to choose the living man she hates over this dead man, but accepts the futility. Psychoanalysis fails her. Faith fails her. Her soul belongs elsewhere, but where? This is a spiritual journey of a woman who is all mind & body but missing her soul.

The film highlights the heroine's atheism and thankfully avoids condemning her for it. It is her lack of spirit that is her illness, not her lack of a religion. In the end, she finds completion in self-destruction. This is pure nihilist cinema and it had to shatter a lot of the programmed blue collar who saw it. It sells her acceptance of nothingness as a celebration. The ending is less tragic and more of an elaborate cosmic joke played on her and only Death laughs. And thats what life is, Harvey explains. This is the Buddhist concept that David Lynch & Terence Malick have arrived at in their darkly spiritualist work.

The "carnival of souls" is life. In the film, it is embodied by an abandoned, crumbling pavilion by the ocean. It is a grim reminder of the past and eventual decay. The architecture itself is a living ghost. After one of her Freudian check up's, Candace has a vision of ghosts emerging from the waters, like memories from her subconscious. The ghosts who follow her in life represent the oppressive force of death on life, past on the present and a violent loss of the future. I assume they are also symbolic of the radically conservative social politics of the time. Our protagonist is a non-conformist who is alienated and disturbed by the dated values, barbaric morals & drab sameness of the non-actors the camera captures.

The visual palette of the film is likewise drab, flat and mostly mediocre, which seems designed to match the existential crisis. This use of financial & stylistic economy thematically is what makes this film a work of genius. But when the film's emotion picks up, we enter a wildly expressionistic, noir mode of "Pure Cinema" (definitely in nod to Hitchcock). Throughout the film there is grim humor in the editing and abstract composition in the shots. Even when things are at their most static and normal, there's the eerie "offness" of the soundtrack. Its like jazz played by organ. This is the work of a master craftsman, but sadly he would not make another film.

This is a deeply personal film made commercially for no money. It survives as a tombstone for the life of a great cinematic poet. There is so much written about filmmakers who walk in Harvey's footsteps but much of that work is less crafty, sincere or original as this. "Carnival" is the best kind of deconstructionist cinema that works as a uniquely original work and a cynical but reverent commentary on its populist roots and a staggering mirror to the Modernism it exists in.

Call it a "masterpiece". Its a 10.