Carnival of Souls · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

She is at a counter in a department store, and the clerk does not hear her. She tries again. Nothing. Outside on the sidewalk the traffic goes past without sound, and a man's mouth moves at her with no voice in it. It goes on. Then she reaches a park, a bird sings, and the world's audio floods back as if a valve had opened.

Nothing was added to that scene to make it frightening. Something was taken out.

That is Herk Harvey's invention, and it is why a film shot in two or three weeks for somewhere between $17,000 and $33,000 by the staff of a Kansas company that made classroom safety reels still does work most horror cannot. Harvey directed sponsored shorts for Centron. Maurice Prather shot them, John Clifford wrote them, Dan Palmquist and Bill de Jarnette cut them. That trade teaches you to work fast in real rooms and make an image legible without spectacle. Pointed once at a fiction with no information to deliver, the training became a style, and the style is subtraction. The film's most frightening compositions have had nothing done to them at all except that a white-faced man is standing where no one should be.

Gilles Deleuze, writing about cinema two decades later, had a name for what happens to Mary Henry in that store. He splits film roughly in two. In the first kind, which is most movies, someone perceives a situation and acts to change it, and the acting works; he calls this the movement-image, and horror usually runs it at full throttle. You see the thing. You run, or you fight, or you burn the house down. In the second kind, which surfaces after the war, perception stops converting into action. You see, and there is nothing to be done about what you see. Deleuze calls the hinge the crisis of the action-image, and the images left standing on the far side opsigns and sonsigns: pure optical and sound situations, which is a heavy phrase for a simple thing. A sight or a sound you can only receive.

The reason to bring this lens to a drive-in second feature is that it explains the film's shape better than the genre does. Carnival of Souls has no monster to defeat, no investigation, no ally, no mechanism. The ghoul cannot be fought. The two men positioned as helpers are a minister who fires Mary for playing profane music and a physician who talks past her; they want her installed somewhere, not saved. So the film runs on attrition instead of suspense, and Mary becomes what Deleuze calls a voyant, a seer — someone who watches and endures rather than acts. Candace Hilligoss plays exactly that: wide-eyed, watchful, affectless in a way that is neither bad acting nor naturalism but absence. Around her the film lays down long passive stretches of being counselled, courted, driving. Deleuze would call that temps mort, dead time, the everyday held past the point where it advances anything. It produces a life running down rather than a plot building.

Then there are the places. Prather shoots the Saltair pavilion and the flats around the Great Salt Lake wide and deep, vacant geometry with a human figure lost inside it, and the lake's blank horizon does the job of a set for free. Deleuze called this an any-space-whatever: a space that has stopped serving as a setting for action and simply sits there radiating its own emptiness. He drew the idea from postwar European rubble. Harvey got there because he had no money, and because a real ruin was standing on the shore, a mass-amusement resort already shuttered and salt-stained, which burned about a decade after he filmed it. The metaphor arrived pre-built. American cinema's rubble turned out to be its leisure architecture.

Sound is where the film is boldest. Gene Moore's score is nearly wall-to-wall solo organ, recorded at the Reuter organ factory down the road from the production office, and because Mary is an organist the music never settles into a fixed position. We cannot always tell whether we are hearing the soundtrack, or hearing her play, or hearing something play her. Deleuze distinguishes a relative out-of-field, the room next door, from an absolute one: a beyond that isn't anywhere in space at all. Moore's organ is the second kind, and it is everywhere. Then add an accident. The film had no usable sync dialogue and was post-dubbed, so voices sit slightly loose on the bodies and every room shares the same hollow acoustic. In a studio picture that is a defect. Here it means the world Mary speaks into never quite closes around her.

The reflections are the film's other signature. The Man is keyed from below and caught in a car window at night, in a mirror, in a shop pane. Deleuze's crystal-image is the point where the actual thing and its virtual double stop being tellable apart, and Harvey builds one out of makeup, a hard light, and glass. The whole film then turns out to be that: Salt Lake City is the virtual image of a woman still sitting in a submerged car. Notice it is a sealed crystal. The loop closes — submersion, emergence, intrusion, return, dredging — and church, clinic, boarding house, and dance hall are forms with no outside behind them.

This is where Bazin matters. He argued that cinema holds us because we believe the camera recorded something that was really there. Saltair was really there. The documentary flatness Prather brought over from industrial work is the collateral, and the supernatural is what it buys.

The waltz at the pavilion earns its length. The dead turn in pairs across the derelict ballroom, Mary watches, and then she is in it. Deleuze's phrase for this is the movement of world: the character goes still and the world moves instead, the dance absorbing the dancer. Astaire arrives there through grace. Mary arrives by being taken.

The lineage is specific. From Dreyer's Vampyr, Harvey's cited model, comes the consciousness adrift between states, the sparse post-synced speech over a drifting camera, reflections detaching from their bodies, and the coffin POV that makes the protagonist a spectator at her own death. From Meshes of the Afternoon comes the working grammar Palmquist and de Jarnette use: hard cuts stitching mismatched spaces into one continuous subjectivity, plus the mirror-faced double who pursues. From I Walked with a Zombie comes Carrefour, the mute ordinary-bodied figure who advances into flat available light with no reveal and no musical sting. Dementia had already proved a horror feature could withhold every line of exposition and let sound do the narrating. The Night of the Hunter supplied both the submerged car with the dead woman still seated inside it and the idea of one recurring musical motif as a film's entire sonic signature. And The Twilight Zone's "The Hitch-Hiker" handed Clifford the plot whole: a woman driving, a silent figure only she sees, the trip voided by a wreck she did not survive.

Forward, Romero named it among the films behind Night of the Living Dead, and the debt is audible: silent, ordinary-clothed dead advancing in flat light, documentary plainness carrying apocalyptic content, and the proof that industrial-film people could make a lasting horror feature with no industry behind them. That model runs on through Pittsburgh and Austin. Critics reach for this film when they talk about Lynch's suburban dread, and about the later art-horror mode where duration, sound, and landscape do what attacks used to do. Every story since in which someone learns the world has been a posthumous fiction is downstream of it, whether or not it knows.

What it did to narrative is stranger than its twist. The twist is the least interesting thing in the film. Most people met it at two in the morning on television already knowing the ending, and it cost them nothing, because this is not a puzzle with a solution. It is eighty minutes of a state. The real move was making withheld explanation structural rather than coy: we are never told why she survived, what the dead want, or what the pavilion is.

Watch it again for the seams rather than the ending. And keep one question open. Is Mary refusing death, or refusing what is on offer as life? The minister, the doctor, and the boarder all want her placed. The pavilion only asks her to dance.