Mary Henry is enjoying the day by riding around with two
friends but everything goes wrong when challenged to a drag race and their car
gets forced off of a bridge. The car sinks into the murky depths, and all three
women are assumed drowned. Some time later Mary emerges unscathed from the
river. She tries to start a new life by becoming a church organist but Mary
finds herself haunted by a ghostly figure that instills fear and dread into her.
The director Herk Harvey was also a prolific industrial/educational filmmaker
for Centron Productions.
Reviewer: adalbert_f -
- August 14, 2006 Subject: great piece! wow, what a great movie. i saw it because i read that David Lynch named
this film as being an influence for his lost highway. obviously it is, but even
more for Eraserhead ). and well, it's really worth being a model for lynch, even
if, of course, lynch is much a better story teller. the plot of carnival is a
quite simple story: a girl is chased by the dead woh want to pull her into their
world. there are also no really astonishing special effects, but the story is
just made so atmospheric, that you will feel greatly scared if you're not a
total jerk. also the music does its part for that atmosphere: a very interesting
mixture between on-screen organ-church-music and off-screen avant-garde
electronic with subtle fading between the two styles. and all in all the
pictures, the visions, the dead: made just great. simply, but just great. i love
this movie. but a shame, that the quality of the sound is so f***in' bad. you
should buy the DVD. i'll do!
vurnt 22
Subject: A triumph of Existential Minimalism
I saw this film as a child on local tv and the dancing spectre sequence in the
abandoned amusement park haunted my dreams. Years later, Carnival Of Souls
enjoyed a well deserved critical re-appraisal, and was once again made
available. Now downlodable it still disturbs. Despite it's low budget and
unknown cast, this film sustains an ambience of creeping unease that most FX
heavy big budget films can't seem to manage. The keys to this film's power is
the minimalist direction of industrial-short film maker Herke Harvey and the
extraordinary performance of it's lead actress Candace Hilligoss, whose fearful
eyed mounting dread at the increasingly macabre unreality around her propels
this film way beyond it's B-movie status. A masterpiece of horror.
MovieShame.
There have always been lots of movies that show or exploit sex, but far fewer
that try to explore it seriously, as a rich, meaningful subject, whether
psychological or social...
A Christmas Carol Seymour Hicks plays
the title role of Scrooge in the first
sound version of the Dickens classic about ..
Carnival of souls 
