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Rating: The person who introduced me to this film told me that a true "horror" film begins when you are alone, in silence, and you turn off the lights. After watching "Carnival of Souls," I understood exactly what they meant.
A horror movie often serves the sole purpose of giving you a few chills, making you scream at best, and then it's all over. You get back into your car, drive home, get into bed as if nothing happened. But there are certain films that start up again once you are alone in your room, that make you suspicious at every little noise. And that undoubtedly means a film has succeeded. "Carnival of Souls," from 1963 was a drive-in movie, the kind made to take girls to, scare them, and make out, filmed in three weeks by an amateur director with a budget of $30,000. Yet, after its release, especially in the United States, it became a little cult, and you can easily see its scattered references here and there in many films. For a start, in Romero's "Night of the Living Dead," because it's from this small and unassuming "Carnival of Souls" that the most affordable monster in history begins to take root: the undead, hungry for human flesh: the zombie.
The plot of the film is quite simple: a group of friends has a car accident, they fall off a bridge and die (the same accident is referenced in the opening scene of Tim Burton's "Beetlejuice"). While road rescues retrieve the car, a woman (Candie Holigloss) emerges from the waters, battered but miraculously alive (a scene similarly echoed in the "Twin Peaks" episode of Ronnette Pulanski's discovery). Mary, that's her name, is an organist: for reasons unknown to us, she embarks on a journey to Salt Lake City, where she stops in front of an old abandoned amusement pavilion: the figure of a man elegantly dressed, but with signs of death in his face, looks at her intently. In the next scene, Mary lives in the city: completely detached, cold, and almost numb. Strange undead figures appear in her house windows, on the streets, in the shop windows, and wait for her. Mary is the church organist: in a trance state she begins to play music and in the strange pavilion by the sea, the dead awaken and start a dance finished centuries ago, until the sacristan drives her out shouting that her music is sacrilegious. I won't reveal the ending, of course. However, if you ever manage to find this title (not an easy task in Italy), don't miss it, it is a little gem.
The staging, although sparse, is effective, incredibly suggestive in its endless silences and in the eternal suspension and dream in which the protagonist lives. The choice of the Saltair Pavilion, a sort of industrial archaeology of the last century, abandoned, was more than fortunate: the place itself would give you chills, the scene of the undead dance is truly beautiful, and I bet Kubrick had it in mind when he filmed "The Shining." And then, very effective is the figure of the undead itself, its sudden appearance in "normal" contexts is decidedly unsettling.
And now, turn off the lights.
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