Carnival of Souls

Shot by industrial documentary director Herk Harvey on a tiny budget with a largely student cast in Lawrence, KS, this imaginative 1962 tale of a chilly church organist who is haunted by apparitions (looking very zombie-like in greasepaint makeup) is a minor masterpiece of independent genre filmmaking. Candace Hilligoss stars as Mary Henry, a young woman who stumbles out of the river after the car she was in goes through a bridge railing. The only survivor of the accident, Mary drives to a new job in Salt Lake City, and the visions begin while she is on the road, drawing her to an abandoned pavilion in the desert (the eerie, abandoned Salt Palace off the Great Salt Lake). The slightly arch performance by Hilligoss sets the film off-center from the beginning, and as she disengages from reality—wandering through a silent city that neither sees nor hears her—she exhibits a genuinely eerie sense of dislocation. “We hoped for the look of a Bergman film and the feel of Cocteau,” said director Harvey in an interview conducted after the forgotten film was rediscovered by a new audience in the 1990s. Yet there is something uniquely American about this mix of fantasy, horror, and modern alienation, which earns its cult reputation through imaginative direction and creative indie filmmaking, and surely served as an inspiration for George Romero's 1968 classic Night of the Living Dead. Presenting a new restoration of the theatrical cut for this Criterion Blu-ray edition, extras include select scene archival audio commentary with Harvey and screenwriter John Clifford, deleted scenes, new and archival featurettes, and a booklet. Recommended. (S. Axmaker)