Carnival of Souls Understood Something About Death That Hollywood Spent Millions Trying to Buy

I don't know how to rank Carnival of Souls (62's) against other horror films because it does not feel like it exists in the same category as other horror films. it feels like it was made in a different dimension and somehow ended up on the same shelf.

they say death in Hollywood costs money and we can see the budget in every frame , the lighting rigs , the score swelling at the right moment and the makeup , slow motion and like actor doing the things with their eyes that tells you this is the scene where you are supposed to feel something...

Carnival of soul , had nothing but 33 thousand of budget and a abandoned building on a salt lake and it understood death than any of them..

not being romantic here about poverty , just being accurate about what the film does and how it does it and why money would have ruined it..

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well, before we move to the next line, i just want to say that this is fully opinionated writing. don’t take it personally. everyone has their own views , i have mine, and i’m simply putting my thoughts here. that’s it, nothing more...

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so where was i? yeah so i am not being romantic about poverty....

i love how this film purely understand is that death does not announce itself.. like i am coming.

Mary Henry's car goes off a bridge into a river and the other passengers don't come back up , she does , she walks out of the water and nobody can explain it, not the rescuers, not the doctors, not Mary hersel and the film ain't linger on this. it ain't give you a scene where someone sits across from her and says you should not have survived that. it moves forward. Mary moves forward. she takes a job as a church organist in Utah and drives there and the thing that followed her out of the river follows her down the highway too.

this is the first correct decision i mean death in this film ain't arrive with loud music and close ups , it arrives the way it actually arrives

which is that one moment everything is normal and then something is differ and you cannot locate exactly when the change happened?

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the pale man appears in a window while Mary is driving.

not in a dark corridor. not at the end of a long hallway with a single light swinging overhead. in a car window, in daylight, on an ordinary road. he's just there, looking at her, and then he is gone...

that's what Hollywood kept getting wrong for decades and kept spending money to get wrong , dread is not darkness , not the right music , it's ordinary world developing a texture , it didn't have before...

the episodes where Mary becomes invisible to other people are the film's real horror and they have nothing to do with the supernatural.

she is in a shop. the shopkeeper doesn't see her. she speaks and he doesn't hear her. she moves through the space and leaves no impression on it. she goes to the street and the people on the street look through her , she is present and she is not there and there is no explanation for it and it stops as suddenly as it started

this is not a ghost trick. this is the specific terror of not existing to the world around you.

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saltair Pavilion was an abandoned resort on the Great Salt Lake , Harvey drove past it and couldn't stop thinking about it. that's the whole story of how this film got made. a man saw a building and could not let it go.

by 1962 the building had been closed for years. the lake had receded and left it stranded on dry flats.

nobody dressed that location , nobody made it feel like death. it already felt like death. Harvey just pointed the camera at it and let it be what it was.

this is the second thing the film understood that money could not teach. the right location is not a set built to feel a certain way and it's a place that already feels that way and has been feeling that way for years without anyone asking it to.

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the organ score goes where it shouldn't go.

Moore wrote and performed it on a pipe organ and the music ain't follow the rules of horror scoring. it does not confirm what the images are telling you. it doesn't swell when the pale man appears to make sure you know you should be frightened.

that's the correct use of music in a film about death cause death does not have a score. death doesn't swell when it is approaching to give you time to prepare. the organ is there before it should be and it stays after it should leave and it makes every ordinary moment feel like it's happening inside something larger and more permanent than ordinary moments have any right to be inside.

the film sat on the bottom half of double bills and disappeared.

Harvey went back to industrial films , Hilligoss did not make another feature. the negative was thought to be lost for years and bootleg copies circulated on damaged prints, the image degraded, the audio inconsistent, and the degradation made the film feel more like what it was about.

it was rediscovered slowly. Romero cited it , Craven cited it , a restored print was released and people who had only seen it on bad tape finally saw what the images actually looked like and the images were as precise and deliberate as anything being made in American cinema in 1962, which wasn't what anyone expected from an industrial filmmaker from Kansas with thirty three thousand dollars and three weeks.

Harvey died in 96's , he was gracious about the attention and said he was glad people found it but that he had moved on.

the Saltair Pavilion burned down in 1970s. there is a replacement structure on the site that has nothing to do with the original.

i keep coming back to what film actually cost you as a viewer.

it doesn't cost you shock , it does not cost you disgust , it does't give you a release the kind of release where the monster is defeated and the credits roll and you can exhale and return to yourself , it ends where it ends and the ending confirms everything the film suspected about Mary from the first frame and then it's over and you are left with the suspicion that the film knew something you did not and chose not to share all of it.

that feeling, the specific unease of a film that withheld more than it showed, is what Hollywood spent decades and hundreds of millions of dollars trying to manufacture and mostly could not.

Herk Harvey got it for thirty three thousand dollars by driving past a building he could not forget.

at the end i think some things cannot be bought , they can only be found.

wonder what community thinks about this?