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Somehow, Herk Harvey directed the low-budget classic Carnival of Souls for $33,000. It’s an incredible film that has inspired many low-budget horror favorites as well as being a kind of guide to how to make a great movie with virtually no money. After aesthetically impacting filmmakers like George A. Romero and David Lynch, six decades later, the film continues to influence DIY horror movies around the world.
Herk Harvey worked for the Centron Corporation in Kansas, directing hundreds of educational and industrial films over his career, which were used by corporations and the government for training and public awareness purposes. He originally joined as an actor but quickly became a popular and prolific director. Carnival of Souls was filmed in Lawrence, Kansas, and Salt Lake City, Utah. The director used his co-workers to provide him with cheap help. He ignored the rules and, because of his extensive experience as an educational director, he knew how to get the best material for the cheapest prices.
Despite his extremely prolific career, Carnival of Souls was Harvey’s only feature film. Because of some bad experiences (editing of the film against the director’s will, and an incompetent and ultimately misleading advertising campaign), the film performed poorly and Harvey never returned to the world of low-budget horror, which is a shame. Harvey used his experience making industrial films in order to make a cheaper and also grittier, more realistic horror film than people were used to, and over time, Carnival of Souls has been recognized as an influential classic.
What Is Carnival of Souls About?
Carnival of Souls starts out with some random people drag-racing, when a carful of girls plunges off a bridge into a lake, where they can’t be found. Yet later, Mary Henry (Candace Hilligoss) appears on the beach as a survivor with no memory of what had happened. Mary was leaving Kansas for Utah to be a church organist at the time of the car accident, and she continues on her journey, however this time she is not alone.
A demon-faced man (played by the director) keeps appearing before her, no matter where she is. His grease-painted face makes him look just like a George Romero zombie, and the influence Carnival of Souls had on Night of the Living Dead becomes obvious. In fact, with the mysterious man, Harvey has created a new horror aesthetic, the look of the modern zombie. Not just the zombies, but also the documentary-style feel and the ironic and tragic ending of the film. Even though it is a horror film, it ends like a documentary because of the styles first used by Harvey in Carnival of Souls. David Lynch also used a “Mystery Man” in Lost Highway, looking almost exactly like Harvey’s demonic apparition in Carnival of Souls, making Lynch another of the many directors who was influenced by this film.
Carnival of Souls’ Proto-Feminist Protagonist
Carnival of Souls partly inspired Roman Polanski’s Repulsion as well, which is also about a mentally unbalanced woman who is extremely disturbed by men’s affection and who may be hallucinating violent men. Candace Hilligoss gives a freaked-out performance as Mary, a strong-willed independent woman with mood swings who needs another person in her lonely life. She probably has borderline or bipolar personality disorder, and she is extremely antisocial and not interested in others.
In addition, although she is a professional church organist, she is not a religious believer at all. To her, playing the organ just allows her to pay the bills. Otherwise, she stays away from churches. She also stays away from men who hit on her or criticize her for lack of religious beliefs, or otherwise try to tell her what to do. In many ways, despite her bitterness, Mary is a proto-feminist protagonist unlike most other women characters in films of the time and before.
DIY Horror and Guerilla Filmmaking
There are many ways in which Carnival of Souls teaches you how to make your own great film for almost no money. His educational films taught him how to shoot scenes that seemed realistic, but with a minimum of money, and the director cut costs any chance he could. The most important part of Carnival of Souls’ production was the guerilla filmmaking aspect of it, where laws were ignored, permits were not sought, and permission was not requested. Whenever possible, locals and friends of the director were used, and the filmmakers used a cheap camera called a battlefield camera that was traditionally used to capture news footage, and thus anything filmed through one appeared as though it were part of a documentary, extremely realistic, and also cheap.
The most obvious use of such guerilla and money-saving techniques was used when people were filmed in a moving car. The traditional way to do this was a rear projection effect. What Harvey did was film his actors in a static unmoving car and combined it with footage of a moving background. This technique is still used today and is but one of many examples of how Carnival of Souls was such a great, innovative movie for such a low price.
In one critical scene, Mary goes to a fitting room to try some clothes on. Today, this would entail making a deal with the shopping mall and the store, which would be executed by an entertainment lawyer. The scenes would be shot at night, when the store was closed, and it would be filled with paid extras to make the store seem more authentic. Harvey chose a different direction. He showed up at the store with his cast and crew and offered $25 to the store clerk for permission to film while the store was open. Shoppers were used as extras, and a huge amount of money was saved by ignoring all the permits, lawyers, and paperwork.
The Where, Who, and How of Herk Harvey’s Movie
As an experienced industrial filmmaker, Harvey also knew how to film on location, using locals and not actors, for a minimum amount of money. Harvey used many of his co-workers and the studio’s resources to help him with the film, including commissioning a screenplay from a co-worker. In all, there was just a five-person crew with a small cast of characters, and the film was shot in 21 straight days. Even when one scene called for something more elaborate, Harvey was resourceful and clever. When conceiving of the film, he envisioned a zombie-style dance, and the result was a congregation of zombies dancing at a pavilion. For dancers, he borrowed students from the local Mormon School of Modern Dance who were surprisingly happy to volunteer for the experience.
In two scenes in the film, everything goes dead silent. Mary can’t hear others who can neither hear nor see her. Both scenes are chilling and effective and neither required much of a budget to freak out the audience; all Harvey had to do was cut the sound (which itself saved money). We watch Mary lose her mind and try to find a connection to humanity, after denying such connections throughout the film.
The director used these cheaper industrial film techniques that he was used to working with, and knew how to be suspenseful on a low budget, influencing films like Eraserhead, Night of the Living Dead, and others. As a result, Carnival of Souls served as the prototypical low-budget, psychosocial horror film.
Carnival of Souls’ Meaning and Fate
One of the film’s few criticisms is that its story seems derivative of certain short stories, and that it was drawn out to turn something small into a film. Carnival of Souls does play out like an extended version of a Twilight Zone episode, particularly the infamous episode The Hitch-Hiker, (based on a story which was originally written for Orson Welles’ radio program), in which a mysterious automobile driver keeps seeing the same hitchhiker over and over again, no matter how fast she travels, until she finally realizes the horrible truth about her existentialist angst. Another influence is the story An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce, which was also made into an episode of The Twilight Zone.
The rest of this article contains spoilers for Carnival of Souls.However, Harvey took that Twilight Zone aesthetic and its plot twists and turned it into one of the most atmospheric horror movies of all time. Yes, there are plot elements which appear in several Twilight Zone episodes and elsewhere, and it has a similar meaning — Mary dies at the beginning of the film in the watery car crash, and Carnival of Souls comprises the last thoughts, fantasies, and fears of a drowning woman. These are here dying dreams, and the entire film could be described as Mary’s purgatory, where she hovers in the ‘twilight zone’ between life and death, reality and delusion.
Nonetheless, the radical thing that Harvey did was use atmosphere and gritter, DIY filmmaking to produce something inexplicable, odd, and haunting. He proved that you didn’t need a budget (or even an original story) to use cinematic techniques in creative, horrifying, unique ways. At the time, it was a failed experiment.
While Harvey wrote and directed hundreds of industrial and educational movies, he only made this one feature film. Because of unwanted studio cuts and false advertising, the film did not do well, and Harvey stayed in the industrial film genre. He never directed a fiction feature again because of the negative experiences.
However, Carnival of Souls gained new life when the distributor sent copies to hundreds of television stations to play at midnight. This turned the film into a bona fide cult classic with an eventually legendary influence. Harvey’s ultra-low-budget film is now widely considered an iconic underground cult horror, film and its influence can be seen in many low-budget films today. Today, the film is even part of the Criterion Collection, so Harvey had the last laugh.
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