Living with experience

Carnival of Souls (1962) asks the question: When given access to the other side, how does one go on with the living?

Notes: Thank you to everyone who subscribed after the first edition. It’s so great to have you here.

I’m excited to soon be paying a visit to the Adams’, a filmmaking family of five who live in Roscoe, NY, for a special edition of FFTW. I’ll be writing specifically about their horror flicks, “The Deeper You Dig” — a wild take on murder and possession — and the making of their upcoming release, “Hellbender.” Here’s a recent article in the NYT for some context. Stay tuned!

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FILM: Carnival of Souls, 1962
WHERE TO WATCH: Wherever — this baby’s in the public domain. Just don’t invite The Man.

Q: Why do most adults live in fear of storms, traffic deaths, their babies’ failure to thrive?

A: Experience.

- Allan Gurganus

You are 22 years old, taking a joy ride with your three closest friends. You are good-looking, well-protected, freshly educated, and you have yet to leave home. Your life is just beginning and you have little reason to fear it. Also, the internet does not exist and you have never heard of cryptocurrency. 

Your friend, who is driving the car, engages in a street race with a Volkswagen full of smirking teenage boys. The race ends when your car careens off the side of a bridge into the rushing river below. You struggle toward the surface as your friends drown upright against their leather seats. Several moments pass. You consider that you may already be dead. And then, air! Somehow, you’ve survived. You wobble up a marooned rock. You are wrapped in a blanket and ushered to safety. In the days that follow, you resolve to put it all behind you and move to a new city. 

But you can’t put it behind you — not with your friends’ bodies beginning to disintegrate somewhere in the muddy current. Not with this fresh knowledge that there is no wall between you and disaster; that any car can go over any bridge at any time. Where you once thought of danger as something solitary and conspicuous — easy to see bobbing on the horizon — you now understand it to be ever-present, like an invisible hand wrapped loosely around the throat of each moment. Something has happened to you, and now it’s suddenly clear that anything could happen to you. 

This is how we find blonde, beautiful, wide-eyed Mary Henry at the outset of 1962’s Carnival of Souls, an indie horror film about a young woman who is the only of three friends to survive a car accident in small town Lawrence, Kansas. Days later, Mary moves to Salt Lake City, Utah to be a church organist, only to find herself haunted by a pale-faced man in a suit, known only as “The Man.” Mary suffers several bouts of invisibility. For brief periods of time, she can walk around in the world and see what’s going on, but can’t hear anything and isn’t able herself to be seen or heard — “It’s as if Mary is flickering in and out of existence,” writes Peter Wilshire.

“It was more than just not being able to hear anything, or make contact with anyone,” Mary tells a doctor.

“It was as though — as though for a time I didn’t exist, as though I had no place in the world, no part of the life around me.”

Mary considers, as do we, whether the flickering and the stalking are psychological results brought on by the trauma of the crash or something other-wordly. The accident seemed to grant Mary the ability to pass between life and death. Carnival of Souls asks the question: When given access to the other side, how does one go on with the living?

Much like its protagonist, Carnival of Souls defied death. Herts-Lion International first bought the distribution rights in the ‘60s, before folding as a company and selling the film off to TV stations, where it would air regularly on late-night television. Given the middling reception of the film upon its original theatrical release, this was probably a stroke of luck. It makes sense that a movie as eerie and artistically disjointed as this one would find fans among the half-dreaming. Bound for resurrection once more, the film was re-released in 1989 to cult acclaim. George Romero (Night of the Living Dead) and David Lynch (Twin Peaks) both cited it as inspiration, cementing its legacy within the genre.

So, it wouldn’t be fair to label Carnival a film “of its time,” considering its original audience found it forgettable (a nice Kansas try, at best). And, it didn’t quite fit in among other, more violent horror movies of its era — Psycho, Black Sunday, and Peeping Tom, for instance. Carnival has the pretty blonde, but we never get to see her bleed. 

Instead, Mary faces the invisible fate of the supremely alienated; people with the good fortune to step back into a world they no longer recognize, one filled with people to whom they can no longer relate. Merritt Mecham writes that “the viewers for whom [Carnival of Souls] resonates are the ones who can really hear Mary Henry.”

No one heard Mary better than the writer who gave her a voice.

Carnival of Souls was the brainchild of colleagues John Clifford and “Herk” Harvey. The pair worked for an educational film company in Kansas called the Centron Corporation, producing PSA-esque short films for classrooms and workplaces, a popular form of education in the latter half of the 1900s. (The residue of this work is apparent in Carnival, which opens with the tragic result of teenage recklessness.) Harvey, the director, asked Clifford to write a film inspired by the old Saltair Pavilion, an abandoned waterfront ballroom outside of Salt Lake City. His only requirement was that the final scene include that pavilion, and ghouls. 

Clifford was a World War II veteran, 15 years out of the Army, where he had first been a clerk and then served in field hospitals in New Guinea and the Philippines. One of his most vivid memories is of a long line of wounded soldiers trailing off in the dark, waiting to be assessed. Like many veterans then, he suffered the effects of undiagnosed PTSD. In an interview with the Kansas Historical Society, he describes random crying spells and moments when his heart would begin racing without provocation. He tells the interviewer that, since he wasn’t serving on the front lines, he didn’t have “the real terrible, gruesome war that so many men had.” 

Interviewer: But you saw the results of it. 

JC: Yeah.

…

JC: … I appreciated the fact that I wasn’t up on the front line. So there’s always that contrast. You’re dealin’ with these fellows that had been there, so [you felt] “What am I afraid of?”... I remember…. One of my memories, I remember hearing about Hiroshima and the atomic bomb.

I: Where were you when that happened?

JC: I was in the Philippines, in our hospital… working in a hospital there. I remember realizing that humanity has turned some kind of a corner here… 

Carnival of Souls, Clifford’s only feature-length film credit, follows a woman who, like its writer, comes very close to death but walks away unscathed. They are both called back at random to remember that something separates them from the naive living. In place of wounds, both are left with the memory of wounds, the kind of cerebral scarring that exists in anxious thoughts and waking nightmares — the kind of haunting with which we are most familiar. After emerging from the water, Mary returns, changed, to a world that is the same as she left it. The Man lurks in every corner: a sinister, gawking reminder of the death she evaded, visible to no one but her. Mary is haunted, not by the dead, but by death itself — a presence that mocks her for her undeserved place among the living. 

“I decided early on to give the heroine no real sympathy or understanding from any other character,” Clifford later wrote. “For the viewer, there is no relief from her dilemma, no catharsis except what viewers create for themselves. I believe that is one reason the film tends to linger in the mind.”

Mary tries and fails to re-engage with the world around her, but tells her doctor that deep down she has no genuine interest in making close friends or having a boyfriend. 

“Don’t you want to join in the things that other people do? Share the experiences of other people?” he asks, but she shakes her head. 

“I don’t seem capable of being very close to people,” she says.  

Mary’s doctor theorizes that The Man stalking her represents her guilty conscience. Guilt for what, he doesn’t say. Mary wasn’t driving the car. The only thing she has to feel guilty about is surviving. About his time in the war, Clifford said  that he didn’t feel justified in his fear. Assessing the damage among men coming in from the front lines, he’d asked himself: “What am I afraid of?” What he meant, of course, was “What do I deserve to be afraid of?”

I was a local reporter in the spring of 2019 when I was sent out to take photos of a road incident in Pennsylvania. Shuman Road, a winding country route, had split in two. An old, rotting storm pipe that ran beneath the road burst during the previous night’s rain storm. The enormous pressure of the water shot upward and flung chunks of asphalt into the woods. The effect of the burst was such that the road appeared completely normal and smooth right up until it did not appear at all. It looked like a mighty hand had reached down and dislodged a section of the pavement as easily as a segment of toy train track. 

I pictured a teenager driving 20 miles per hour over the speed limit just after the pipe had burst, listening to loud music and thinking of summer plans, not noticing the drop off until they were nose diving straight into it, their car folding up like an accordion into the Earth. 'The road,' they might say, between sobs in the back of an ambulance, 'just wasn't there!’

There was a lot of infrastructure talk then. It occurred to me that if this one storm pipe was so old and weak that it could no longer hold up, there must be dozens of others in our county, thousands throughout the state, in the same condition. Beneath us, a quadrant of time bombs waiting to explode and obliterate the very foundation on which we rely. If asked whether I felt the world was a safe place, I would have said something cynical (and correct) like ‘of course not, and you’d be stupid to think otherwise.’ Suffice to say, I didn't necessarily feel that the ground was stable, and yet I was shocked to see that it really wasn't.

The vanishing road remains a visual reminder that our safety is not assured. The year 2020 brought us a fresh cadre of such reminders; refrigerated trucks full of corpses, for example, navigating empty city alleys. Humanity has turned yet another corner. We move forward (what else?), but we have been irrevocably changed. 

I: But you saw the results of it? 

JC: Yeah.

In horror films, a haunting usually represents a person wronged or lingering grief. In reality, a haunting might be something we can access readily — anything we use as a reminder to ourselves that, simply by surviving, we have escaped death in a million little ways. We are haunted by the moments that altered our perspectives forever; all the ways we could have been harmed but weren’t — the great irony being that we are lucky to be haunted instead of dead. 

The ultimately unsurprising twist at the end of Carnival of Souls is that Mary Henry did not survive the car accident at the film’s outset. Back in Kansas, we see a group of be-suited men fish her out of the water along with the car and her friends, lovely and young and dead. Like the light from an exploded star still reaching Earth, the entirety of the movie has just been the residue of Mary’s existence hanging on until it couldn’t any longer. As Clifford intended, the viewer is granted no real catharsis. We are left alone. 

Among the living, Mary no longer belonged. She knew she had been called elsewhere. But she couldn’t accept that she was one of the dead, not when she could look down and see solid ground beneath her feet. In one of the final scenes, the one Harvey envisioned, Mary gives herself over to the souls who have been calling to her. She joins The Man and his crew of elegantly dressed deceased, all spinning round and round in a ballroom, itself long dead – one final party that promises to last for eternity. 

A special thank you to John Clifford, who died March 2, 2010, for leaving us the carnival.

Thanks, again, to Nicholas Gambini for helping get this thing spiffed up.

Suggested reading: Merritt Mecham’s Bright Wall/Dark Room essay on visiting the Saltair Pavilion is lovely, and explores aspects of the movie I didn’t touch on here. Here’s John Clifford in the Criterion Collection, writing about the making of the movie.