Carnival of Souls (1962)

Last night, I finally sat down and watched Herk Harvey's director's cut of Carnival of Souls, his cult classic, creepy flick. I'd tried a time or two to get through it, but the time wasn't right.

A while back, I found the Criterion Collection DVD at my local Half Price Books. I'd never seen the film, but upon seeing the Criterion lettering down the spine, I wasn't able to leave it alone. (I have no problem blind-buying Criterion DVDs.). The cashier said he'd been eyeing it for some time, so he was glad I'd snapped it up. Saved him some money that way.

Carnival of Souls has a simple premise: A young woman and two of her friends drive off a bridge and crash their car into a river, and when she surfaces three hours later, strange things (and people) start to appear in her life. Here's the girl:

And here's the weird dude who follows her around:

The concept is cool. The effects aren't terrible. The score is downright creepy. There's a lot to like here.

Yeah, this one is rough around the edges. The dialogue and sound effects are badly looped, which is distracting. The actors aren't professionals, and their weaknesses can be glaring. As for Harvey's direction and shooting style, it's just a few degrees north of amateurish.

Despite all the flaws, though, Carnival of Souls was well worth the blind buy.

As for Criterion's set, you get the original cut of the film and Harvey's director's cut (5 additional minutes). The set is chock full of documentaries and other goodies, including a look at the films from Centron Corporation, which was an industrial film company where Harvey worked for many years. Carnival of Souls is Herk Harvey's only real, full-length narrative film.

Took me a long time to get to this one. It's not as if the film is lengthy and requires an entire afternoon, or as if it's incredibly complex or depressing or any of the usual reasons that take me forever to watch something. Sometimes, it's just easy to get away from watching movies, or just hard to sit down with something and devote full attention. Gotta try to do better.