Ok let’s do this! Let’s talk about what happened this week. The first thing I would like to discuss is Herk Harvey’s 1962 movie, Carnival of Souls. The film’s plot follows Mary, played by Candace Hilligoss, has she descends into a state of madness and purgatory following a car accident that happens in the first five minutes of the film Often times Mary finds herself more dead than alive even completely invisible to the rest of the world. I really enjoyed this movie, not going to lie though the unnamed male ghost that keeps appearing to Mary, definitely scared me pretty badly when he kept popping up randomly in the film and in my dream later that night. That being said it was Harvey’s effective use of high camera angles and dark shadows that kept me on the edge of my seat during the film. Harvey often shows Mary in high angle shots giving the audience a sense that she is in a position of venerability. What I found to be particularly effective in evoking my sense of fear/nervousness was the fact that often times you didn’t know who’s vantage points the high angles were attributed to. This gave the idea that Mary was often being watched by people that didn’t exist.

Another highly effective element in the film is Harvey’s use of shadows. Harvey uses shadows to create a deeper layer of darkness and mystery for his audience. We often see the shadows falling over Mary’s face this allows for the the idea that she is not quite in the light and not quite in the dark, alluding to the idea that she is in this purgatory between life and death. This is particularly effective when Mary goes to visit the old abandoned carnival sight, the home of the ghostly souls that haunt her.

Overall Herk Harvey’s Carnival of Souls uses the highly effective film making techniques of high angle shots and shadows to create a suspenseful and thrilling narrative that keeps audiences on the edge of their seats.

The second thing that we discussed this week that I would like to talk more about is Mark Jancovich’s essay titled Cult Fictions: Cult movies, subcultural capital and the production of cultural distinctions. While I covered most of it while leading the reading discussion this week I found this particular reading very interesting. I really found Jancovich’s points about the issues of defining the ‘Other’ to be quite confusing at first but upon the fifth re-reading it was very fascinating. From what I understood the ‘Other’ he is talking about, in the most simple and naive terms, is the other side of the audience from the cult film viewers, the mainstream and the block buster participants. However Jancovich’s biggest criticism is the fact that there isn’t just one classic cult film fan mold that we all fit into that allows the “other” side to be so cut and dry and its wrong to say that there is. It is the beautiful quilt of niche genres and fandoms that allows the cult film community to be so interesting and diverse. In this quilt we are divided into patches of horror lovers, sci-fi nerds, people that just like the weird movies about friends, and many other groups. It is because we are so divided in these patches that we often see the patch next to us as the ‘other’ side instead of this completely separate blanket of the mainstream. Jancovich’s main argument is that it is naive and ignorant to just define the ‘other’ as this outside source and only think of our own cult community as a one solid blanket, instead of the patchwork of ideas and genres that make the community the beautiful quilt it is.