Carnival of Souls vs. Conservative Horror

“In the beginning, things are okay. Then something unusual turns up – a vampire,  werewolf, an alien, a monster of some sort, a guy in a hockey mask- and everything is a mess. But someone figure out how to solve the problem, and in the end, things are pretty much where they were in the beginning.” - Welch Everman, on conservative horror films.

In order to ensure success and revenue when producing horror films, most filmmakers resort to copying films that have already made money. And by copying these films, they also wind up conveying certain conservative world views. Horror films may be conservative in very specific ways, such as “in their treatment of women as helpless, powerless victims or in their view of anyone who is different as dangerous and deserving death.” Or they may be conservative simply in ideology; generally speaking, most horror filmmakers follow a basic formula which “assumes that the way things are is the way things ought to be, and so the goal of the movie is to get everything back to the way it was, back to normal.”

What I enjoyed most about Harvey’s Carnival of Souls was the fact that it doesn’t follow your basic horror-film formula. In fact, it pretty much completely goes against the grain of what Everman would consider to be ‘conservative horror,’ i.e. horror created with the intention of making a quick buck. For starters, nothing in Carnival of Souls was never okay – the movie started out with a car full of young women going over the edge of a bridge and plummeting to their deaths. It can be argued that “The Man” is the formula’s “something unusual” that turns up, but considering the fact that he is never truly a threat to the protagonist nor is his arrival what turns her life into a mess, I wouldn’t consider it so. And in the end, nothing ever gets back to normal. The goal of the movie is never to return the character to normal, although that may be her goal, but rather to convey the struggles she goes through as she tries to navigate life in the purgatory state she’s unaware of entering.

Ultimately, I feel that the originality of Harvey’s plot is what separates it from other horror movies of its time, which has thus earned its cult following. The ‘aura’ that Walter Benjamin mentions in his essay, that indefinable something that sets it apart from everything else, has a lot to do with the structure of the movie and the world that Harvey creates around his main character. Although the threat posed seems to be “The Man” whom Mary constantly sees, the world around her is much more dangerous than he ever proves to be. From the men who seem to be essentially in control of her life – the priest with her profession, the neighbor with her comfort, and the doctor with her credibility – to the bouts of time spent in confused detachment from the rest of the world, we see Mary in direct conflict more with her surroundings than with “The Man.” It’s the journey between worlds in this movie that truly defines everything, giving it this sort of hazy aura that can only be achieved by the fact that the ending doesn’t offer resolution in the way we expect, but rather with the revelation of this purgatory state and the protagonist finally bridging the gap between the two worlds.