2000:

directed by Herk Harvey
written by John Clifford

Criterion #63.

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I’m going to pick up from last time. This is after all a sort of diary.

Of Joan of Arc I asked, “What is this for?” That’s my recurring skepticism when I’m emotionally taxed by a serious movie: “Let’s make sure we’re not locking ourselves into a paradigm of difficulty by getting too fond of ‘confronting’ the difficult.”

But difficulty is in the eye of the beholder. So the skepticism has something essentially to do with me. Otherwise I wouldn’t feel the need to express it.

A phrase came to mind today from John Williams’s novel Stoner (which, note, I have never actually read beyond the first couple chapters): surrounded by righteous public fervor about World War I, the protagonist “discovered within himself a vast reserve of indifference.” This reserve, which I think we all have, is a precious resource, the font of serenity. But it’s also something that we are under considerable social pressure to deny, as that wartime context suggests.

A few months ago the New York Times Magazine ran a “riff” praising Stoner, in which a detractor (described as “an elderly gentleman… in a state of high dudgeon”) was quoted, addressing a book group: “Why should I read about this loser? He refuses to fight for his country… He never does anything.”

That guy’s irritation stuck with me, and today, I found myself responding to him in my head: You don’t have to read this book or any other, but perhaps you would benefit from reading this one exactly because you object to it. Read it with the ambition not of coming to love it, but of becoming indifferent to it. The only reason you would ever feel the need to object to something as inconsequential as a book is because some form of denial has cut you off from your natural reserve of indifference. The irritating book can serve as a useful tool for sanding down that denial. Which will improve your quality of life.

Something along those lines.

When I was in elementary school, the idea that I could ever “hate” any TV show seemed absurd, something like “hating” particular raisins in a box of raisins. Nonetheless I felt social pressure to have some “shows I hated” up my sleeve, so I got used to exaggerating my disinterested opinions into a display of phony riled-up emotion. Mr. Rogers is so stupid! Ha ha ha! Cut to the present day: a lot of the time I genuinely can’t remember whether things actually bother me, or if I’m just saying they do to hide my underlying indifference.

Ultimately it comes to the same thing: if I claim to be bothered by, say, a movie’s choices, what I am really bothered by, one way or the other, is some form of my own denial. Otherwise I would just shrug. Shrugging is a much more pleasant experience than complaining.

The cranky man who didn’t like Stoner nicely embodies the problem, since his objection is, specifically, that he doesn’t want to read about some loser who wasn’t angry enough to fight. Both in form and content, he is committed to denying the capacity for indifference.

So when I claim to object to something as unsurprising as The Passion of Joan of Arc, what do I reveal? (“Unsurprising” as in “I wouldn’t be surprised”; its existence on earth poses me no puzzles, is readily dreamt of in my philosophy.) At its root, my denial is the same as the elderly gentleman’s: I simply don’t want to admit how easy it is for me to not care about things.

But my specific stated objection is to what I see as an over-fondness for “confronting” hard emotions. So the denial, I guess, would be of the fact that I live in a world where many many people do subscribe to just that. Including me, sometimes; including me during the movie. I can’t just argue it away. Watching Joan of Arc I did feel moved, and then wished I hadn’t been. Saying “maybe there shouldn’t be movies like this” as though it’s purely intellectual criticism is an attempt to deny the real feeling: “I am ashamed of myself that I was moved by this.”

Becoming less irritable, less critical, doesn’t mean “confronting” anything. It means releasing the impulse to deny that these things, and my responses to them, simply are. It means being indifferent to them the way I was indifferent to, say, Silver Spoons, a TV show about which I have never in my life taken the time to say a bad word. Why would I start now?

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This is really getting out of hand. For the love of god, say something about Carnival of Souls already!

Well, here’s how I wanted to segue: All horror movies are designed to grate, to make the viewer uneasy. A horror movie is a kind of machine for eliciting objection; not critical objection, but emotional objection. And so, following on the logic above, I think an effective horror movie has to pick at some form of denial. If you’re serenely indifferent to its scares, they’ll just seem like so much Scooby-Doo, and if you’re serenely displeased by them, you’ll simply and calmly turn the movie off. Whereas if you are getting through your life in a state of denial, a horror movie will be able to successfully trouble you, get into your dreams, go to work on you with that heavy duty sandpaper. So the question about a horror movie might be: what form of denial does it target?

The obvious scab to pick at is the denial of death, which would seem to be the most essentially universal denial. But it’s not uniformly universal. I find that my own personal state of death denial fluctuates greatly day to day and moment to moment. My responses to horror movies are a way of gauging this fluctuation: sometimes the threat of cinematic death feels like a terrible pressure on me, really turns my gut and makes me sweat. Other times that same gut blithely assures me that it’s all just Punch and Judy, army men. Sometimes, in fact, when I feel particularly at peace with the world, my gut tells me that so too will my own death just be a kind of final bop on the head, after all, and that there is nothing to know about it that I don’t already. Those days are rare but getting more common, I’m proud to say.

From here we could easily hop off on to today’s movie: Carnival of Souls is rather explicitly about this kind of denial. If you get my drift. If you trawl my car.

But the more interesting forms of denial prodded by horror movies are not to do with our ultimate fates; more to do with our present existential condition. Such as:

That we are a kind of animal; that we are fragile; that we are made of biological matter, or even just physical matter; that the Earth is what it is in relation to the universe and the universe is what it is in relation to the Earth; that interpersonal relationships are contingent and changeable; that the social order is contingent and changeable; etc. etc. etc.

I think it is perfectly possible to be genuinely at peace with all these things, but it is very common to be in denial of them. From the outside, these two states look more or less the same. Apart from horror movies, nightmares, and emergencies, we don’t have a lot of occasions to expose the difference.

So. Despite the rather traditional motif of “death and the beyond,” I think Carnival of Souls actually gets at a form of denial that is one of the hardest for us to transcend, and yet the most rewarding: denial that consciousness itself, our sense of inner and outer reality, is contingent and changeable, and absolutely uncorroborated.

Do you know who you are, and where you are, and what’s going on, and whether it makes sense? Accepting that you might not and you might never — normalizing that idea — can be very upsetting. People don’t just get into a high dudgeon about it, they put each other into mental institutions to keep it locked safely away. But if you can normalize it, you allow yourself access to a great existential serenity.

This I think has always been the appeal to me of Alice in Wonderland and Yellow Submarine and all such phantasmagorias: they offer a dose of normalization to all the ways in which, like it or not, life is but a dream. The ideal such work takes place in a zone that is safe and dangerous in equal measure, as in some ways Alice and Yellow Submarine both are. Or think of Twin Peaks. Whereas Carnival of Souls is exclusively a horror movie, isolating and ominous. And yet it can’t help but have a kind of a subterranean reassuring quality: the coziness, the trust, of being allowed to admit that consciousness can be creepy and unreliable. Come to think of it, maybe that’s why I enjoy returning even to someplace as nightmarish as The Shining: because to be inside a dream always lifts the burden of denial, no matter how bad the dream itself. It relieves us of our anxieties of madness.

This zone I’m talking about, it’s a kind of middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition. In a sense, it’s as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It lies between the pit of man’s fears and the height of his knowledge. Do you see what I’m saying here?

Carnival of Souls is Twilight Zone material done in something close to a Twilight Zone spirit. It shares with The Twilight Zone that it manages to evoke the tightly limited reality of a short story. My imagination has always found it easiest to stretch out, to really experience wonder and fear, when I’m given only a relatively bare outline. (Maybe this is an example of the old Scott McCloud idea about iconicity, though it doesn’t quite feel that way to me.) There’s something about the clearly-demarcated function in mid-century short stories that leaves them feeling potent, whereas a lot of mimetic ambition can tend to siphon off a story’s power. (I still haven’t finished Mimesis either. Many books to finish.)

A lot of movies have way more needless ornament than would the corresponding short story. This one doesn’t. Apart from The Twilight Zone I’m not sure what else I could point to that shares that strength.

Production cost about $17,000, making this probably the all-time aesthetic-bang-for-your-buck award winner. The photography is simple and thus effective. The movie is simple and thus effective.

The pitch: the distant blonde who doesn’t really know herself — you know, the one from movies — goes into a trance and montage time begins to trickle over her face. Someone keeps looking at her. She keeps looking at a building. Someone is definitely haunting, or being haunted by, something else. Maybe she’s doomed. Maybe none of this makes sense. Maybe this isn’t “life,” exactly. Maybe it’s just a quick and dirty low budget movie made on an artsy lark by industrial filmmakers from Kansas. Maybe being doomed doesn’t necessarily mean you’re heading toward anything. Maybe doom isn’t so bad after all.

That’s one pitch. Alternate pitch: Betty Draper’s Bogus Journey.

If that doesn’t sound good to you, then this movie isn’t for you. It sounds good to me, and I’ve come to really like the movie. When I first watched it a few years ago, I was afraid it might unnverve me badly. It didn’t. It is genuinely creepy, but that’s a friendly thing. I talk about being averse to untrustworthy movies; this is the opposite: I’m willing to let you jump-scare me if I trust you. In Carnival of Souls I can tell that behind the camera are non-sleazes.

Behind the camera, in fact, is a guy who reminds me vaguely of my grandfather, and so does his art ethic, in a way. A steady-handed, contented American type, not unaware that life has troubling depths, but secure in his position many well-stratified layers above them.

I said last time that you’d have to be an extreme person to make The Passion of Joan of Arc, and that I never would. Carnival of Souls is certainly “weird” but I can readily imagine myself making it (assuming I were a filmmaker in Lawrence, Kansas in 1961). Extremity is relative, of course. To me, this doesn’t feel emotionally extreme. But maybe that’s just because it falls in the zone of my personal emotional extremity. Maybe I should fess up: this movie doesn’t actually seem weird to me at all.

I mean, it’s tremendously cheap and doesn’t all work and has moments of really sloppy amateur writing, acting, directing, editing, everything. Stuff that would be laughable under other circumstances; and maybe even under these circumstances. For the first few minutes, it is nearly indistinguishable from the very saddest sort of Mystery Science Theater fodder. But over time it shows that it is reliable at some basic level where those movies aren’t, even as it wanders around humming to itself like a child. In the commentary, Herk Harvey notes, rather sagely, that part of its appeal and power is in its amateurish surface. Even if that’s not necessarily true, I respect him for being able to see that it might be.

The movie doesn’t have anything to say and it doesn’t do anything that isn’t done elsewhere with more skill. It’s fairly goofy. But it dreams its dream without wavering, which is a rare thing. I can dream along with it if I’m in the mood. Good enough for me.

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This is a rather substantial 2-disc set from Criterion. Disc 1 has the 1962 distributor’s cut of the movie, with about 7 minutes edited out to keep the pace and interest up (and to allow it to be shown in a drive-in double-feature with The Devil’s Messenger). The cuts are intelligent and don’t really hurt the movie or remove anything of significance; they might in fact help it overall, very mildly. Disc 2 has the director’s original longer cut, restored for its 1989 revival. The shorter copy seems to be in slightly better shape, visually, though that might be my imagination.

It seems a little unnecessary for Criterion to have sprung for 2 discs just so we’d have the choice between seeing this movie with or without these mostly inconsequential 7 minutes, though I do respect the integrity of this presentation. In any case, I didn’t consider it necessary to actually watch both versions all the way through, just so I could feel the very subtle difference. I poked around and got the gist.

We get some unpretentious commentary by writer and director, but there’s only about 30 minutes of audio there, spread out with gaps, which can be a little frustrating to sit through. Then there are are two early ’90s segments from local Kansas TV about the movie, including footage from the 1989 reunion screening that gives a nice strong sense of the essential midwestern small-towniness of the whole project. The occasion looks more or less like my home town, gathering in the school auditorium to see someone’s show because why not, and happening to see something better than usual. I like this kind of art, art that doesn’t come out of art communities, but out of the latent artistic intelligence of other kinds of communities. (The false note in Waiting for Guffman is that they’re all supposedly eager for Guffman, the voice of higher showbiz, to validate them. I don’t think that’s ever the motivation for people in those situations.)

The artists here are all good decent Kansas folks, plus exactly one ringer, a movie-glamorous actress hired from New York. Part of the reason the movie works is because Candace Hilligoss, with lips and cheekbones to match and coming to you straight from the Lee Strasberg studio, is so spookily different a being from all the calmly textureless non-professional non-actors around her. Also, because she is talented! She’s in nearly every shot and she carries it all, despite being very much in the middle of nowhere, doing her own stunts and hair and makeup for someone’s tiny hometown project. Not to mention staring into space, saying strange things, seeing ghouls, and screaming. I felt a little bit irritated at the somewhat condescending, impersonal way in which she’s praised by the director and documentarian, dwelling on how she didn’t want to get in the freezing river and had to be forced. Well, what about how she gamely did everything else? It’s her damn movie! And she didn’t really have any others, so can’t we all give her this one?

I think what might be going on there is just garden-variety midwestern chilliness toward glammed-up cityfolk. That was probably a pronounced undercurrent at Centron Corporation, the industrial film production company where the filmmakers worked, competing against the smug coasts.

But all the same, everybody involved comes across as friendly and human, and deepened my sense that this is a friendly human movie, some kind of a spooky Kansas cousin to my backyard video experiments of childhood.

There are also 40 minutes of outtakes, which are nice if you like outtakes, but that’s all they are, and 40 minutes is a long time. You get to see ghouls break character in the middle of being eerie, which is fun I guess. This is accompanied by the score (see below), but mostly as ripped from the movie, with some effects and dialogue. (If you want to hear it in the clear you need to find a copy of this CD.)

The biggest bonus feature is an hour worth of excerpts from Centron Corporation films. I have seen my fair share of educational and industrial films over the years, in both serious and parody contexts, but this was the first time that the people responsible were so fully humanized. Watching this kind of thing with an emphasis on the studio that produced it, I felt a kind of envy for the job these guys all had, at once workaday and genuinely creative. They got to churn out movie after movie on every conceivable subject (well, every conceivable boring subject). The weird whimsy of some of those movies, the “Well, Johnny, have you ever thought about what it would be like to be a tooth for a day?” writing, starts to make sense as a kind of wholesome enthusiasm for a quirky career. The more I watched, the more I felt hungry for Criterion or someone to do a whole set of such films, well-restored, with commentaries.

The extent of the curation here is that we get an essay profiling Centron as excerpted from this book, and then brief texts introducing: a travelogue promoting Kansas; a fisheye-lens zip around the film studio; a safety lesson for operators of Caterpillar construction equipment; promotion of the community education initiatives in Flint, Michigan (unfortunately titled “To Touch a Child”); a classroom film for McGraw Hill about the Greater and Lesser Antilles, shot on location; and a visit to the wonderful land of South Korea, circa 1980. They’re all staid and soporific and the color prints have all faded well toward red. It is all tremendously dull. And yet I felt like I was having my eyes newly opened to this familiar aesthetic: never before had I thought to think of it specifically as coming out of Kansans. Or for that matter out of Kansans who in their spare time made dream-like horror movies. There was something very stimulating to me about the fact that Carnival of Souls is demonstrably a direct sibling to Korea: Overview, and that the latter is a suitable companion piece on the DVD of the former. These real but counter-intuitive aesthetic relationships are among my favorite things to discover about culture: secret passages, steam tunnels.

I think we all agree that those classroom films are a kind of middle-American gothic, but it had never occurred to me that they might really be that, intentionally, with some kind of artistic integrity. I think people tend to feel that they are inventing for themselves what’s interesting about those films, that we are bringing our own Mad Magazine or MST3K cleverness to bear on something hollow, born out of some black hole of pure anonymous density. But those films were real and deliberate products from a real place, and the people in that place were not absurd drones but full and thoughtful human beings. Having a slightly fuller sense of who they were only deepens the daydream their work offers. Like some grandma’s living room with a deep pile carpet and butterscotches in the bowl. Sure, this may not be how you want to live, but what’s mysteriously enveloping about it is that it really is how someone lives. It’s not just a game.

Oh yeah and the disc also has some print interviews with the writer, the director, and the star, to be read off the screen. DVDs don’t do that sort of thing anymore, but they were good interviews and I didn’t mind pressing “next” to read them. Oh and I forgot there’s also an illustrated history of the Saltair resort outside Salt Lake City, which serves as the movie’s Devil’s Tower. Basically, there’s a lot of stuff in this set. That’s why this entry is so ridiculously long; I started it after I watched the movie once, but couldn’t finish it until I’d gotten through all that bonus stuff, which took a long time. Maybe too long a writing window for my own good. Or yours.

Almost done here, just a couple more bits of business to attend to. Let’s have another horizontal line.

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I haven’t mentioned yet that this is a movie widely asserted (by opportunists) to be in the public domain for lacking a copyright notice on its original release. Charade, already Criterioned, is the most beloved movie in this category; Carnival of Souls is probably number two. Number three is almost certainly House on Haunted Hill with Vincent Price (which has a proper notice but, so they say, was not properly renewed). I doubt Criterion will ever get around to that one, though one never knows.

This means that it’s on archive.org, ready for you to knock yourself out in both the long and short versions. (This high-quality copy seems to be have been ripped straight from the DVD, but it’s not streamable.) And it’s all over youtube; seek and ye shall find. There is naturally also a colorized version. And a fan apparently converted it to 3D, a mind-boggling task.

Just now I got a pickle out of a jar, and it looked to me like Herk Harvey coming out of the Great Salt Lake. That’s the power of art.

Connection to the previous movie. I guess I’m going to go with: a woman has visions that isolate her and compel her toward death. Or, if you prefer: a creepy guy looks straight into the camera.

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Our heroine is an organist, which gives the movie an excuse to show one of the neatest locations available in Lawrence, Kansas: the organ factory! That the score should be an organ solo follows naturally. It’s by one Gene Moore, another local, who apparently recorded it in the course of one morning, with minimal preparation, mostly improvising. It’s very confidently done and works excellently. I have to imagine that he had been a theater organist for silents, or had at least observed the craft closely in his childhood, because you can hear that it’s all done on instinct, very well-honed. People talk about how the organ contributes a unique ingredient to this movie’s particular mood; they forget that live organ was the soundtrack standard for decades. So here is an opportunity — I’m actually not sure how many such recorded opportunities there are — to hear what kind of a thing an improvised organ score was, and why for so many years it was counted on to provide an entire movie’s worth of atmosphere. Moore uses all the essential organ orchestrational tricks: juxtaposing material on the different keyboards, in different registrations, pushing and pulling on long sustained chords and clusters. It is disembodied and ethereal but still closely responsive to the action.

The musical centerpiece is a scene where Mary is supposed to playing church music but her inner creepshow takes over (“Profane!” exclaims the minister), and the longest continuous cue is a climactic merry-go-round-of-the-dead type thing — a “carnival of souls” I suppose you might call it — but those both end up being sort of formless to hear without the visual, so I’m just going to give you the relatively brief Main Title.

That soundtrack CD would be great for your haunted Halloween party. The whole movie would. It’s a peeled grapes and cold spaghetti kind of movie, with all that that implies. Butterscotch candies, too.