CARNIVAL OF SOULS 1961
This is the Saturday Night Fright Midnight movie for the ITSALWAYSABOUTTHEMUSIC episode of The Friday Night Radio Horror Program presented by Odd FM W. O. D. D. Royal Oak
NIGHT OF THE COMET 1984
This is the Saturday Night Fright Midnight movie for The Strawberry Moon episode of The Friday Night Radio Horror Program presented by Odd FM W. O. D. D. Royal Oak https://www.mixcloud.com/OddFM/strawberry-moon/
Carnival Of Fear (1962)
ReplyDeleteDon’t expect gore and the usual graveyards and creepy castles. This is an intriguing movie in a contemporary setting that gets increasingly unsettling and disorientating. It begins with three girls in a car crashing off a bridge and disappearing into a river. Rescuers can’t find the car but hours later passenger Mary appears by the bridge as the sole survivor. She can’t explain how and the film reveals what follows. She’s a professional church organist and soon leaves town for a new role in Utah where she encounters The Carnival, an abandoned dance hall/theme park in the middle of the salt flats, where her haunting by The Man, a creature of ghoulish appearance, begins.
She experiences incidents, which may be real or hallucinatory, entering a silent world where she is mute and invisible to people around her. She’s unsure if this is her imagination from the stress of the car crash or a new reality.
In both worlds she’s stalked by The Man despite her increasingly desperate attempts to escape him. There is a sense of foreboding, almost an inevitability, that she will not succeed.
Drawn back to The Carnival she encounters a macabre ball where many ghouls dance together including her double in the arms of The Man. Terrified, she is chased outside, falls and is caught by the ghouls. We no longer see her. Later a search party finds Mary’s footprints from the chase and a single hand print in the sand but no further trace. She has literally disappeared into thin air. The movie ends back at the bridge and river where the car has finally been located and is being winched out. Inside are the three dead girls, including Mary.
The film with its creepy, discordant organ soundtrack is widely regarded as a Cult Classic and could be said to warn of of our own mortality, reminding us that Death is always waiting to snatch us away. It also raises many questions. Mary has died in the crash yet somehow has come back. Is she a ghost, although a flesh and blood ghost that can drive a car, play the organ in church, go on a date with her pervy neighbour, try on dresses in a shop, drink coffee and be grabbed by the arms by her doctor? Who is The Man and why does he stalk Mary? What happens to her when The Carnival ghouls finally trap her?
These are deep metaphysical issues, questions on the nature of reality and the transition between the realms of the Living and the Dead. But it’s way past midnight, dawn approaches and so time for the Fright Master to once more snooze in his coffin of earth from the Carpathian Mountains. Until next Saturday fellow fright lovers…
Oops! It's Carnival of Souls not Fear! Apologies, but I was very, very drunk...
ReplyDeleteHey Monica, I realised the review of Carnival is way too long and Oggy will get a dry mouth and sore throat attempting it. Here's a condensed version around the same length as House on Haunted Hill...
ReplyDeleteCarnival of Souls (1962)
Avoiding typical horror tropes, this intriguing film invokes a contemporary, unsettling vibe. Three girls crash their car off a bridge into a river. Hours later, only Mary reappears, unable to explain her survival. A church organist, she moves to Utah, discovering an abandoned theme park, The Carnival, in remote salt flats and begins to be haunted by a ghoulish figure - The Man.
Mary experiences strange incidents, entering a world where mute and invisible. Unsure if these are hallucinations or a new reality, she’s stalked relentlessly by The Man. Despite desperate attempts to escape, there's a sense of inevitable doom. Drawn back to The Carnival, she encounters a macabre ghoul’s ball, seeing her double in The Man's arms. Terrified, she is chased and caught by the ghouls, disappearing completely. A search party later finds her footprints and a handprint but no other trace. The movie ends with the car being found in the river, containing the bodies of all three girls, including Mary.
With its eerie, discordant organ soundtrack, this cult classic explores the boundary between life and death, raising many questions. Mary has died in the crash yet comes back. Is she a flesh and blood ghost who drives, plays the organ, and dates her pervy neighbor? Who is The Man? What happens when the ghouls finally trap her?
Deep metaphysical questions my friends. But it’s way past midnight, dawn approaches, and it’s time for the Fright Master to snooze in his Carpathian coffin. Until next Saturday, fellow fright lovers…
I'm glad you cut it down. I read it when I woke up this morning. The content is good, but I read it with Oggies voice in my head and it seemed like a lot.
DeleteOk, so I was a little worried at the beginning of the movie. The audio dubbing is so weird in the first scene that I thought I was watching the MST3k version until I realized they weren't saying anything funny. Luckily it's only in the opening.
ReplyDeleteThis movie really has it all. The movie goes 0-60 in the first 24 seconds with a "Rebel Without a Cause" style chicken race. The pinnacle moment is when the two ramblers race up the bridge, but Mary's car doesn't quite make it. Her car flies off the bridge and lands in a lake where there must be a radioactive substance. The search party can't find anything, but down the embankment a ways, a lake creature has taken the shape of Mary and now emerges muddy on the bank. The doppelganger lake creature tries to hide out at a pipe organ factory. The workers there are amazed by it's skill and send it off to work playing a pipe organ at a church in Salt Lake City.
Mary's doppelganger uses the clout of the job working for the church to gain a room at a boarding house where a drunkard who lives across the hall can't tell that she's not human at first and tries desperately to ask her out on a date, but the lake creature that looks like Mary doesn't know how to have human fun. In the end, she is lured to the Under the Sea Ball by the body snatcher creatures of the Salt Lake. She was rejected by the church, fell out pretty quickly with the land lady and creepy neighbor guy, confused the doctor, and probably scared the mechanic when she fell off of the hoist. The reality is, body snatching lake creatures, try as they may, just don't belong in human society. They belong with other lake creatures. She eventually finds her way to her own kind and the mystery of the real Mary is closed when her body is finally found.
Total classic.
~MM
I hadn’t considered radiation but it’s a compelling explanation as it was an obsession in the early 60’s and would have caused lake monsters. I did have a half baked beer induced fever dream that The Man represented the Patriarchy, intent on disappearing Mary as a single, independent woman with her own career and life plans. She shoulda been a kinda Stepford Wife instead of driving her own car and playing the church organ and The Man had to fix that. BTW, did you know that in the 60’s in UK a woman had to leave her job as soon as she married because a job would distract her from being a good wife!
DeleteI thought The Man sort of embodied her fears. She literally follows the music to SLC. The Man and his friends don't really try to harm her or communicate anything to her. They are purely accepting and seem to want her to join them. I took it to mean that her "spirit" has sort of driven off the bridge in Wyle E. Coyote fashion and coasts on for a while not looking down. It takes her a few days of hanging out around Salt Lake City sort of alienated and disjointed. She floats around able to interact in ways, but can't eat, drink or buy anything. She's of great concern to doctors, priests, and police while still effecting the corporal world around her. I see the carnival as the "tunnel of light" and that her consciousness is drifting towards it. As she gets closer she experiences sensory blackouts. She's loses connection with the real world until she finally makes it to the beach at the old resort and disappears to join the others. That part of the story reminds me a lot of the ghosts in the ballroom of the hotel in The Shining.
DeleteThink about this. If she's dreaming, or ethereal. Whatever the case may be... in the scene where she's at the mechanic, she falls out the car after daydreaming she saw The Man at the Doctor's Office. She had a dream within a dream. That's some Inception/Nightmare on Elm St. level dream mechanics for a 1961 movie.
They probably just had a script about a chick that has a psychotic break and they wanted it to outsell Psycho, so they slapped a "and she was dead the whole time" plot twist onto it. After watching this, I really wanted to watch Repulsion.
Repulsion Trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jdUAZ-tstk
We have it scheduled for some time in September. I was tempted to move it to next week, but Night of the Comet is one of my favorite movies, so I made the song for Night of the Comet instead.
~MM
Carnival definitely invites interpretations and is just a whole lot deeper than the usual Hammer horrors. There's something extra about monochrome for spooky films, maybe it's a bit more atmospheric and subtle. Repulsion looks like it's a quality classic from the reviews in the trailer and it's a Polanski so we can expect something special. I'm guessing she's going to be giving some of those guys a "close shave" with that cut throat razor...
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