Programme notes CH 03 — The Haunted Screen
Carnival of Souls
A church organist survives a crash, moves west, and stops casting a shadow on the world.
Made for pocket change by a Kansas industrial-film director who never made another feature, and quietly one of the most influential horror films in the canon — Romero borrowed its dead, Lynch its atmosphere of a world one layer out of register. The abandoned Saltair pavilion is the great found location of the genre. Its dread is administrative: a woman who can no longer get the world to acknowledge receipt of her.
Credits — follow anyone
- Directed by
- Herk Harvey
- Photographed by
- Maurice Prather
- With
- Candace Hilligoss · Herk Harvey · Art Ellison
Every name is a door — each opens onto everything else that person made in the network.
The thread · every thread
Thirty-two years apart, two films about people nobody has told they are dead: a liner of well-mannered passengers in a studio fog, and a church organist driving west to Utah. Both let the audience guess a little before the dead do, and neither raises its voice.