Carnival Of Souls is like if you were in a world where you must find the greatest horror movies around and you start driving along the freeway and see a big abandoned carnival in the distance, you know you just hit an underrated jackpot.
Carnival of Souls tells a simple story on the surface about a woman who survives a fatal car crash that ends up falling into a river and drowning for quite some time. She holds the job as a Church Organist and now she must travel to another town to play as their organist for Church. The only scary part, creepy phantoms start popping up all over.
As a person who despises horror films, I cannot watch this film the second time and for a good reason. It's haunting about it's message and how it portrays anti-social people. Here we have a woman who hates being around people because she's strong willed. (Ha, the dumbest horror character to be honest out of all 10 horror films I've seen in my life.) Since she's anti-social, she doesn't do anything with people. But, the way we sympathize with her is that we start seeing these phantoms also and we feel bad for her when people like the flirting neighbor starts to leave her alone because they ran out of respect for her. She is constantly losing every single person that knows her. In the end, she starts dancing with the phantoms which represents herself that she is also like them and at the end they take her and she disappears the next day. What could this mean? Well now you know. She was basically like a phantom, a person who doesn't socialize with people and disappears on the face of the earth since nobody could remember her. And that fear for being alone makes it so terrifying.
I also love to discuss a scene in this film that I highly enjoyed a lot and is one of the techniques I haven't seen been put into use in films, the dream sequence. Now there is no arguing this is one of the most realistic nightmare scenes ever made. Our main character drives into a garage to get her car fixed, the machine pulls her up into the air so the repairman could repair the parts underneath the car. She falls asleep. Then, a light appears through the window, she sees a mysterious shadow and who knows if it was the phantom? The car starts going down and she quickly gets out of the car and starts running out as far as she could. We didn't see the phantom, nothing happened. She was trying to talk with people, nobody listened to her. And at the end, she goes to the doctor's office to talk about her issues again and it was shown that it was actually the phantom. She then wakes her up. Now let's explain this in the way the director did. He never cuts the scene of her sleeping first off, the light just appears during that shot. And she runs away right? She's at the train station and we, the audience are like okay. Then everything starts going back into focus and she can hear everything. But, how did she travel from the park to the doctor's office? How did she get anywhere if we never seen her actually do it. No doubt this is the best dream sequence because everybody actually fell for it. This is an important film for the horror genre as it shows the fear of being alone but also create build one of the most realistic dream sequences of all time. Hats off to this guy. Legendary film.
Carnival of Souls tells a simple story on the surface about a woman who survives a fatal car crash that ends up falling into a river and drowning for quite some time. She holds the job as a Church Organist and now she must travel to another town to play as their organist for Church. The only scary part, creepy phantoms start popping up all over.
As a person who despises horror films, I cannot watch this film the second time and for a good reason. It's haunting about it's message and how it portrays anti-social people. Here we have a woman who hates being around people because she's strong willed. (Ha, the dumbest horror character to be honest out of all 10 horror films I've seen in my life.) Since she's anti-social, she doesn't do anything with people. But, the way we sympathize with her is that we start seeing these phantoms also and we feel bad for her when people like the flirting neighbor starts to leave her alone because they ran out of respect for her. She is constantly losing every single person that knows her. In the end, she starts dancing with the phantoms which represents herself that she is also like them and at the end they take her and she disappears the next day. What could this mean? Well now you know. She was basically like a phantom, a person who doesn't socialize with people and disappears on the face of the earth since nobody could remember her. And that fear for being alone makes it so terrifying.
I also love to discuss a scene in this film that I highly enjoyed a lot and is one of the techniques I haven't seen been put into use in films, the dream sequence. Now there is no arguing this is one of the most realistic nightmare scenes ever made. Our main character drives into a garage to get her car fixed, the machine pulls her up into the air so the repairman could repair the parts underneath the car. She falls asleep. Then, a light appears through the window, she sees a mysterious shadow and who knows if it was the phantom? The car starts going down and she quickly gets out of the car and starts running out as far as she could. We didn't see the phantom, nothing happened. She was trying to talk with people, nobody listened to her. And at the end, she goes to the doctor's office to talk about her issues again and it was shown that it was actually the phantom. She then wakes her up. Now let's explain this in the way the director did. He never cuts the scene of her sleeping first off, the light just appears during that shot. And she runs away right? She's at the train station and we, the audience are like okay. Then everything starts going back into focus and she can hear everything. But, how did she travel from the park to the doctor's office? How did she get anywhere if we never seen her actually do it. No doubt this is the best dream sequence because everybody actually fell for it. This is an important film for the horror genre as it shows the fear of being alone but also create build one of the most realistic dream sequences of all time. Hats off to this guy. Legendary film.