Trailer
Plot summary
Mary Henry is riding with two other young women in Kansas when a pair of men in another car challenge them to race. The women's car is knocked off a bridge into a muddy river, and three hours later, after police begin dredging, Mary surfaces on the bank with no memory of how she survived. She moves to Salt Lake City to take a job playing the organ at a church. Driving past an abandoned lakeside pavilion, she sees a ghoulish, pale-faced man who keeps appearing to her. In a department store she becomes invisible and inaudible to everyone around her. At her boarding house she meets her landlady, Mrs. Thomas, and a fellow lodger, John Linden. The church's minister drives her out to the pavilion but will not let her inside.
Cast
- Sidney Bergeras John Linden
- Frances Feistas Mrs. Thomas - Landlady
- Stan Levittas Dr. Samuels
- Tom McGinnisas Organ Factory Boss
- Forbes Caldwellas Carpenter in Organ Factory
- Dan Palmquistas Gas Station Attendant
- Bill de Jarnetteas Mechanic
- Steve Boozeras Chip - Man at Juke Box
- Pamela Ballardas Dress Saleslady
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Carnival of Souls (1962)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Herk Harvey, a director of industrial films for Centron Corporation in Lawrence, Kansas, got the idea for Carnival of Souls while driving past the abandoned Saltair Pavilion in Salt Lake City. He told writer John Clifford the last scene had to be ghouls dancing in that ballroom, and Clifford wrote the script in three weeks.
- With no money for a process screen to fake rear projection inside a moving car, Herk Harvey shot the car interiors with a battery-powered hand-held Arriflex camera, a type then used mainly for newsreels, which also let him move the camera without dollies or cranes.
- Herk Harvey raised the $17,000 cash budget of Carnival of Souls by asking local businessmen to invest $500 each, and the remaining $13,000 of the $30,000 total was deferred. He rented the Saltair Pavilion for $50 and shot scenes like the department store guerrilla style, paying off locals to let the crew film quickly.
- The scene where the car plunges off a bridge into the river was filmed in Lecompton, Kansas, where the town charged no fee but required the crew to replace the bridge's damaged rails, which cost $12.
- Candace Hilligoss, a twenty-six-year-old Lee Strasberg-trained actress Harvey found in New York City, turned down a role in the horror film Violent Midnight to take the lead in Carnival of Souls, later calling it a "take-the-money-and-run type of situation"; she was paid about $2,000.
- The US release prints of Carnival of Souls carried no copyright notice, putting the film in the public domain, while the foreign release marketed by Walter Manley did carry a copyright card and stayed protected overseas.
- The shot of The Man's face appearing in the car window was done with an angled mirror placed on the far side of the window.
- Herk Harvey's assistant director on Carnival of Souls was Reza Badiyi, a young Iranian immigrant who had been second-unit director on Robert Altman's debut The Delinquents and went on to create iconic TV openings and montages for Hawaii Five-O, Get Smart and The Mary Tyler Moore Show.
