Post by petrolino on Dec 9, 2017 1:46:01 GMT
David Lynch, George Romero, Tobe Hooper and Wes Craven are among the many horror filmmakers who cited this movie as an inspiration. Craven co-executive produced a loose remake in the 1990s starring horror icon Shawnee Smith. 'Carnival Of Souls' is directed with flair by industrial filmmaker Herk Harvey who mounts some atmospheric sequences. Its influence extends to all genres but it's the dark shadow it cast across modern horror that's been most visible.
Fun fact : Harvey's assistant director Reza Badiyi was also an assistant in his early days to Robert Altman. Badiyi married screenwriter Barbara Turner, making him step-father to Jennifer Jason Leigh, star of Altman's dramas 'Short Cuts' (1993) and 'Kansas City' (1996), as well as Alan Rudolph's biopic 'Mrs Parker And The Vicious Circle' (1994) which Altman co-produced.
"Carnival of Souls" is an odd, obscure horror film that was made on a low budget in 1962 in Lawrence, Kan., and still has an intriguing power. Like a lost episode from "Twilight Zone," it places the supernatural right in the middle of everyday life and surrounds it with ordinary people. The movie is being revived in art houses around the country for Halloween, and it's possible that it plays better today than when it was released. It ventures to the edge of camp, but never strays across the line, taking itself with an eerie seriousness. The movie stars Candace Hilligoss, one of those worried blonds like Janet Leigh in "Psycho," (1960) as a young woman who goes along for the ride when two hot-rodders hold a drag race."
- Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
"In the sixteenth century, the medieval notion of purgatory as a physical place started losing favor to a broader conceptualization of it as a liminal state of being. As the centuries wore on and Dante’s seven-terraced description of purgatory in The Divine Comedy was increasingly accepted as allegorical, even within the church itself, the concept called attention to other relationships that were appearing in newly emerging secular philosophy and psychology—such as those between the sleeper and the dream world, the existentialist and the Absurd. Those ideologies challenged the objective physical definition of “place” itself, posing the question of how much of our experience unfolds solely within the confines of our own imaginations. The mutability of place and the disconnection from one’s sense of it form the central concern of Herk Harvey’s elegiac 1962 cult horror film Carnival of Souls. While two decades of experimental cinema had already been replicating dream states prior to its release, this low-budget, independent marvel was a pioneer of the purgatorial horror subgenre—along with the 1960 Twilight Zone episode “The Hitchhiker” and the Oscar-winning 1962 short film adaptation of Ambrose Bierce’s 1890 story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”—which has continued through films as disparate in ambition as Lost Highway (1997), The Sixth Sense (1999), and The Oregonian (2011)."
- Kier La-Janisse, The Criterion Collection
- Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
"In the sixteenth century, the medieval notion of purgatory as a physical place started losing favor to a broader conceptualization of it as a liminal state of being. As the centuries wore on and Dante’s seven-terraced description of purgatory in The Divine Comedy was increasingly accepted as allegorical, even within the church itself, the concept called attention to other relationships that were appearing in newly emerging secular philosophy and psychology—such as those between the sleeper and the dream world, the existentialist and the Absurd. Those ideologies challenged the objective physical definition of “place” itself, posing the question of how much of our experience unfolds solely within the confines of our own imaginations. The mutability of place and the disconnection from one’s sense of it form the central concern of Herk Harvey’s elegiac 1962 cult horror film Carnival of Souls. While two decades of experimental cinema had already been replicating dream states prior to its release, this low-budget, independent marvel was a pioneer of the purgatorial horror subgenre—along with the 1960 Twilight Zone episode “The Hitchhiker” and the Oscar-winning 1962 short film adaptation of Ambrose Bierce’s 1890 story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”—which has continued through films as disparate in ambition as Lost Highway (1997), The Sixth Sense (1999), and The Oregonian (2011)."
- Kier La-Janisse, The Criterion Collection
Fun fact : Harvey's assistant director Reza Badiyi was also an assistant in his early days to Robert Altman. Badiyi married screenwriter Barbara Turner, making him step-father to Jennifer Jason Leigh, star of Altman's dramas 'Short Cuts' (1993) and 'Kansas City' (1996), as well as Alan Rudolph's biopic 'Mrs Parker And The Vicious Circle' (1994) which Altman co-produced.
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The Saltair amusement park looked forbidding. You guys did a great job filming it. I almost felt like it was this other worldly place faraway from civilization. What an ingenious choice of location. The likes of Eli Roth can learn a thing or two from you guys.
