Classic Films in Focus: CARNIVAL OF SOULS (1962)

Herk Harvey made Carnival of Souls (1962) in three weeks, with a budget of around $30,000. He came up with the idea, raised the money, directed the picture, helped write the screenplay, and even appeared in it, which says something about how much this production was his personal baby. Despite his love for the project, it flopped, even as a B horror picture on the drive-in circuit. Today, Carnival of Souls is regarded as a "cult classic," which means that people who weren't even born in 1962 caught the film on some late-night television airing and fell in love with it, partly for its charms but more likely for its sheer clunky weirdness. I won't call Carnival of Souls a great movie, or even a good one, but it doesn't exist in that "so bad it's good" territory, either, since its creator seems to take his work very seriously, indeed. There is, however, an artistic vision at work in the film, and the moments in which we glimpse that help to account for the movie’s reputation among certain groups of classic horror fans.

The movie is much more interested in images than story, but it does hang the pictures together on a very thin narrative thread. Organist Mary Henry (Candace Hilligoss) is involved in a car accident at the opening of the film, the result of a drag race between the female driver of Mary's car and some boys who pull up alongside them at a stoplight. The girls' car ends up in the river, and, long after the searchers assume it's too late, a bedraggled Mary wanders out of the water. People comment on her strange behavior, but she has a job offer in Utah, so she heads out, and along the way she begins to see visions of a frightening, ghoulish man. The visions become more unsettling after she arrives at her destination, and other strange things happen, as well. Nobody else seems to see the things Mary can see, and everyone who meets her is struck by her cold, anti-social demeanor. Drawn to an abandoned carnival ground, Mary hopes to dispel her rising hysteria by confronting her fears.

The performances in the movie don't merit much attention, overall, since Harvey used local talent as much as possible to save money, and it really shows, especially in the character of the doctor. Candace Hilligoss is fine as Mary; she seems stunned through most of the movie, and that's the right note for her to strike. She possesses an unearthly, empty-eyed kind of beauty, and she holds herself like a bird, nervous and fragile. Harvey delights in close-up shots of her delicate, shell-shocked face. Sidney Berger reeks of sexism and lust as Mary's neighbor, Johnny, which would be great if the movie knew what to do with him, but he simply vanishes from the plot. There never was a horror film character more marked for a just and terrible death, but Harvey doesn't seem to be conscious of the genre's conventions in this regard. Poetic justice could easily be served by having Johnny go out to the carnival with Mary and be properly disposed of by the lake ghouls, but, sadly, it doesn't happen.

The chief ghoul, the one who haunts Mary throughout the film, is played by Harvey himself, and I can't fault his performance, such as it is, since he is only seen in flashes and never speaks. He leers at the camera quite convincingly, and he looks perfectly creepy in the make-up. In fact, we could stand to see rather more of him and his fellow ghouls than we do; they are a strange, shuffling horde with vacant expressions, but they are really more interesting than most of the live people who populate the rest of the movie.

There are plenty of people who love Carnival of Souls, and they are not necessarily wrong to admire it. Given its shoestring budget and slapdash production, it achieves more than one might expect, and Harvey clearly had a vision of creating a dreamy, unsettling excursion through the borderlands between life and death. He manages some striking images, mainly of his heroine and himself, and I do love those shots of the lake zombies rising slowly from the water. With more money and time, Harvey might have made a really good picture, something more akin to the nightmarish fantasies of foreign film luminaries like Ingmar Bergman or Georges Franju, to whom Harvey is rather optimistically compared by some commentators. As it is, the film drags, the narrative doesn't quite come together, and much of the acting is wooden, if not laughable, and yet there are moments when the camera captures something better, a fleeting idea of the vision that lived in Herk Harvey's imagination.

Whatever its flaws, Carnival of Souls makes a perfect movie to run on mute in the background at your Halloween party. If low-budget, cult horror classics are your thing, try Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959), The Little Shop of Horrors (1960), and George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968).

An earlier version of this review originally appeared on Examiner.com. The author retains all rights to this content.

Classic Films in Focus: THE BAD SEED (1956)

The Bad Seed (1956) ranks pretty high on the list of classic "evil children" movies, although it's not exactly a straightforward horror film. Director Mervyn LeRoy, working from a stage adaptation of William March's original novel, presents the story more as dark melodrama, like Mildred Pierce (1945) cranked up to eleven. Film historian David Thomson hates the picture and provides a scathing review of it in his book, Have You Seen?, but The Bad Seed might well reveal its true horror only to a female audience, for this movie strikes at the very heart of maternal experience and fear.

Nancy Kelly stars as Christine Penmark, the mother of a seemingly perfect eight year old girl. Pig-tailed princess Rhoda (Patty McCormack) is not, however, as sweet as she appears. When one of Rhoda's classmates drowns at a school picnic, the evidence indicates that Rhoda knows more about what happened than she wants to say. Soon Christine realizes the horrible extent of Rhoda's homicidal tendencies, the hereditary product of a dark secret in Christine's own past.

Male characters exist mostly on the periphery of the story. Christine's husband (William Hopper), leaves town for an extended business trip, and the male criminologists utterly fail to spot the perfect little sociopath in their midst. Only Leroy (Henry Jones), the deranged handyman, sees through Rhoda and plays an active role in the characters' daily lives, and he intentionally taunts the infant serial killer and makes matters worse. All of the other significant characters are female, from bossy Monica Breedlove (Evelyn Varden) to grief-stricken Hortense Daigle (Eileen Heckart), whose little boy becomes one of Rhoda's victims. This women's world of domestic entrapment, uncertainty, and suppression inevitably unhinges many of the characters. Even the teacher, Miss Fern (Joan Croydon), has developed a nervous, strained manner, while Christine completely falls apart, clutching desperately at the useless men as she succumbs to her guilt and horror at Rhoda's amoral acts.

The horror of The Bad Seed derives from this stifled, segregated world in which women have few outlets for their hopes and fears. Maternity is the only accomplishment either Christine or Hortense can claim; each one loses her child in a different way, but the loss triggers similar collapse and self-destruction. Fear of a child's death is one kind of horror, but fear of giving birth to a monster is something even worse. New mothers look hard at their infants and count their fingers and toes, fearful lest anything wrong should have issued from their wombs. A pregnant woman obsesses over every action because blame for a damaged child invariably falls on her. Does the monstrous child repay us for our own failures, or is it some changeling trick, the work of the devil or an evil star? This fear of unnatural offspring drives stories as diverse as the Greek myths, King Lear, and Rosemary's Baby (1968).

The ending of the film pointedly asks viewers not to give away the final twist, so I'll refrain from commenting too much on the subtexts of those scenes. I will, however, say that I think the movie might have ended better about ten minutes earlier than its actual conclusion. You'll know the moment when you reach it. There would have been greater poetic justice, at least for Christine, had the credits simply rolled after that shocking - but absolutely necessary - act.

The Bad Seed earned four Oscar nominations, including nods for Nancy Kelly, Patty McCormack, and Eileen Heckart, all of whom had also appeared in the stage production. Mervyn LeRoy also directed I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932), Random Harvest (1942), and Mister Roberts (1955). For more awful offspring, try Village of the Damned (1960), The Omen (1976), and The Good Son (1993).

Classic Films in Focus: THE MUMMY'S HAND (1940)

Universal produced a steady stream of horror movies during the 1930s and 40s, and not all of them reached the artistic heights of Dracula (1931) and Frankenstein (1931). Among the lesser pictures of the era we have entries like The Mummy’s Hand (1940), director Christy Cabanne’s contribution to a series of follow-ups to the 1932 classic, The Mummy. More pedestrian than Universal’s original mummy movie, The Mummy’s Hand falls short of greatness but still offers classic horror fans a reasonably good time, thanks in large part to the presence of talented supporting players like George Zucco and Cecil Kellaway.

Dick Foran stars as Steve Banning, an American archeologist down on his luck in Egypt until he stumbles upon clues to the secret location of the Princess Ananka’s tomb. With backing from the magician Solvani (Cecil Kellaway), Steve and his sidekick Babe (Wallace Ford) set out to find the tomb, but the high priest Andoheb (George Zucco) opposes them at every turn. Determined to protect the princess’ resting place, Andoheb unleashes her mummified guardian, Kharis, on the intruders.

The story repeats many elements from the 1932 film, including the history of Kharis’ love for the princess and his gruesome punishment for trying to resurrect her. Gone, however, is the connection between the dead princess and the modern heroine, Marta Solvani (Peggy Moran), which makes the mummy’s kidnapping of her seem like an odd course of action. The mummy himself, played by Western actor Tom Tyler, lumbers about in an unconvincing suit of bandages, his face devoid of the detail and expression that make Karloff’s visage so memorable. The addition of Wallace Ford’s Babe as a comic sidekick does nothing to help the film, either, since he’s an obnoxious lout whose wisecracks inevitably fall flat.

The main attractions here are George Zucco as the fanatical Andoheb and Cecil Kellaway as the charming magician, Solvani. Zucco, an expert heavy, is much scarier than the shuffling mummy, even though we feel some sympathy for him, too, as Andoheb strives to defend his people’s sacred tomb from the greedy Western infidels. His predecessor, played with perfect intensity by Eduardo Ciannelli, also appears as an early highlight of the film. Cecil Kellaway makes an excellent foil to the serious mystics as a paternal stage illusionist, a genial fellow who can fill drinks with a finger and pull bowls of goldfish out of his hat. It’s the kind of role for which Kellaway is perfectly suited, and he provides the effective comic relief that Wallace Ford fails to deliver.

The mummy character Kharis returns for The Mummy’s Tomb (1942), The Mummy’s Ghost (1944), and The Mummy’s Curse (1944), although in each of the later films he is played by Lon Chaney, Jr. Christopher Lee plays Kharis in the 1959 remake, The Mummy. See more of George Zucco in The Cat and the Canary (1939), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), and Dr. Renault’s Secret (1942). Cecil Kellaway also stars in I Married a Witch (1942), The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), and Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964). There are plenty of other classic mummy movies to keep you busy, but I’m especially fond of the 2002 horror comedy, Bubba Ho-Tep, which features cult favorite Bruce Campbell as a geriatric Elvis battling an Ancient Egyptian threat.

Classic Films in Focus: I MARRIED A WITCH (1945)

Classic horror makes an obvious choice for Halloween, but comedies can also fit the bill, especially when they offer a seasonably supernatural twist. Few Halloween treats could be more delightful than I Married a Witch (1942), an adorable screwball comedy from director René Clair that stars the very bewitching Veronica Lake as an immortal enchantress who falls for a human male. With an excellent cast that also includes Fredric March, Cecil Kellaway, Susan Hayward, and Robert Benchley, I Married a Witch is certain to cast its spell over almost any classic movie fan.

Lake plays Jennifer, a beautiful witch condemned to death by the local Puritans in colonial New England. She and her warlock father (Cecil Kellaway) are burned at the stake, and their spirits are then trapped inside a tree planted over their ashes. When they finally escape this prison several centuries later, the pair set out to avenge themselves on the descendant of the man responsible for their fate. Their unsuspecting target is Wallace Wooley (Fredric March), an aspiring politician already suffering from Jennifer’s dying curse that all Wooley men should be unlucky in love. Wallace’s luck, however, might be changing when Jennifer herself falls in love with him, thanks to a misdirected magic potion meant for him.

Although we remember her primarily as a noir star, Veronica Lake really shines in this comic role, perhaps her best aside from Sullivan’s Travels (1941), which had come out the previous year. Lake brings great vivacity to her strange but charming heroine, who represents a humorous mix of feminine types, from the immortal seductress to ingénue to madcap minx. It’s no wonder that Fredric March’s baffled hero doesn’t know what to make of her. Various sources report ill will between Lake and March on the set, but it doesn’t show up on the screen.

March takes the straight man role and plays it admirably; his character spends most of the picture uncomfortably caught between his intended bride (Susan Hayward) and the determined interloper. Cecil Kellaway, however, has all the fun as Jennifer’s mischievous, drunken father. A talented comedian and character actor, Kellaway plays the warlock as more devilish scamp than true villain, even though he’ll stop at nothing to end Jennifer’s romance with her mortal beloved. Luckily, his fondness for liquor proves a convenient Achilles’ heel that prevents him from doing too much damage.

Be sure to enjoy the special effects that open the movie and pop up periodically throughout the picture. Of course, I Married a Witch, along with Bell Book and Candle (1958), helped to inspire the later production of the classic television series, Bewitched. I Married a Witch earned an Oscar nomination for its score, but there were 18 nominees for the award that year, which finally went to Now, Voyager (1942). René Clair also directed The Flame of New Orleans (1941), And Then There Were None (1945), and The Gates of Paris (1957). See more of Veronica Lake in This Gun for Hire (1942), The Glass Key (1942), and The Blue Dahlia (1946). Fredric March won Oscars for his performances in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931) and The Best Years of Our Lives (1946). Don’t miss the marvelous Cecil Kellaway in Harvey (1950), The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), and Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964). Ironically, Kellaway also turns up as Santa Claus on an episode of Bewitched.

While you’ll have trouble getting a copy of I Married a Witch on DVD, and it’s not available at all on Netflix, it does air sometimes on Turner Classic Movies. The Criterion Collection version of the film is also available for streaming on Hulu Plus.

Classic Films in Focus: THE VAMPIRE'S GHOST (1945)

Streaming services like Netflix Instant make a lot of obscure classic movies available for the first time in years, but often one watches them only to confirm the reasons they fell into obscurity in the first place. Director Lesley Selander’s 1945 film, The Vampire’s Ghost, comes as a pleasant surprise, then, as an example of an obscure, low-budget picture that actually tells an interesting and entertaining tale. Its unique setting and muted tone, along with an original story by Leigh Brackett, help it to age better than many of its peers, and The Vampire’s Ghost also offers one of cinema’s most remarkably underplayed vampiric characters in John Abbott’s immortal Elizabethan, a very different vampire from any of his more famous bloodsucking kin.

The story focuses on an African community of natives and English transplants, where numerous odd murders have the jungle drums talking. Roy (Charles Gordon) and his fiancée Julie (Peggy Stewart) find the events unsettling, but only Roy learns their true cause. Webb Fallon (John Abbott), a mysterious bar owner who has recently arrived in the area, is really a centuries old vampire, cursed to live forever on the blood of his victims. Roy falls under Fallon’s control even as Julie becomes the lonely vampire’s new obsession. With the natives in turmoil, Roy must break free of the creature’s power in time to save Julie from joining the ranks of the undead.

Webb Fallon is a curiously quotidian monster, who uses his own unremarkable appearance as a tiger uses its stripes. He is very English, short, and rather frail, wearing sunglasses during the day and complaining of a “touch of malaria.” He wears no cape, and he definitely does not sparkle. The actor John Abbott might seem like the last man on earth to play a credible vampire until we see his mesmerizing eyes. There his power reveals itself, as he bends first Roy and then Julie to his will.

You’ll probably wish that more screen time were devoted to the captivating Adele Mara, who plays the dancer, Lisa. Fallon speaks of her vampiric resurrection, but it would have been better to see it for ourselves. Mara would have made a fabulous vampire seductress with her dark tresses and intense, exotic beauty. Her dance number, however, remains a highlight of the picture. The ending lacks panache and might have made a better use of its villain’s inevitable demise, although the death cult temple makes a provocative setting. Despite such shortcomings, the story packs plenty of entertainment into a very compact 59 minutes of running time.

Lesley Selander directed mostly B Westerns, although writer Leigh Brackett helped shape real classics like The Big Sleep (1946), Rio Bravo (1959), and even The Empire Strikes Back (1980). You might recognize John Abbott’s refined English accent as the voice of Father Wolf in Disney’s The Jungle Book (1967), but he also appears in Mrs. Miniver (1942), Humoresque (1946), and Gigi (1958). Charles Gordon made few other films, but Peggy Stewart, still alive and well in 2012, has appeared in dozens of Westerns and television programs, including The Office. See more of the gorgeous Adele Mara in You Were Never Lovelier (1942), The Inner Circle (1946), Wake of the Red Witch (1948), and Sands of Iwo Jima (1949).

Thanks to my friend, horror expert Jonathan Lampley, for recommending The Vampire's Ghost as another classic horror movie worth watching! Check it out for yourself on Netflix Instant, where I hope it will remain available at least through the end of the Halloween season.

Classic Films in Focus: THE INNOCENTS (1961)

Adapted from Henry James’ 1898 novella, The Turn of the Screw, director Jack Clayton’s The Innocents (1961) is a masterpiece of supernatural suspense that claims its place among cinema’s greatest ghost stories. Visually and thematically, The Innocents occupies a space halfway between Jane Eyre (1943) and The Haunting (1963), combining the conventions of Victorian Gothic with modern psychological insight. The result is a thoroughly chilling horror story whose insidious suggestions take root in the viewer’s mind and blossom like poisonous flowers.

Deborah Kerr stars as Miss Giddens, who arrives at the great country estate of Bly as the new governess of Flora (Pamela Franklin) and Miles (Martin Stephens), the orphaned wards of a distant, disinterested uncle (Michael Redgrave). Although both of the children seem charming at first, Miss Giddens begins to experience strange, disturbing visions that she believes are connected to her charges. Convinced that the spirits of the former governess (Clytie Jessop) and her sadistic lover (Peter Wyngarde) have possessed the children, Miss Giddens adopts increasingly desperate measures to reclaim their souls.

Imagination is an important theme of the story. Gothic hysteria invests ordinary things with extraordinary horror, from an insect in a broken statue’s mouth to a music box that plays a familiar tune. What does Miss Giddens imagine, and what does she really hear or see? We never know for certain, and therein lies the sense of dread that lingers in the mind long after the picture is finished. Camera angles and lighting add to our doubts, infecting us with the same paranoia that troubles our heroine. Lights reflected in the characters’ eyes give them an unearthly expression, as if they looked indeed beyond the veil between the living and the dead.

Deborah Kerr gives an excellent performance as the nervous Victorian woman rapidly unraveling beneath the strain of her own fevered imagination. She obviously longs for male attention, has no professional experience, and suffers from a turn of mind that rural isolation can only exacerbate. She is, in short, the perfect candidate for a complete psychological breakdown. Like any traditional Gothic heroine, she climbs shadowy staircases and wanders through whispering corridors in her white nightgown, but unlike most of her forebears she lacks the spirit to recover from the inevitable shocks. Jane Eyre would give Miss Giddens a hard slap and command her to get a grip on herself.

Of course, Miss Giddens does have two rather unnerving charges in Miles and Flora. Miles in particular, a miniature copy of his dissipated uncle, seems morally empty, his coy remarks accompanied by an inscrutable look in his emotionally dead eyes. Both children smile at strange moments, evade their keeper’s questions, and run off at every opportunity. The secret to their uncanny effect, however, is the way that they are underplayed. This is not The Bad Seed (1956) or Village of the Damned (1960). Nothing that Miles and Flora do really suggests more than the influence of their upbringing, as pernicious as their past experiences with Miss Jessel and Peter Quint might have been. Are they really possessed, or are they simply damaged by the unnatural actions of the adults who ought to have protected them?

Jack Clayton also directed The Great Gatsby (1974) and Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983). See more of Deborah Kerr in Black Narcissus (1947), From Here to Eternity (1953), and The King and I (1956). Martin Stephens, ironically enough, turns up as the leader of the alien children in Village of the Damned (1960). Pamela Franklin also appears in The Nanny (1965), The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969), and The Legend of Hell House (1973). For more classic movie adaptations of Henry James, try Berkeley Square (1933), The Lost Moment (1947), and The Heiress (1949).

Classic Films in Focus: SON OF FRANKENSTEIN (1939)

After the success of Frankenstein (1931) and The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), it’s not really a surprise that Universal would continue the series with a third film, although Son of Frankenstein (1939) takes us forward in time to the next generation of the famously doomed family. Boris Karloff returns as the iconic creature, this time in company with Basil Rathbone, Bela Lugosi, and Lionel Atwill, all of whom create memorable characters in their respective roles. Although it is not as well-known as the first two films, partly because of the departure of James Whale as director, this third movie is a worthy entry in the series that also boasts one of Lugosi’s more entertaining performances as the living dead man, Ygor.

Many years after his father’s death, Baron Wolf von Frankenstein (Rathbone) and his family return from England to the ancestral home, much to the dismay of the local villagers, who believe that the son will bring back the horrors of his father’s time. Soon enough, Wolf encounters the mangled Ygor (Lugosi), who leads him to the comatose but living creature (Karloff) and encourages him to restore it to its former power. Hoping to vindicate his father’s work, Wolf revitalizes the monster with predictably disastrous results, while Inspector Krogh (Atwill) struggles to protect the baron’s family from threats both within and without the walls of their estate.

Rathbone makes an elegant and interesting Frankenstein, a man torn between his family’s past and future. On one side he has his lovely wife (Josephine Hutchinson) and his curly-mopped young son (Donnie Dunagan) to think about and defend, but on the other he feels drawn by his father’s legacy and an overwhelming desire to continue and validate the dead man’s work. As he sinks deeper into the fatal project, he becomes increasingly unhinged, and Rathbone delivers a particularly manic performance in the final scenes. Karloff doesn’t really have that much to do as the monster, but Lugosi creates a fantastic character in the menacing, broken-necked Ygor; variations of the figure would become an integral part of later Frankenstein stories, and Lugosi deserves credit for making such a strong impression, even though Dwight Frye had originated a similar character under the name of Fritz in the original Whale film. Lionel Atwill also has a memorable role as the one-armed police inspector, whose bizarre movements are copied almost exactly by Kenneth Mars in Young Frankenstein (1974). The film creates a very suggestive connection between Inspector Krogh, who lost his arm to the creature when he was a small child, and Frankenstein’s own young son, Peter.

Director Rowland V. Lee might not be as brilliant as James Whale, but Son of Frankenstein still possesses a very effective visual style. The Gothic scenery is wonderfully evocative of the German expressionist tradition in silent horror, with interiors that recall The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) and Nosferatu (1922). Long shadows cut across oversized arches and cold, angular rooms, giving the Frankenstein home all the warmth and charm of an echoing tomb. The Baroness is struck by the character of her new home from the very start, and we understand why she eventually admits to feeling afraid all the time even though she has no idea of the lumbering horror her husband’s house conceals.

You’ll find both Karloff and Atwill in House of Frankenstein (1944), although Glenn Strange takes over the role of the creature. See more of Karloff in The Mummy (1932), Bedlam (1946), and The Comedy of Terrors (1963). Lugosi, best known for Dracula (1931), also appears in The Wolf Man (1941), The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942), and Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943). Don’t miss Basil Rathbone’s performances in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) and The Mark of Zorro (1949); he is also remembered today for his many screen appearances as Sherlock Holmes.

An earlier version of this review originally appeared on Examiner.com. The author retains all rights to this content.