There Really IS Something About Mary: Carnival of Souls
Mary Henry, a passenger in an apparently fatal car accident resurfaces hours later from the river where locals on the scene futilely search for the vehicle and the remains of its occupants after it careens off a bridge during a joy ride. Mary’s miraculous reappearance from the wreckage is not so much a testament to her survival but a hint that she has been reborn in the shape of herself but somehow not her self. Once the river’s placental matter is washed away, restoring her to the cynical, coolly detached young woman she was before her brush with death, we are already asking what - not who - is Mary Henry? How she survived unscathed when her fellow passengers remain entombed in their unrecovered vehicle is as much as a mystery as her decision to relocate to Salt Lake City to become a church organist. Nothing in Mary’s demeanor suggests religious devotion. On the contrary, she appears downright annoyed by the suggestion that her occupation is motivated by anything other than “business”, coldly insisting the choice is a pragmatic one.
“It’s just a job” she snaps when the head of the organ factory where she is employed praises her decision to accept the position in Utah with the implication that church work will have the desired effect of humbling her. He goes on to admonish her for her “soulless”, intellect-driven approach to music. Here the somewhat stilted, inchoate dialogue associated with the era’s low-budget ‘exploitation’ fare underscores what is 'unnatural’ in Mary, and her otherworldly surroundings - presented as mostly stock footage of church organ manufacturing as it existed in Kansas where Herk Harvey and his screenwriter John Clifford worked for Centron Films, a local independent film company that churned out educational and industrial films. The filmmakers intuited a serendipitous link between the still operational pipe organ factory in their Midwestern hometown of Lawrence, Kansas, and a desolate, boarded-up entertainment pavilion hundreds of miles away, where their heroine would eventually succumb to the malevolent forces pursuing her.
Her music, not so much learned or gleaned from memory, but plumbed from the depths of her disintegrating self will accompany her throughout 'Carnival of Souls’, providing the atmospheric accompaniment to Herk Harvey’s 1962 masterpiece. Inspired by the first time director’s happenstance encounter with an abandoned Mormon theme park on a Salt Lake boardwalk, the film explores the metaphysical terrain of a nightmare, where time and space intersect to render life and death simultaneous occurrences, non-linear and overlapping. Death, as Mary’s plight illustrates, is not something “down the line” or “at the end of the road”, but just part of an endless cycle of false awakenings, a suspended state of deja vu that foreshadows past and present.
Mary is a diffuse and fractal presence; a mere hologram entity running from the shadows she is unable to cast headlong into her own reflection. We first meet Mary as the defiant and cynical girl whose cool gaze signals a willingness to risk death in a drag race, only to grudgingly escape its clutches, more determined than ever it seems, to cling to the hard shell that encases an inner void.
The factory’s towering pipe organs and sky lights provide a celestial backdrop where Mary first appears after the accident, but where she decides instead to follow the invisible hand of fate that already seems to be guiding her own hands at the organ. With all the talk of Mary’s “soulless” path to damnation by the well-meaning father figures who attempt to set her straight, Carnival of Souls is often interpreted as a lurid Christian-themed morality play, pitting a godless heroine against the hellfire fates awaiting her beyond purgatory as punishment for her apparent atheism. It’s surely what the men in Mary’s life imply, but the film is less than concerned with addressing theological themes than posing metaphysical questions. “I’m never coming back”, Mary announces on the eve of her departure. She appears startled by her own abrupt declaration as if divining foreknowledge of a cruel, undetermined fate.
Along the road to her awaiting destination, the inanely generic score of a educational film - focusing perhaps on the perils of littering or offering hygiene tips to teenage girls on the eve of a first date - fill the car’s interior, underscoring the wholesome, bucolic scenery she is about to leave behind. Mary seems incapable of actually hearing music, she can only involuntarily summon it. As a cipher she denotes its dictionary definition of “absence of quantity: zero” and/or conversely, “the Arabic numeral for three”. Mary is an ecstatic culmination of the past, the present, and the future, and the temporal void where all three collide.
No voices or static punctuate the dial as Mary adjusts it providing the first clue that her contact with the physical world is tenuous at best, and that her grip on reality is as fading as the twilight beginning to descend on the deserted road. Gradually, canned syrup string arrangements give way to the improvised inner pipe organ music that has so far propelled her to stray from the path of righteousness, despite her desperate attempts to switch stations. Her inability to navigate or even make physical contact with electrical devices bears the hallmark of the lucid dreamer untethered to the sleeping figure it has left in its wake. She is either sleepwalking through consciousness or terrifyingly awake in death. In any case, her hands are increasingly useless appendages against the forces that have possessed her car’s radio. It’s at this point she makes contact with the mysterious ghoulish presence (Herk Harvey himself in zombie white face) that will pursue her throughout the rest of the film. She encounters him at first as a leering reflection in the passenger window. Moments later, his full-bodied apparition appears in the middle of the road where she swerves to avoid him, leaving a skid mark demarcating the point where purgatory becomes perdition.
Approaching her destination, she spots a rather imposing and unlikely structure sprawled desolately on the banks of a dried up lake that a gas station attendant explains to her is an abandoned old bathhouse/dance hall that was later expanded into a fairground. The crumbling monument that would inspire Harvey to foray into feature filmmaking, and the foundation upon which John Clifford would base his screenplay, was in fact the one-time Saltair Pavilion, a Mormon-run operation built in the late 19th century as a showcase for Utah’s burgeoning prosperity. In its day, the festive, open air facility was meant to bridge a tourist gap between its largely Mormon population and the rest of the country, and here it similarly functions as an intersecting point between hell bound travelers and their immortal hosts. Mary’s unwanted suitor is formally attired for the occasion of their fated Danse Macabre in the pavilion’s rat-infested ballroom.
Barely settled into her new boarding house, Mary is once again startled by the demonic visage of Herk Harvey, this time coming face to face with his reflection in the window. The following morning, she makes her way to the small church where she is to be its resident organist. The pastor is soon taken aback by the her churlish refusal to attend a tea reception with the ladies of the congregation. “Can’t we just skip it?” Mary sneers in response to the invitation. The virginal and viperous Mary seems to have vast reserves of contempt for the elderly men she encounters, interpreting their paternalistic, oft-repeated concern for her soul as a particularly unwelcome intrusion, hinting perhaps at a sexually-derived fear of their interference. Implicit in her distaste of intimate human contact is a belief that it represents forced entry into the sealed fissure enclosing her well-guarded darkness. Mary might not be a virgin in the literal sense, but rather, virgin territory. All attempts to shine light into this vacuum are rudely repelled. Fathers, heavenly or terrestrial, bring out her coiled-serpent nature. Still, Mary suitably demonstrates her organ playing skills and despite his apparent misgivings about the new organist, the pastor leaves her to practice, beamingly observing “We have an organist capable of stirring the soul”.
Alone in the church, Mary is once again startled by Herk Harvey, whose emboldened presence is no longer confined to reflected surfaces, but a palpable physical entity lurking in the nave below. Feigning tiredness as an excuse for the abrupt end of her practice session, she accepts an offer from the pastor for a ride to the outskirts of town where he has an appointment, hoping to get a better look at the abandoned amusement park that continues to enthrall her. She is torn between her need to flee from her ghastly visitor, and pursue a still undefined desire to seek whatever enchantments lie within the desolate landmark. Her pious host, however, is less than willing to break the law by breaching the 'No Trespassing’ signs and refuses her entreaties to accompany her inside.
Later that evening, she is visited again by an unannounced visitor, but this time its Mr Linden, the only other tenant in her boardinghouse. Lindon is a leering, boozed up warehouse worker, who attempts to shoehorn his way into her room hoping to get closer acquainted with the attractive young lodger in the next room. Mary politely rebuffs him, only to encounter Herk Harvey again in the corridor below her room. This time she tries to enlist the her landlady’s help, but is met with the same skepticism she is doomed to repeatedly encounter from well-meaning strangers for whom Mary’s mysterious stalker is a figment of her imagination. The following morning, she allows the undeterred Linden into her room, coquettishly dodging his less-than-expert lunges and delicately demurring the “enticements” he offers in the form of the cheap bourbon he’s brought along for the occasion of seducing her. She encourages his slobbering advances with halfhearted and kittenish resistance. Mary, it turns out, has a higher tolerance level for men intent on getting into her pants than the ones determined to save her soul. If anything, she views the the latter as a particularly unwelcome form of abasement. With Linden, she is coy and skittish, and the mixed signals she’s sending him are more evidence that her internal systems are failing to navigate the differently wired terrain of the multiverse she unknowingly inhabits.
While shopping, she realizes she has become invisible; a sensation that becomes apparent to her as she is engulfed in absolute silence, save for her own voice trying to get the attention of the saleswoman, who just moments before was fitting her for a new dress. A frantic Mary attempts to make herself known to the preoccupied people around her before rushing out of the department store, where among the noiseless bustle of traffic, construction crews go on about their work, oblivious to her and taxis speed away, determined it seems, not to notice her. Mary is not herself, perhaps only 'of’ herself, a non-illuminated projection without a surface - a disappearing act in progress. She is presence entirely separated from 'being’, only capable of registering a partial presence to everyone around her. In turn, she seems unable to decipher those she comes into contact with, or divine meaning from the once familiar and increasingly illegible signposts all pointing to the derelict and foreboding fairgrounds.
Audibility returns to her moments later as bird sounds punctuate the stifling silence of the film’s muted soundtrack. A man identifying himself as a doctor, noticing her distress, takes her to his office where he assures her that no man fitting Herk Harvey’s description exists outside her imagination. For the films’s Criterion release, screenwriter John Clifford explained in his introductory notes “I decided early on to give the heroine no real sympathy or understanding from any other character. For the viewer, there is no relief from her dilemma, no catharsis except what viewers create for themselves”. Damnation, the film suggests, is the inability to stir within others empathy or even understanding. The doctor attributes her hallucinations to the “shock” she’s experiencing in the aftermath of her earlier car accident, offering yet another platitudinous bromide that neither explains her plight or correctly divines its metaphysical underpinnings. She struggles with the question of whether she’s always shunned the intimacy of human contact, as if the answer lies in a lapsed and distant memory she can’t quite recover. “I’m not given to imagining things”, she insists - a poignantly apt observation from the “soulless” wanderer traversing a corridor of funhouse mirrors diminishing her at every turn.
Seizing on the doctor’s observation that she is a “strong willed person”, an emboldened Mary decides to drive out to the deserted pavilion to put her demons, so to speak, to rest. Her solitary exploration yields no obvious clues beyond the juxtaposing light and shadows flitting across the cavernous, rotting ballroom, and an occasional errant breeze stirring the chandeliers. Mary remains blissfully unaware of Herk Harvey’s supine figure beneath the lakefront wharf just under her feet, and heads home where a waiting John Lindon pesters her for a date following her rehearsal at the church where she is scheduled to practice for upcoming Sunday services.
Seated at the organ, her fingers alight upon the familiar notes of the devotional piece she is prepared to perform, but abruptly freeze. Her hands, though seemingly unaltered, register in close-up as a terrifying vision of disembodied entities with a fascination of their own. She falls into a trance-like state as her now phantom-led hands swoop across the keyboard, pumping out a delirious, unfamiliar tune, whose malevolent, carnivalesque strains fill the church and rouses the dead souls slumbering at the bottom of a distant lake in the shadows of the brooding fairgrounds. Mary’s expression conveys both numb obedience to the dark muse positioned in her place at the organ, and a stark realization that she is merely a helpless observer trapped inside her own body. A vision of a black cloud scuttling across a full moon becomes the rippling reflection of Herk Harvey underwater, followed by a retinue of ghouls emerging from the lake. Suddenly male hands appear over hers. The enraged minister’s voice booms out “profane”, going on to denounce her performance as “sacrilege”. Mary is again accused of being “soulless” and as such, is cast out of the church.
Later at a rowdy jukebox joint, Linden soon tires of trying to lubricate his morose, uncommunicative companion with cheap beer and is unable to mask his annoyance. Sensing he is ready to abandon her, Mary insists that she wants to be with him, reasoning that she has has a better chance of survival by throwing herself at the mercy of a living, breathing predator rather than face her unknown stalker. Back at the boardinghouse Linden once again ingratiates himself into her room. His approaching figure is briefly reflected in the mirror as Herk Harvey creeping up behind her. A screaming, sobbing Mary tries to convince him that she is being pursued by a strange man, but Linden, like the doctor, is more inclined to believe her hysteria is brought on by an abject fear of sexual intimacy and leaves.
Mary checks out of the boardinghouse the following day, but all her attempts to leave town are thwarted by the surreal mishaps and false leads characteristic of a dream entering its nightmare phase. Having abandoned her car in the service station where she has taken it in for repairs, Mary is once again a hapless, ethereal presence, desperately seeking human contact and finding only unmasked demons taunting her at every turn. Here the film picks up a terrifying momentum as if the gloves have finally come off the plodding, workman like hands behind the camera, freeing them from the constraints of manufacturing a film on a shoe-string budget and finally able to seize upon its underlying vision. In the he reanimated ballroom of the old pavilion, Mary’s perspective shifts from horrified witness to participant in a ghoul infested orgy, becoming simultaneously the rag-doll corpse waltz partner of a formally attired fiend and an invisible wallflower who will eventually be subsumed by a frenzied pack of zombie extras. The crux of 'Carnival’s’ enduring and unsettling power is its ability to convey death as a quantum leap through the flimsy, easily punctured fabric delineating a carefully constructed 'self’ from an endlessly reflected “irrational” other projecting its own consciousness. 'Carnival of Souls’ is probably the first time a nightmare has been fully captured on screen, and Mary is every blighted traveler of the sub-conscious; the unreliable protagonist of all our dreams who is never quite able to negotiate its ever-shifting, time-lapsed terrain.
by Jennifer Matsui