‹ Back

(Deep Cuts) What Herk Harvey's CARNIVAL OF SOULS Says About Queerness

By. Bee Delores

 

It’s mind-blowing that Herk Harvey only directed one feature film in his career. 1962’s CARNIVAL OF SOULS, written by John Clifford, a co-worker of Harvey’s at the Centron Corporation (an industrial and educational film production company), contains one of the most chilling jump scares ever put to celluloid. Its dream-like state feels like something from another world, as though the viewer is peering into a crystal ball and witnessing the story through a smoky purple haze. While analyzing humanity’s existential dread of dying, CARNIVAL OF SOULS also has quite a bit to say about the queer experience, navigating heteronormativity, and the enlightenment that comes with emerging from the sleepwalking state of being queer in a very straight world.

Harvey traveled back from California to Kansas when he passed the ruins of Saltair Pavilion (the second of several structures) in Salt Lake City. The idea, particularly the film’s haunting ending, sprang to his mind. Once back in Lawrence, Kansas, he approached Clifford about the idea, noting that the story had to culminate in the ending, which was filmed inside Saltair Pavilion (he rented the space for $50). He gave Clifford freedom to write everything else. The abandoned resort emerges as a character in the story, both a reflection of the world's deterioration and of one’s former identity vanishing into dust. 

In one of very few film roles, Mary Candace Hilligoss plays Mary Henry, a strong, independent woman with a halcyon demeanor. She takes a new job as a church organist in another town with no plans of ever returning. Despite her title, she has no interest in religion or faith. She prefers believing in the here and now of existence. Following a car accident, she appears to be fleeing something or someone; what that is, she remains tight-lipped. As she makes her way into Salt Lake City, she spots the Saltair Pavilion, once a bathhouse, dance hall, and carnival. She quickly heads into town and rents a room from the annoyingly nosy Mrs. Thomas (Frances Feist).

Another resident, John Linden (Sidney Berger), lives across the hall and proves aggressive in his lustful advances. “What are you… afraid of men?” he argues after she brushes him off. That question lingers over Mary Henry, also mirrored in a strange man (Harvey) stalking her ever since she left Kansas. She can’t seem to shake him. Even as she zipped down the highway, The Man followed her every move, resulting in many of the film’s most unsettling visual scares (e.g., the passenger’s window moment is an all-timer). Her journey mimics the path of self-loathing, fear, and tremendous knowledge most queer people gain. There’s a terror that’s born out of society’s obsession with and adherence to straightness. The very requirement to come out of the closet is so embedded in CARNIVAL OF SOULS that the film coats the queer viewer with a soul-tingling sensation that the story feels too real, as if ripped from their own lives.

As The Man inches closer, Mary’s reality distorts into something out of a Twilight Zone episode. During a shopping trip to a local department store, the world freezes in time. The sound drops out for the audience, and no one can see or hear poor Mary. “Why can’t anybody hear me?!” she screams. The silence is deafening. “Why can’t anybody hear me?” is a siren going off in a queer person’s brain, as they struggle with a strict religious upbringing (most often, queer people suffer from emotional abuse and gaslighting) and who they truly are deep inside. Mary eventually lands back in reality and soon meets a psychologist who recommends an unscheduled appointment in his office just across the street. But even that becomes blurred in a disturbing stimulation that further drives the proverbial nails into her mind and body. The Man appears in the doctor’s chair, with wide eyes bugging out and a gleefully menacing smile.

Being unheard becomes its own kind of horror when everyone around you has already decided what your experience means. Davalyn Baker's GOTHIKA essay follows that fear into the institution itself, where a respected psychiatrist suddenly discovers how quickly a woman's voice can stop mattering once others decide she is unstable.

There’s just no escaping the truth about yourself. When the film leaps into its final act, Mary Henry takes refuge inside the Saltair Pavilion, but she discovers a host of dead people wickedly dancing and circling underneath the reggae big top. These ghosts torment her until she spots herself, or at least someone who bears a striking resemblance to her porcelain-like visage. She shakes it off, and the crowd chases her out onto a plot of beach lining a nearby body of water. Her existence comes to a brutal end, as though she’s shedding who and what she used to be.

The terribly eerie ending (don’t worry, no spoilers!) hammers home the ideas of identity, truth, and remarkable rebirth once someone finally, truly steps into the light. CARNIVAL OF SOULS scrawls out a passionate and tender love letter to queer people in a way that most other queer films of its era fail to accomplish. 64 years later, Mary Henry remains an icon of pure cinema, and as a result, Mary Candace Hilligoss is an unsung hero of queer power that rivals Irena in 1942’s Cat People and Sister Hyde in 1971’s Dr. Jekyll & Sister Hyde (but those are for a different day and different essays). Once you see yourself portrayed onscreen, it’s nearly impossible to let it go. And why would you want to?

Mary Henry's journey is haunted by the pressure to exist inside a world built around other people's expectations. WICKER imagines the opposite possibility: a woman who refuses the life prescribed for her entirely and builds a happily ever after strange enough to actually belong to her.