MSU Cinema International is screening its last film of the fall semester this week. The early 60s classic horror “Carnival of Souls” has a psychological twist about a young woman who survives a horrific accident but finds herself haunted by shadowy figures.
WKMS Morning Edition host Daniel Hurt spoke with co-director of Cinema International Tamara Feinstein and associate professor of English Andy Black about this film, how it may have reached cult classic status, and how the era it was made in impacted its production.
“This is a very eerie, spooky, you know, psychological horror movie that starts off with the main protagonist, who's a woman, who's a very strong female lead who gets into a car accident and then survives it, and then it sort of shows her traveling to Salt Lake City and all of these strange occurrences that keep happening again and again and again to her,” Feinstein said. “And it really sort of has the feel of a Twilight Zone episode. It's not gory, but it's kind of eerie.”
Black said that the film was part of an evolution not only of of the horror genre in film, but also the style of how filmmakers produced movies. Because of its low budget, Black said Carnival of Souls has a more intimate feel, adding that it almost feels like it is being made as you watch it.
“What's exciting about this movie and this kind of movement in the 1960s and horror is that if you think about the classic horror movies, you think about the monster movies – Dracula, Frankenstein – and then in the 50s, they start moving to use horror to be more allegorical, to be about things like communist witch hunts and just general kinds of questions about identity, like Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” said Black. “By the 60s, there's really this movement of people making extremely low budget horror movies. And this is really sort of the beginning of it, and we have some others around the same time. But this movie costs nothing to make, and you'll see that, and that's part of the fun of the movie, is seeing it's kind of like just bare bone structure.”Feinstein said one thing that stands out about the film is the way the female protagonist is portrayed compared to other films of the era.
“There's a strong pull back to those traditional roles, and this character just doesn't want to fit into the expectations, particularly of the men that are telling her what's going on, how she should be acting. She just doesn't care. And so it shows the strength to women that you don't often see in horror movies from that time period.”
MSU Cinema International is screening “Carnival of Souls” on Thursday, Oct. 31 and Saturday, Nov. 2 at 7:30 p.m. in Faculty Hall room 208 on campus at Murray State University.
