CARNIVAL OF SOULS

Two cars race at breakneck speed: one of them skids and plunges into a lake, sinking. Shortly after, a girl miraculously emerges from the waters, apparently unharmed, and is rescued by some passersby. Her life seems to slowly return to normal, but it is not so: the young woman is haunted by spectral apparitions, people behave strangely towards her, and she begins to feel drawn to a mysterious and gloomy abandoned amusement park. Telling the plot of this wonderful horror film from the sixties without revealing the ending is not an easy task; the most attentive viewers will have already guessed how the story ends, but even if that were the case, we still highly recommend watching it. Filmed in a livid and spectacular black and white with a very limited budget, and enhanced by a "disquieting" soundtrack, perfectly suited to the tone of the film, "Carnival of Souls" remains one of the best horror movies ever made, though, unjustly, one of the least known. Two of the most appreciated genre films of recent years, namely "Allucinazione Perversa" and "Il Sesto senso", owe a great deal to this small but great film, and some claim that even Romero drew inspiration from the atmospheres and settings of Harvey's film to shoot some of the sequences of his masterpiece "Night of the Living Dead" (see the final scene where some souls awaken and emerge from the lake's waters). Unfortunately, as often happens, while it is enough to go to any video store to find all the useless chapters of the various "Nightmare" and "Friday the 13th" sagas, masterpieces like this one (or "Ballata Macabra" by Dan Curtis, or even "Brood" by Cronenberg) are almost unfindable, and one must hope that some television channel has the good sense to air them (which, alas, is rather rare). An absolute cult film to watch and rediscover for all genre lovers. One last curiosity: the ghost that haunts the film's protagonist is played (and effectively) by the film's director himself, Herk Harvey, not because he wanted to appear in his film at all costs, but because he needed to save on the budget, and thus he managed to hire one fewer actor!