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Overview
In our 5th side dish, we look at a newer public domain movie – Carnival of Souls. Inspired by a Twilight Zone episode (which I’m sure you’ll agree is spot on), this movie is a “what is real” exploration.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnival_of_Souls
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0055830
Trailer
Watch It
https://archive.org/details/CarnivalofSouls
YouTube
Transcript
[00:00:00]
Stephen: Carnival Souls, we’ll get rolling. All good. Ready? Yeah. Alright, so this is what, like our fifth or sixth side dish now?
No. Something like that. This time we’re covering a, an interesting one, carnival of Souls. And I say interesting just because it’s the newest one we’ve covered for the side dish, but it is still public domain. It’s from the sixties, but still in the public domain.
Rhys: It was in the public domain as soon as they published it.
Stephen: Oh, really?
Rhys: Because they forgot to file stuff properly. I think George Romero
Stephen: did the same thing.
Rhys: Yeah. So it came out in the public domain as soon as it, as soon as it hit the ground.
Stephen: Interesting. Yeah. And I believe there was a remake of it that I was gonna watch and compare the two. I didn’t for this, but I will for the future at some point.
Rhys: Yeah. It was done in the nineties. The [00:01:00] first one that I saw when I was watching this back on my list was the colorized version,
Stephen: and I was gonna bring that up because the colorized version actually has four more minutes. It’s like the director’s cut a few extra, nothing that changes the story, but some longer extended scenes where she’s freaking out a bit.
Rhys: Yeah, I, I didn’t think that the extended cut would be. A whole lot more. ’cause this guy Herk Harvey did this on a shoestring budget. Like he paid $12 to repair the railing when they drove the car off the bridge. And then that large building where they were working in, salt Lake City Chamber of Commerce charged him 50 bucks to let him use the saltaire pavilion that they were in. So it didn’t cost him a whole lot of money.
Stephen: That building has a bit of an interesting history ’cause it’s burned down more than once. It was a pretty big, [00:02:00] attraction. I watched, it was interesting a couple years ago, I caught one of those things in history that you didn’t know type videos on YouTube myself, and it was focused on that and I’d never known a thing about it.
So when I saw it in this movie, I’m like, Hey, I know that building. In fact, I think that’s the same shot that I saw in the other video.
Rhys: That’s funny. The thing that really, really stuck me and really made me think about this. He based this loosely on the Twilight Twilight Zone episode called the hitcher.
Stephen: Okay. Because I, I said all this is like a very long Twilight Zone episode. That was my exact comment.
Rhys: Yeah. And there was another movie that came out about the same time, shoot, I can’t remember what it was called. It came out in the same year. They both dealt with the. Main character spoilers main character is dead and doesn’t know it story, but I was trying to think of an earlier example of that in a feature film.[00:03:00]
And I’m having a hard time thinking of anybody else who did it.
Stephen: I don’t know about earlier, and I don’t even know about feature film. I know I’ve seen it a few times in like TV shows and maybe like a Twilight Zone anthology show, but I don’t remember a movie. It was a major feature.
Rhys: Yeah, that Twilight Zone episode came out two years before this.
That makes sense. But George Romero cites this as like one of the inspirations for him doing, night of Living Dead, which you can see, you can see the influence on how the ghouls look in this as how they look in his right, in his film as well.
Stephen: And definitely like you said.
It’s to us now, 70 years later it’s, it was like, yeah, okay. I know exactly what’s going on. She’s dead. She doesn’t know it. And we’re, the whole story is her going through the world until she realizes it. But in 1962 it was probably an unknown thing and people probably were like, oh my gosh.
And astounded by the whole storyline. [00:04:00]
Rhys: Yeah. This was legitimately, I see dead people 30 years before I see dead people.
Stephen: And it was the audience that could see ’em that and didn’t realize it instead of the kid.
Rhys: Yeah. Yeah. It ended up like running. That freaks weird little thing.
And it wasn’t really well received when it first came out either, but over time people were like, you know what, this is a pretty significant film when you start to look at it and how it sits in history.
Stephen: Yeah you get that a lot. It’s pretty common. A little ahead of its time. Something new and different.
Just about every, even Hitchcock had his people that wanted to get rid of him and he was horrible, blah, blah, blah.
Rhys: Candace Hilligoss agent actually dropped her after she started this movie.
Stephen: Wow.
Rhys: Yeah. And she didn’t go on to do a whole lot more. And once
Stephen: you’re dead in a movie, you can’t go up too much.
Rhys: Hank Harvey he wasn’t really a dramatic film guy. He did educational films. That was his [00:05:00] background. Peter Jackson
Stephen: did a semi bad horror movie before Lord of the Rings. He did just show you did it bad taste. The one thing I did two. There are two main things I picked out of this.
The pipe organ that she was playing near the beginning is absolutely gorgeous. Yeah. It was pretty, pretty fantastic. And I did the evil Carnival amusement park theme. Of it. That was nice. But the one thing that really stuck out was the very bad stereotype, misogynistic guy that wanted to date her, and all the things he said, and the lines and the way he acted.
Hey, yeah. Oh my God, this whole movie would just be completely canceled. Made today like that. Hey sweetie, wanna get a bite to eat?
Rhys: Yeah,
Stephen: he was horrible in. The lens of today’s world. Oh,
Rhys: for sure.
Stephen: I was I cringed. It was way over the top bad
Rhys: It only took him three weeks to film it and the whole thing cost him 30 grand.[00:06:00]
Wow. And that 30 grand he raised pretty much all in a day. He went to a couple
Stephen: friends and asked them all for 600 bucks.
Rhys: No, I think it was much more industrial. Like he got investors outta Kansas to back it. But, it wasn’t a lot of money at the time,
Stephen: nice. Alright, so there’s a Carnival of Souls.
Yeah. So what’s coming up next? Steve? Next is a great one. I’m excited about the next one. It is the most dangerous game, which is a classic. It’s been in everything. It’s the whole basis for the Predator movies. Yeah.
Rhys: Then there’s actually a whole host of movies that. You think, oh hey, they’re dead.
And they didn’t know it was like a sub genre. The most dangerous game is like the name of the sub genre there. So
Stephen: yeah, it absolutely is. And any show that has gone on for more than a couple years. [00:07:00] Even comedies have played with this most dangerous game, have had this in one form or another, especially if it’s an action or a cop show or sci-fi fantasy, heck, star Trek and Battle Star, all of those had this storyline somewhere.
So we’ll get to watch the movie and see how it goes. And it was based on a book back way back when. So we’ll talk about more of that next time.
Rhys: Awesome. Looking forward to it. Cool man. Later. See ya.
