something about carnivals

I saw ‘Carnival of Souls’, but perhaps not all of it, as a child, and its creepy atmosphere lodged itself in my memory for the term of me natural.
A real one-off, this film, and one of the things that’s most impressive about it, apart from a really fine performance from the totally convincing lead (Candace Hilligloss), is its low-key, no-nonsense way of transforming the screen into an all-enclosing and somehow profoundly unnerving otherworld. The plot’s simple enough – a young woman emerges from a river, sole survivor of a bridge accident, and we follow her as she moves from her home town, immediately after the accident, to another town to take up the position of church organist. She has a series of experiences, is revealed as an intriguing loner, who is haunted by visions, and drawn to an abandoned fairground outside of town. She also has periods or bouts in which nobody is aware of her existence. Finally we find that she didn’t survive the accident at all.
There’s no real coherence to this, but it doesn’t matter, the plot’s not the thing, it’s kind of existential, but above all it’s about atmosphere and mood. There’s an intensity of focus on one person, her own perspective sometimes offset by those of others looking in on her - the doctor who wants to help her, the priest who puzzles over her lack of spirit (irony of ironies), the drunkard neighbour who wants to fuck her - and the mood is beautifully enhanced or created by the music of that most other-worldly instrument, the organ, as well as by some subtle cinematography, and of course the fairground setting, used quite sparingly but obviously to great effect as it’s that image which has (mildly) haunted me since the first viewing.