Dance of Dead Souls (1962)
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | Dance of the Dead Souls |
| Original title | Carnival of Souls |
| Country of production | United States |
| original language | English |
| Publishing year | 1962 |
| length | 84 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 12 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Herk Harvey |
| script | John Clifford |
| production | Herk Harvey |
| music | Gene Moore |
| camera | Maurice Prather |
| occupation | |
| |
Carnival of Souls ( Carnival of Souls is) a low-budget film from 1962, which was directed by Herk Harvey. The plot is borrowed from a story by Ambrose Bierce entitled An Incident at Owl Creek Bridge . Dance of the Dead Souls remained Harvey's only feature film.
action
Mary Henry, a young organist , mysteriously survives a car accident in which her two friends drown in a river. Mary goes to Salt Lake City , where she has accepted a new position as organist in a local church. When she drives past an old, deserted fairground on the way there, the face of a man appears in the window of her car for the first time. From now on, the appearance of this undead (played by Herk Harvey himself) haunts her again and again and with increasing intensity.
She sublet a room in Salt Lake City and takes up her new job. But they remove their appearances more and more from the everyday world, which becomes more and more threatening for them. At times she has the sensation that she is invisible and inaudible to others. A doctor who wants to help her discusses the possibility of a traumatic shock due to the accident and also tries to inquire about a connection between the terrifying imagination and the previous life story. She tells him that she has never been interested in the fate of others. In her distress, she herself responds to the advances of a womanizer, who she is basically repugnant. There is no one who understands it; little by little she loses connection with the real world.
Again and again she feels magically drawn to the pavilion of the fairground. There she sees those dancing undead who emerge from the water in her visions at night and pursue her. Suddenly she sees herself dancing with the undead who has appeared to her so many times. In the end she can no longer escape the dead, who are persecuting her from all sides.
At the place where Mary was last lying in the sand, footprints are found the next day that lead nowhere. The final scene shows how the car of the initial traffic accident is rescued from the water. In the car are the bodies of the three women - including Mary's.
Reviews
“ Carnival of Souls is, as absurd as it sounds in the face of a no-budget movie, a perfect film. He achieves the greatest possible effects with the simplest means, without these ever being just means for these effects. The added value that terrifies the images is an effect of the renouncement of the direct calculation of means into effects. No image is aimed only at the horror it has. The shock is lost in the relentlessness that is in the pictures right from the start. "
"The great art of this film is to show a living person as dead and again as more alive than all living."
“ A cheaply produced, but comparatively imaginative horror film. "
Trivia
- The film exists in different versions, the length of which varies between 78 and 84 minutes.
- The film was shot in just three weeks (some sources speak of just nine days) in Lawrence and Salt Lake City. The leading actress Candace Hilligoss trained with Lee Strasberg , the other actors were mostly amateurs. The film contains a number of connection errors , which are commonly attributed to Harvey's lack of experience in the feature film field.
- Herk Harvey was originally a producer of training and promotional films. During a stay in Salt Lake City, he was so impressed by the atmosphere in the abandoned Saltair pavilion there that he and John Clifford developed the concept for a film based on the story of Ambrose Bierce. That film would remain Harvey's only feature film. The person who died of cancer in 1996 did not experience the keen interest in the DVD release .
- The budget of the film was only 33,000 US dollars , according to other sources even only 17,000 US dollars. Herk Harvey and John Clifford waived their fee in order to meet the budget.
- Harvey had to pay $ 17 for the damage to the bridge in the entrance sequence.
- Harvey was likely inspired to aspects of the film by two episodes of Rod Serling's Twilight Zone : In The Hitch-Hiker (January 1961), a young blonde girl drives from New York to California and is chased by a hitchhiker who keeps reappearing when she is thinks him left behind. In Mirror Image (Feb 1961) is also about a blonde girl who is convinced that a doppelganger from the mirror of a bus station, their luggage and finally steals her ticket their entire identity.
- In Germany, the film was not dubbed until the 1990s on behalf of ZDF . The German premiere took place on June 2, 1992 in the station's night program.
- An original recording of the film by Candace Hilligoss can be heard in the song 13 Beaches on Lana Del Rey's album Lust for Life .
influence
- The film flopped in the drive-in theaters and was never widely used. It has been shown again in arthouse cinemas since the 80s and has since enjoyed a small and steadily growing fan base. The publication on DVD provided an additional increase in awareness.
- Directors George A. Romero ( Night of the Living Dead ) and David Lynch have identified the film as an important influence on their work.
- Claude Chabrol's 1976 film Alice ou la dernière fugue also varied the Carnival of Souls motif.
- The short story An incident at Ambrose Bierce's Owl Creek Bridge was among others. a. also template for the films Jacob's Ladder (USA, 1990) and The Sixth Sense (USA, 1999).
- In 1998 there was a remake of the film, which has little in common with the original and which was launched as a direct-to-video production under the label " Wes Craven presents".
- The 2006 film Yella by the German director Christian Petzold was attested to have many content and stylistic similarities to the Dance of Dead Souls .
literature
- Thomas Gaschler, Eckhard Vollmar: Interview with Harold "Herk" Harvey. in: HOWL No. 11, Munich 1991.
Web links
- Carnival of Souls in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Review by Ekkehard Knörer in the Filmzentrale
Individual evidence
- ↑ on filmzentrale.de
- ↑ Retro Cinema: Carnival of Souls ( Memento of the original from June 16, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. moviephone.com
- ↑ Doomed to Eternal Movement , Interview with Christian Petzold in the taz from February 15, 2007, accessed on April 12, 2008
