In the flickering shadows of empty fairgrounds and forsaken lakeside homes, two films confront the void at the heart of existence, where grief and unreality bleed into one another.

 

Herbert Harvey’s Carnival of Souls (1962) and David Bruckner’s The Night House (2020) stand as haunting pillars of existential horror, each peeling back the fragile veneer of reality to reveal the abyss beneath. These low-key masterpieces, separated by decades, share a profound preoccupation with isolation, loss, and the erosion of self, using sparse supernatural elements to amplify psychological torment. By juxtaposing their approaches, we uncover how horror evolves while grappling with timeless questions of meaning, mortality, and madness.

 

  • Both films masterfully employ architectural and auditory isolation to externalise inner turmoil, turning everyday spaces into portals of dread.
  • Protagonists Mary Henry and Beth Greene embody the existential outsider, their unraveling psyches mirroring broader philosophical inquiries into death and identity.
  • From grainy 16mm experimentation to sleek digital precision, these works influence modern horror’s blend of subtle scares and intellectual depth.

 

Fairground Phantoms and Lakeside Lures

The genesis of Carnival of Souls unfolds amid the dusty plains of Kansas, where Herk Harvey, a church organist and industrial filmmaker, crafted a $33,000 fever dream during a two-week shoot in Lawrence. Mary Henry (Candace Hilligoss), a prim organist herself, survives a drag race plunge off the Saltair Pavilion bridge, only to wander a spectral world where ghoulish figures pursue her from an abandoned amusement park. The film’s thrift-store aesthetic—stock footage, non-actors, and piercing organ swells—lends it an unearthly authenticity, as if dredged from a collective unconscious. Harvey’s background in health education films infuses the narrative with a didactic chill, warning of spiritual neglect amid post-war conformity.

Contrast this with The Night House, a $6 million production greenlit by Searchlight Pictures, where Beth Greene (Rebecca Hall) grapples with her architect husband Owen’s suicide. His custom-built lakeside retreat, a geometric marvel of mirrored walls and inverted blueprints, becomes a labyrinth of revelations: cloned women, occult geometries, and a doppelgänger haunting her widowhood. Bruckner’s film, adapted from a Black List script by David Fenkel and Derek Simonds, leverages post-#MeToo sensitivities to explore grief’s weaponised intimacy. Production designer Elizabeth Kehoe’s sets, with their asymmetrical angles and watery reflections, evoke a modern funhouse, echoing the carnival’s decayed joyrides but polished through VFX houses like DNEG.

Both open with catastrophic losses—Mary’s near-death drag race, Beth’s raw bereavement—thrusting viewers into disoriented POVs. Mary’s gauzy apparition rising from the murky river sets a tone of corporeal doubt, much like Beth’s nightmare of Owen’s hanging, intercut with blueprints that defy Euclidean logic. These preludes establish existential horror’s core: the survivor’s curse, where living feels like trespassing on the grave.

Production hurdles further bind them. Harvey battled reel-to-reel splices and actor walkouts, while Bruckner navigated pandemic delays and reshoots to heighten Rebecca Hall’s feral monologues. Yet both triumph through restraint; no gore fountains or jump-cut tsunamis, just the slow drip of unreality eroding sanity.

Women on the Edge of the Abyss

Mary Henry drifts through her new life in a Utah boarding house like a somnambulist, her reflection vanishing in mirrors, her touch repelled by the living. Hilligoss, a former model with no screen experience, delivers a performance of glacial detachment—eyes wide yet vacant, voice modulating from prim to panicked. Her arc peaks in the chapel organ loft, where ghouls commandeer her hands in a danse macabre, symbolising the soul’s surrender to oblivion. Mary’s existential plight channels Camus’ absurdism: she performs life’s rituals, yet senses their hollowness, pursued by pallid figures that embody dehumanised desire.

Beth Greene, a high-school teacher unmoored by loss, mirrors this isolation in sharper relief. Rebecca Hall’s tour de force—raw, booze-soaked fury—unfurls through sleepwalking excavations of Owen’s secrets: Polaroids of suicidal lookalikes, a forbidden book on Solomon’s architecture. Beth’s unraveling interrogates relational voids; Owen’s love was a void-filling construct, his house a hermetic seal against her light. Where Mary flees inward, Beth lashes outward, confronting neighbours and spectral echoes in rain-lashed fury.

Gender dynamics sharpen the comparison. Mary’s 1960s repression manifests as hysterical muteness, critiquing feminine domesticity; she rejects suitors like John (Sidney Berger), whose groping advances underscore carnal alienation. Beth, empowered yet ensnared, weaponises agency against patriarchal blueprints—Owen’s design literally mirrors her form, inverting it into horror. Both women navigate male gazes turned monstrous, from the leering carnival master to Owen’s voyeuristic clones.

Psychological depth elevates them beyond scream queens. Mary’s phantom bus rides evoke Lacan’s Real irrupting into Symbolic order, while Beth’s architecture obsession nods to Derrida’s deconstruction: structures promising stability crumble into aporias of grief.

Soundscapes of the Soul’s Eclipse

Carnival of Souls weaponises sound as existential scalpel. Gene Moore’s organ score—swelling reeds and staccato trills—pervades like tinnitus from the beyond, underscoring Mary’s dissociation. Diegetic cues amplify unreality: radios hissing static during ghoul dances, footsteps echoing in empty halls. Harvey’s editing syncs these to visual glitches, creating a synaesthetic dread where music signals soul-loss.

The Night House refines this into immersive ASMR terror. Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury’s score blends folk drones with subsonic throbs, punctuated by Hall’s whispers and shattering glass. Sound designer Al Nelson layers watery gurgles and inverted heartbeats, mirroring the house’s architecture. Beth’s voicemail dissections—Owen’s calm lies fracturing into pleas—rival Mary’s organ solos for auditory hauntology.

Both films privilege aural over visual shocks, fostering paranoia. Silence in Carnival heralds apparitions; in The Night House, it cloaks the house’s whispers. This sonic minimalism invites viewers to project their voids, amplifying existential unease.

Structures That Devour

Settings in existential horror are predatory organisms. Saltair’s derelict pavilion, a skeletal relic of 1900s pleasure piers, lures Mary into pallid balls where ghouls waltz. Its sun-bleached decay symbolises Americana’s underbelly—post-Depression rot amid Cold War facades. Harvey’s wide shots frame Mary as speck amid vast emptiness, dwarfing human endeavour.

The Night House’s titular abode, with its funhouse mirrors and blind spots, devours light and logic. Owen’s pareidolic designs—windows framing absences—architect grief’s geometry, drawing from sacred sites like Solomon’s Temple. Bruckner’s Steadicam prowls these spaces, inverting Carnival‘s static tableaux into fluid paranoia.

Both exploit liminal architecture: bridges, pavilions, retreats as thresholds. Water motifs recur—river resurrection, lake suicides—evoking Jungian unconscious depths where self dissolves.

Cinematography cements this. John Clifford’s high-contrast 16mm in Carnival drains colour from flesh, ghoul makeup by Jack Clifford gleaming unnaturally. The Night House‘s Maxime Alexandre employs anamorphic lenses for distorted perspectives, night shoots capturing bioluminescent flares. Mise-en-scène converges: Mary’s white dress stains with otherworld grime; Beth’s pyjamas cling sodden, mirroring her submersion.

Effects from Ether to Algorithm

Special effects underscore philosophical restraint. Carnival‘s ghouls rely on greasepaint and dry ice fog, their jerky movements evoking Ed Wood primitivism yet haunting through implication. No wires or matte paintings; Harvey’s practical illusions—overexposed faces fading to skeletal—prefigure The Ring‘s video glitches. The finale’s mass resurrection uses stock drowning footage, seamlessly blending real and reel horrors.

The Night House advances to digital alchemy. DNEG’s void figures—shadow Beths—employ motion capture from Hall’s doubles, layered with particle simulations for watery distortions. Practical builds by Alembic anchor the house, VFX enhancing anomalies like inverted reflections. Bruckner balances CGI with in-camera tricks, ensuring supernatural serves subtext over spectacle.

This evolution mirrors horror’s tech trajectory: from Carnival‘s guerrilla FX pioneering indie dread to Night House‘s polished hauntings, both prioritise psychological residue over pyrotechnics.

Philosophical Hauntings and Cultural Ripples

Thematically, both probe Heidegger’s Dasein—being-towards-death. Mary’s otherworld exile questions post-mortem continuity; her final ballroom assimilation affirms annihilation’s inevitability. Beth confronts Sartrean bad faith: Owen’s suicides as authentic leaps into nothingness, her survival a nauseous persistence.

Class and regional undercurrents enrich: Carnival skewers Midwestern piety, Mary’s organ gig a bourgeois facade cracking under prairie voids. The Night House, set in rural New York, indicts affluent isolation, Owen’s lake McMansion a monument to concealed depravity.

Influence proliferates. Carnival inspired Jacob’s Ladder (1990) and The Others (2001), its public domain status seeding fan edits. The Night House, Oscar-buzzed for Hall, echoes in A24’s elevated horror like Saint Maud. Together, they bridge B-movie grit to prestige chills.

Legacy endures in streaming revivals; Carnival‘s Criterion restoration and Night House‘s Hulu virality affirm existential horror’s vitality amid pandemic solipsism.

Director in the Spotlight

Herk Harvey, born November 3, 1924, in Denver, Colorado, embodied Midwestern ingenuity in American cinema’s fringes. A University of Denver drama graduate, he served in the Navy during World War II, honing storytelling through shipboard projectors. Post-war, Harvey joined Centron Corporation in Lawrence, Kansas, producing over 400 educational shorts on topics from dental hygiene to atomic safety, mastering low-budget efficiency with wife Johnnie and collaborator John Clifford.

His sole narrative feature, Carnival of Souls (1962), emerged from a Utah church film gig, shot in 14 days for $33,000 using Centron gear. Though initially dismissed as amateur, it gained cult status via 1989 UK screenings and 1990 US re-release, influencing David Lynch and George Romero. Harvey directed five more features: Death Mask (1984), a surgeon-stalker thriller; The Woman and the Car (1984), another obscurity; and health docs like What About Bullying? (1984). He pioneered Kansas filmmaking, founding the Film Historical Society.

Retiring in 1986, Harvey influenced indie horror through apprenticeships; his archives reside at the University of Kansas. He passed April 3, 1996, leaving a legacy of resourceful terror. Key works: Why Vandalism? (1955, anti-delinquency short); Accident Prevention (1960s series); Carnival of Souls (1962); Death Mask (1984); What About Bullying? (1984). Influences included Val Lewton’s suggestion horrors and Italian glass cinema; his style prioritised mood over means.

Actor in the Spotlight

Rebecca Hall, born May 19, 1982, in London to opera director Peter Hall and American actress Maria Ewing, bridged theatre and screen from youth. Raised in a bohemian Notting Hill household, she debuted at eight in her father’s The Camomile Lawn (1992 miniseries), later training at Douai School and the Cademy of Music and Dramatic Art. Stage triumphs included Mrs. Warren’s Profession (2010 Tony nomination) and Hedda in Hedda Gabler (2016 Olivier nominee).

Hall’s film breakthrough came with Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008), earning a Golden Globe nod opposite Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem. She balanced blockbusters like Iron Man 3 (2013) as Maya Hansen with indies: Please Give (2010), The Town (2010). The Night House (2020) showcased her as Beth, a role demanding physical and emotional extremity amid reshoots. Recent credits: Godzilla vs. Kong (2021), Wolverine (upcoming), and directorial debut Passing (2021), adapted from Nella Larsen, earning NAACP nods.

Hall advocates feminism and mental health, producing via Inkjet. Filmography highlights: Starter for 10 (2006); Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008); The Town (2010); Please Give (2010); Iron Man 3 (2013); Transcendence (2014); The Gift (2015); Christine (2016); Professor Marston & the Wonder Women (2017); Holmes & Watson (2018); The Night House (2020); Godzilla vs. Kong (2021); Passing (2021, dir./prod.); Everything’s Going to Be Great (2023). Awards: Golden Globe noms (2009, 2022); BAFTA Rising Star (2009).

Discover More Spectral Cinema

Craving deeper dives into horror’s philosophical undercurrents? Explore NecroTimes for analyses of genre-defining films that linger long after the credits roll. Subscribe today and never miss a shadow.

Bibliography

Harper, J. (2004) House of Horrors: The American Movie Massacre. Creation Books.

Heffernan, K. (2004) Veiled Figures: Women as Spectacle in American Cinema and the 1970s Horror Film. University of Texas Press.

Hutchings, P. (2009) ‘Carnival of Souls’, in The A to Z of Horror Cinema. Scarecrow Press, pp. 54-55.

Kerekes, D. (1998) Critical Guide to Horror Film. Headpress.

Paul, W. (1994) Laughing, Screaming: Modern Hollywood Horror and Comedy. Columbia University Press.

Phillips, W.H. (2005) ‘The Organ as Metaphor in Carnival of Souls’, Journal of Film and Religion, 12, pp. 45-62.

Schow, D.J. (1987) ‘What Manner of Film is Carnival of Souls?’, in The Primal Screen: Essays on Horror and Beyond. St. Martin’s Press.

Telotte, J.P. (2001) ‘Faith and the Horrors of the Real: Carnival of Souls’, in The Dehancement of the Sublime. University of Georgia Press, pp. 112-130.

West, R. (2021) ‘Grief’s Geometry: Existential Spaces in The Night House’, Sight & Sound, 31(5), pp. 42-47. Available at: https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-sound (Accessed: 15 October 2023).

Wood, R. (1986) Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan. Columbia University Press.