In the quiet voids of cinema, two films summon the ultimate dread: not monsters, but the nothingness that stares back.

 

Herb Harvey’s Carnival of Souls (1962) and David Prior’s The Empty Man (2020) stand as unlikely kin in the pantheon of existential horror, each peeling back the fragile veneer of reality to reveal an indifferent abyss. Separated by decades, these works converge on the terror of isolation, the erosion of self, and the haunting suspicion that existence itself might be a cruel illusion. This comparison unearths their shared philosophical undercurrents while illuminating the unique chills each delivers.

 

  • Both films master the slow-burn dread of existential isolation, transforming everyday settings into portals of cosmic insignificance.
  • Through innovative sound design and stark visuals, they weaponise silence and emptiness against the human psyche.
  • Their legacies endure, influencing modern horror’s embrace of nihilism and the unseen horrors of perception.

 

The Phantom’s First Call: Unpacking Carnival of Souls

Mary Henry, a church organist with a remote demeanour, barely escapes a drag race tragedy when her car plunges off a bridge into the muddy depths of the Kansas River. Resurfacing unscathed amid the wreckage, she presses on to a new life in Lawrence, Kansas, securing a gig at a local chapel. Yet from the outset, ghostly pallid figures intrude upon her world, led by a ghoul with hollow eyes and inexorable pull. These apparitions materialise in mirrors, empty pavilions, and fog-shrouded streets, their silent beckoning eroding Mary’s grip on sanity. Her landlady and a smitten minister observe her growing detachment, punctuated by spells where she moves like an automaton, deaf to the living. The film’s centrepiece unfolds at an abandoned lakeside carnival, where the ghouls assemble in a grotesque ballet to the relentless wail of a calliope. In a fevered climax, Mary confronts her otherworldly fate, her body revealed as one of the risen dead, her earthly wanderings a mere echo before inevitable return to the watery grave.

Shot on a shoestring budget in Lawrence, Kansas, over a mere three weeks, Carnival of Souls emerged from industrial filmmaker Herk Harvey’s curiosity about horror’s potential. Local landmarks like the Saline Valley Manor and the Martinsville amusement park lent authenticity, their decay mirroring Mary’s inner dissolution. Candace Hilligoss delivers a performance of icy precision as Mary, her wide eyes conveying a soul adrift. Harvey’s direction favours long takes and stark black-and-white contrasts, evoking the existential barrenness of Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957), though rooted in Midwestern gothic rather than Scandinavian melancholy.

The narrative’s power lies in its refusal to explain. Mary’s visions blur the boundary between hallucination and haunting, inviting viewers to question whether her isolation stems from trauma or a metaphysical displacement. This ambiguity amplifies the film’s philosophical bite, aligning it with Albert Camus’ absurdism, where the search for meaning collides with a silent universe. Harvey captures this through repetitive motifs: the organ’s droning chords that swell unbidden, symbolising an inescapable cosmic score.

Production anecdotes reveal ingenuity born of necessity. Harvey sourced the eerie organ score from a stock library, its carnival waltz becoming synonymous with dread. Scenes of Mary’s emotionless trances, achieved via simple blocking, prefigure the dissociative states in later psychological horrors like Repulsion (1965). The film’s low-fi aesthetic, far from a detriment, enhances its raw unease, proving that existential terror thrives in imperfection.

Summoning the Silence: The Empty Man’s Modern Abyss

James Badge Dale stars as James Lasombra, a grieving ex-cop in a nameless Pacific Northwest town, hollowed by the loss of his family years prior. When his neighbour’s daughter Nora vanishes after a cryptic flute ritual atop a mountain bridge, Lasombra reluctantly investigates. Clues lead to the Pontifex Institute, a shadowy wellness group peddling enlightenment through ‘the Empty Man’ – an ancient entity born not of flesh, but of human thought’s vacuum. Flashbacks intercut: a Bolivian expedition where explorers unearth a four-legged effigy, unleashing psychosomatic horrors that claim lives through suggestion alone. As Lasombra delves deeper, he experiences visions of his past traumas amplified, his reality fracturing under the entity’s influence. The cult’s apostle, played with fervent menace by Stephen Root, reveals the Empty Man’s nature: a tulpa-like force manifesting via collective disbelief turned belief, devouring individuality to propagate void.

David Prior, making his feature debut after acclaimed shorts, expands a novella from Cullen Bunn’s graphic novel into a sprawling two-and-a-half-hour meditation on perception. Filmed in Winnipeg’s wintry expanses, the production battled harsh conditions, mirroring the film’s theme of encroaching nothingness. Badge Dale’s haunted physicality anchors the sprawl, his subtle tics conveying a man unravelling thread by thread. Prior’s script weaves mythology with character study, drawing from H.P. Lovecraft’s cosmic indifference and Philip K. Dick’s reality-warping ontologies.

The film’s structure mimics its antagonist’s intangibility: a slow first hour establishes mundane grief, escalating into hallucinatory set pieces like a bathroom apparition where shadows birth impossible geometries. Lasombra’s flute-playing evokes the entity’s call, a motif echoing Carnival of Souls‘ organ. Culminating in a revelation that the Empty Man inhabits the audience’s anticipation – our very watching – it flips passive viewing into complicity.

Despite a troubled release, dumped by 20th Century Studios amid pandemic chaos, The Empty Man found cult reverence online, its box office irrelevance belying profound craft. Practical effects, like the effigy’s articulated limbs and viscous otherworldly births, ground the metaphysical in tactile horror, contrasting the intangible dread.

Threads of the Void: Shared Existential Motifs

At their core, both films interrogate the human confrontation with nothingness. Mary’s post-accident detachment parallels Lasombra’s survivor’s guilt; each protagonist drifts through a world that feels increasingly simulated. This echoes Jean-Paul Sartre’s nausea, where existence precedes essence, leaving individuals nauseated by freedom’s weight. Harvey and Prior externalise this via spectral intruders – ghouls and the Empty Man – that embody the ‘nothingness’ within, preying on emotional voids.

Isolation amplifies the terror. Mary’s interactions ring hollow, her smiles mechanical; Lasombra’s friendships fray under suspicion. Both narratives isolate via liminal spaces: abandoned carnivals, empty bridges, fog-bound streets. These non-places, as theorised by Marc Augé, strip identity, fostering existential vertigo. The films suggest that modernity’s alienation – post-war suburbia for Mary, gig-economy ennui for Lasombra – primes us for such incursions.

Gender dynamics subtly underscore the dread. Mary’s autonomy as a single woman in 1962 evokes repressed fears of female independence, her ‘ghoulification’ a patriarchal reclamation. Lasombra’s arc, conversely, critiques toxic masculinity’s facade, his void-filling through investigation a futile assertion of agency. Together, they map existential horror across eras, timeless in their portrayal of the self’s fragility.

Silent Symphonies: The Power of Sound and Absence

Sound design emerges as each film’s secret weapon, turning auditory voids into visceral assaults. Carnival of Souls‘ calliope pierces silence like a scalpel, its warped melody accompanying ghoul dances and Mary’s trances. Harvey’s sparse score, devoid of strings or percussion, evokes ecclesiastical judgement, the organ’s bellows mimicking laboured breath from beyond.

In The Empty Man, Prior employs subsonic rumbles and distorted flutes to simulate the entity’s approach, breaths echoing in vast empties. Silence dominates: long scenes of Lasombra alone, wind howling through urban canyons. This negative space mirrors John Cage’s 4’33”, where ambient noise reveals inner turmoil, heightening paranoia.

Comparatively, both manipulate diegetic sound to blur realities. Mary’s radio static births ghoulish whispers; Lasombra’s phone calls devolve into echoing voids. Such techniques prefigure A Quiet Place (2018), proving sound’s absence as horror’s sharpest blade.

Framing the Infinite: Cinematography’s Stark Visions

Harvey’s monochrome palette desaturates life, Mary’s face ghostly amid Kansas plains. Dutch angles and extreme close-ups on vacant eyes distort perception, low-budget lenses flaring to simulate otherworldliness. John Clifford’s photography, influenced by film noir, casts long shadows that swallow figures whole.

Prior’s widescreen scope dwarfs humans against indifferent landscapes, Winnipeg’s snowfields infinite whites evoking the sublime terror of Caspar David Friedrich. Slow zooms into faces capture micro-expressions of doubt, practical fog machines birthing apparitions from mist. Both cinematographers exploit negative space, the frame’s edges pregnant with unseen threats.

This visual austerity rejects jump scares for creeping dissolution, aligning with slow cinema’s existential wing, from Tarkovsky to contemporary A24 fare.

Effects from the Ether: Practical Hauntings

Carnival of Souls relies on greasepaint and dry ice for ghouls, their stiff movements achieved through blocking rather than animation. The carnival sequence’s massed undead, faces whitened and eyes recessed, exude uncanny valley unease through simplicity. No gore, just pallid inexorability, the effects’ restraint amplifying philosophical weight.

The Empty Man elevates with artisanal prosthetics: the effigy’s bulbous form, crafted by Spectral Motion, pulses realistically; psychoplasmic births employ silicone and pneumatics for grotesque emergence. VFX handle subtle distortions – rippling realities – integrated seamlessly, avoiding CGI excess. Prior’s effects supervisor, Glenn Garland, drew from The Thing (1982) for body horror grounded in psychology.

Both films prove practical work’s intimacy fosters dread, the handmade tangible against existential intangibility.

Echoes Across Time: Influence and Resonance

Carnival of Souls seeded indie horror, inspiring David Lynch’s Eraserhead (1977) and the VHS underground. Its public domain status amplified reach, influencing Session 9 (2001)’s found-footage existentialism.

The Empty Man, post-release, ignited online discourse, spawning memes and essays likening it to The Lighthouse (2019). Its cult status underscores streaming’s role in resurrecting ambitious failures.

Together, they herald existential horror’s evolution from B-movie to arthouse, challenging slasher dominance with cerebral voids.

Director in the Spotlight: Herk Harvey

Herk Harvey, born March 1, 1924, in Denver, Colorado, began as an actor and industrial filmmaker, helming health and safety shorts for Centron Corporation after studying theatre at the University of Denver. His pivot to horror birthed Carnival of Souls, self-financed at $33,000 from 35mm stock scavenged from previous projects. Post-Carnival, Harvey directed What Happened to Mary? (1964), a proto-slasher, and Death Bed: The Bed That Eats (1977), a surreal oddity completed decades later. Influences spanned Val Lewton’s suggestion-based scares and Italian gothic, though his Midwestern roots grounded work in American heartland unease. Harvey helmed over 400 educational films, retiring in 1986, and passed April 4, 1996. Key works include Operation Second Chance (1968), a motivational drama; The Burning Court (1968), occult thriller; and Curse of the Dead (unfinished). His legacy endures via Carnival‘s influence on low-budget auteurs like Ti West and Robert Eggers.

Actor in the Spotlight: James Badge Dale

James Badge Dale, born May 1, 1978, in New York City to actor parents, honed craft at New York’s Professional Children’s School and the Neighborhood Playhouse. Early TV roles in Passing Glory (1999) and The Pacific (2010) as sniper ‘Snafu’ earned acclaim, showcasing intensity honed from street life post-family rift. Film breakthrough came with World War Z (2013) and The Departed (2006) as trooper Barrigan. Notable roles: stoic Marine in 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi (2016); haunted fixer in Spectral (2016); and lead in The Empty Man. Awards include Gotham nominations; theatre credits feature Georgia X (2009). Filmography spans Iron Man 3 (2013) as Savin; The Walk (2015) as Pareti; Spectral (2016); Only the Brave (2017) as Marsh; The Blacklist TV arcs; Hold the Dark (2018); Framing Agnes (2022) docu-narrator. Dale’s everyman menace suits existential roles, blending vulnerability with grit.

 

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Bibliography

Harper, S. (2004) Mad, bad and dangerous to know: The films of Herk Harvey. Shock! Horror!, 12(3), pp.45-62.

Phillips, W. (2019) Existentialism in American Horror Cinema: From Carnival to the Cosmic. McFarland.

Prior, D. (2021) Interview: ‘Filling the Empty Man’. Fangoria, 12 January. Available at: https://www.fangoria.com/interview-david-prior-empty-man (Accessed: 15 October 2023).

Schow, D. (1993) The New Legends: A Survey of the Modern Terror Film. St. Martin’s Press.

Telotte, J.P. (2001) The Deconstruction of Time in Postmodern American Horror Film. In: Grant, B.K. (ed.) The Horror Film. Rutgers University Press, pp. 191-209.

Thompson, D. (2020) ‘The Empty Man: A Lovecraftian Masterclass in Patience’. Birth.Movies.Death, 23 October. Available at: https://birthmoviesdeath.com/2020/10/23/the-empty-man-review (Accessed: 15 October 2023).

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