5 Great Movies You Probably Haven't Seen #2

CARNIVAL OF SOULS (1962)

It’s always interesting to see a low-budget movie that is minimal in all ways, whose limitations are clearly notable, and which still succeeds on its own internal merits. Carnival of Souls is such a movie, made in three weeks with a cast of nobodies and a budget of just $30,000, most of which was raised from local businesses. The director was Herk Harvey, whose only prior or future experience in filmmaking was a long career in educational shorts. He claims he got the idea for the story, which involves a girl (Candace Hilligoss) who seemingly survives a terrible car crash and begins to see menacing apparitions everywhere she goes, from passing by an abandoned amusement park that was so eerie it would provide the perfect setting for a thriller. This very park area, which was located in Salt Lake City, is the one seen in the movie.

Carnival of Souls has become an underground classic through the years, mostly helped by late-night TV airings thanks to the film’s reported public domain status. It is a fascinating picture for many reasons, the most obvious being that it really does work on a base level. The ghost was played by Harvey himself and he would often appear in full makeup for revival screenings and interviews in the years to come. This menacing character is the first image of the film that is brought to the viewer’s memory, because he is one of the most truly frightening figures in popular horror history, helped by his only brief and very sudden appearances throughout the film. The effect of his scenes is still jarring today, even though these moments aren’t accompanied by loud blasts of music like the modern thrillers are so keen to use. I find one moment particularly alarming, when the figure suddenly appears in the girl’s mirror, and such moments work because they are so wisely underplayed.

The ghost is never properly explained over the course of the movie and neither is the young lady’s state of mind, which lends the movie a mysterious air that makes it puzzling in a Twilight Zone-esque way without ever becoming confusing. This has led to many fan interpretations that may or may not be accurate and which are largely unsupported by any actual evidence in the film. Carnival of Souls is not a great movie because it is scarier than others or because it offers some big puzzle for viewers to put together, though it is often treated this way. It is great as an example of quality overcoming poverty. Harvey took a real-life moment that he experienced, the creepiness of the abandoned amusement park, and created a lasting, accessible version of it, a movie that shares that creepy feeling with everyone who sees it.

The greatest scary movies are always minimal in their presentation, and Harvey uses the necessity of his very small budget and his documentary experience to successfully render a cinematic version of fear, using atmosphere and suggestion more than shocks. Those who discover Carnival of Souls almost always cling to it, because they can recognize that unique thrill it possesses when compared to the bigger shock movies of the era. It really is something special.

COMPLIANCE (2012)

Compliance is one of the most astonishing and actually thought-provoking movies of recent years. As enjoyable as it is to mull over all the layers of Inception and the other intentionally complicated movies that came with its success, the great thought-provoking movies are the ones that ask questions that make the viewer a better person for answering. Compliance almost makes a statement with its question: “Would you have done this?” It then answers with an emphatic, “Probably.”

The movie takes place at a fictional fast-food restaurant called “Chick-which” where tensions are high because somebody left the freezer door open all night, ruining a large amount of supplies. The manager is Ashley Manson (Ann Dowd), a middle-aged woman who knows she is not respected by her younger employees (She hears them making fun of her after a desperate attempt to relate to their text talk.) and who is the sort of person who cannot handle the already high-stress situation of running the restaurant for all her worrying about what the teenagers think of her. In the middle of this busy weeknight, she gets a call from a policeman who says that an employee (Dreama Walker) stole money from a customer’s purse, describes the employee and demands that she be held in a back room until he can arrive to question her. Ashley, always willing to please, follows instructions, even when the policeman’s orders get increasingly ludicrous. By the end of the movie, the girl who has been detained has also been humiliated and even assaulted by multiple people. Because the man on the phone told them to.

Director Craig Zobel wrote and directed Compliance, his second feature, based on a series of incidents that actually occurred at some McDonald’s and other fast-food restaurants. Most movies that begin with a “Based on a true story” label do little to convince us of actuality. With this movie, half of the audience reaction is founded on disbelief that this could actually happen, much less multiple times. Are these people dumb or something? Zobel’s movie stays calm and collected throughout. He does not exploit his characters or make their behavior exciting. He shows us the evidence as an accusation, because he wants us to be aware that we almost certainly would do the same thing. This has caused his movie to get stronger reactions than any typical horror movie. People can accept watching others commit crimes, but don’t want to be told that they are potential criminals themselves.

As incredible as Zobel’s film is, what holds it all together and really convinces us is the performance by Ann Dowd. Her work here is disturbing in its life-like simplicity, as she equally embodies the misunderstood everyman and hateful boss we all thought we had as teenagers. Dowd has been a respected stage actress for years and this should have been her breakout film performance that made her a bona fide star. She won a couple little-publicized awards for the performance and paid for her own Academy Awards consideration advertising, but was looked over. In years to come, her performance and this movie will still stand, because human beings will never be less viciously stupid than we are now and it will always horrify us to discover it.

Dead of Night (1945)

The British censors outright banned the making of horror movies in the country during the World War II, opting instead to allow patriotic, morale-lifting pictures to pervade for the good of the people. So, when the British horror anthology Dead of Night was released immediately after the war, one cannot now imagine what kind of power it held. It is a captivating movie, frightening and contemplative, circling around itself as its stories plummet to their disturbing conclusions. It was a work of team effort, containing six segments made by four directors (Alberto Cavalcanti, Charles Chricton, Basil Dearden and Robert Hamer) and featuring overlapping actors (including Michael Redgrave, Mervyn Johns, Ralph Michael, Sally Ann Howes and Anthony Baird). The macabre glee with which the directors approached their only just recently taboo subjects shines through and Dead of Night contains images that deserve a place next to the most well-known thrillers.

The main plot of the film concerns a man who is summoned for reasons not made abundantly clear to a house in which he finds several people engaged in a social party. He insists that he repeatedly dreamed the events that then unfold, that he vividly dreamed the house and all the guests. When he accurately predicts a few minor incidents that occur, the guests are enthralled by the supernatural prospects and begin to tell stories about other unexplainable incidents that occurred to them. This is the link that leads to five isolated segments that make up the bulk of the film.

In one, a man is haunted by the vision of a spectral hearse that he believes foretells his death. In another, the same man’s wife is disturbed by her husband’s sickly fascination with a mirror that he claims does not reflect their bedroom. Another involves a girl who finds a child during a game of hide and seek, a child that shouldn’t exist. In the most famous segment, a ventriloquist’s dummy may or may not be acting on his own. And in the only portion of the film that doesn’t quite work, a gentleman beats his friend at a golf game by cheating, which leads to the friend killing himself and returning as an obnoxious ghost.

Excepting the golf story, each segment in Dead of Night is a genuinely chilling experience of its own. They mostly use everyday objects and situations that resonate with a viewer more than horror’s usual impossible scenarios. I know that I spent most of my childhood terrified of mirrors because of the idea that I’d see something that shouldn’t be there, and the idea of a possessed ventriloquist’s dummy has been used to death since its appearance here and never as effectively. What makes the stories even more involving is the constant suggestion of falsehood. All of the stories, again excepting the golfing one, are presented in ways that could make them factual or hallucinatory. A “logical” explanation can always be provided, but the fun of the movie is in how much it convinces us otherwise. Even though its absence on home video makes it difficult to see, it is a little masterpiece of its genre, and well worth seeking out for fans of the genre.

THE TINGLER (1959)

In the late 50s and early 60s, William Castle was the self-proclaimed “King of Showmanship.” He had a way of exaggerating the truth, and everyone knew he was truthfully the “King of Gimmicks.” His specialty was horror B-movies and before beginning a career of his own he had a reputation at Columbia Pictures for producing films before schedule and below budget. His first movie as director and producer was Macabre in 1958, tickets for which were accompanied by a $1,000 life insurance policy, in case the viewer should die of fright. Then, in 1959, he released the now cult classic House on Haunted Hill starring Vincent Price. Larger theaters showing that film were equipped with a box containing a skeleton on a wire, which would swing over the audience during the finale. Both films were written by Robb White who also wrote Castle’s third and best picture The Tingler, which White claimed was inspired by the sight of the fake worms in House on Haunted Hill, even though there were no worms in that movie (It seems inventing stories about William Castle productions was infectious.).

The story of The Tingler is absurd beyond reason. Vincent Price stars as a doctor who discovers that whenever people are afraid, a worm-like creature grows in the spine and is only destroyed by the sound of the person screaming, releasing the fear that the creature feeds on. If the person is unable to scream for whatever reason, they die of fright, due to the creature growing to a ridiculous size and breaking the person’s spine. During the climax, the “Tingler” creature, now in large, obviously-a-puppet centipede form is loosed on the world. The screenplay could never be considered intellectual, but it delivers this baffling premise as smartly as it can muster. Even more convincing is the direction by Castle, who firmly believes his movie is frightening and almost succeeds in making it so through this conviction, and the performance by Price, who always somehow managed to be likeable when playing characters that were undeniable creeps. This would later be known as the Hannibal Lector paradox.

The Tingler is a movie so straight-forward and so charmingly sincere that it succeeds as great entertainment, even when failing as anything else. Castle had a way of treating his viewers like they were friends in on a joke. Even when pulling silly ploys in both plot and presentation, you never suspect he actually questioned our intelligence. I also think it’s interesting that the movie includes a respectful deaf character (played by Judith Evelyn who does scared well during the movie’s most elaborate sequence) during a period that did nothing but treat minorities condescendingly. Also included is one of the first uses of LSD in a motion picture, an acid that was then legal.

William Castle was one of the great camp filmmakers and one of the most successful. The popularity of House on Haunted Hill and The Tingler led to Alfred Hitchcock’s decision to make his own low-budget horror flick, Psycho. Castle wanted to entertain his audience and make them a first-hand part of the film process, which explains the buzzers that were placed under seats during screenings of The Tingler, which went off suddenly at the point where Price announces, “The Tingler is loose in this theater! Everybody scream! Scream for your lives!” It’s corny, but it worked.

VALERIE AND HER WEEK OF WONDERS (1970)

Valerie and Her Week of Wonders was a Czechoslovakian novel written by surrealist Vitezslav Nezval and published in 1932. It was a fantasy tale about a young girl who wanders a disturbing world in which she encounters priests who are secretly vampires, relatives who want to kill her, animals that are also humans, and mobs that gladly sacrifice her when falsely told she committed sins. The novel in its surreal, whimsical and gothic style is an analogy for the onset of womanhood and, thanks to an English translation, has been recently rediscovered as a forgotten literary classic. The 1970 film directed by Jaromil Jires and starring child actress Jaroslava Schallerova is also making a reappearance in the film world, having been largely unseen since its release, but now available on DVD.

The film follows the same dreamlike structure of the novel, though the plot is somewhat more hurried (The biggest difference between the two is the film changing Valerie’s age from 17 to 13, reflecting a more 60s-accurate age for a girl having her first period.). I also feel the whimsical nature of the novel is not accurately presented in the film, which may or may not be a fault. The movie embraces the darker aspects of the story, most notably in the Weasel character, so named because of his weasel-shaped mask and for his occasional transformations into an actual weasel. He is Valerie’s father or perhaps grandfather and has a young assistant named Eagle, who becomes Valerie’s first love interest. The appearance of the Weasel would complement any horror movie, what with his Nosferatu-like pale face, protruding teeth and pointed ears. This menacing figure provides some of the movie’s most memorable images, such as when he sneaks up on Valerie and envelops her in his black cloak, or when he goes into a sudden frenzy, violently whipping everything in sight, even startlingly setting a water fountain on fire.

Jires’ movie does have problems. The novel’s allusions to menstruation are subtle enough to almost go unnoticed, while the movie is almost annoyingly blatant. Close-ups of blood dripping on flowers and the long shot of red wine spilling all over a white tablecloth are obvious when suggestion would have been more effective. Even more egregious is the movie’s stubborn insistence on always reminding us that we are watching Valerie’s dream, a fact that is left ambivalent in the novel and should have remained so in the film. Instead of allowing the movie to simply be surreal, Jires has Valerie flat out saying, “This isn’t real. I am only dreaming,” and closes the movie with a scene in which all the characters dance around Valerie’s bed. Mr. Jires, could you be any more obvious?

What Valerie and Her Week of Wonders lacks in subtlety, it makes up for in imagination. It wouldn’t have worked at all if the fantasy scenes hadn’t been so mesmerizing. Through the scenes of vampirism, some restraint is preserved. The sudden violence that interrupts an otherwise light and colorful movie is like the sudden onset of a new adult world and the terrors it contains. For these moments, and for the creative and haunting fantasy world the film creates, it still has value.