A couple for Halloween month.

Carnival of Souls (1962), directed by Herk Harvey. The film reminds me of Robert Enrico's Occurence at Owl Creek Bridge, made a year earlier. There, I have given everything away. But the reason for seeing Carnival of Souls is hardly for the plot or the scares or anything horrifying and perhaps even surprising. The film is worth seeing for evidence of what beauty a film maker can bring to film with hardly any money and mostly unprofessional actors. Much of the film is visually stunning, an amalgamation of Bergman, Corman, and even the intrepid Ed Wood Jr. The locations - the organ factory in Kansas, the ruined Pavilion near Salt Lake City, the garage, the church, even the boarding house that the owner says is not a boarding house - are suitably creepy and unsettling. The opening shots before the credits invoke 1950s films about teenagers, films such as Jack Arnold's High School Confidential and even that film by Nicholas Ray, the one with the famous car race. After the credits things roll along in a rather haunting manner until the dance macabre near the end. In its strange way, the film is carnivalesque. It follows the rules but in a manner askew from what we might expect. It upturns convention and while delivering the expected gives us something unexpected. Again, it manages to do this through its imaginative and clever cinematography. As for the story, this captures something of the soulless state of affairs lurking just beneath the Camelot surface of the early 1960s. The film looks forward in both look and sensibility to George Romero's Night of the Living Dead (something Romero acknowledges).

The Innocents (1961), directed by Jack Clayton. This is Henry James's spooky Turn of the Screw about the governess and the two creepy children in her charge. The cinematography is by Freddie Francis, and it is marvellously moody. The deep focus is so sharp that at times it looks as if we are seeing 3-D. The setting is grand in excellent gothic mode. The two children are as spicy as one could wish for, working in the vein of children in such films as The Bad Seed, Children of the Damned, and These Three. They smile and fawn all the time possibly playing the villain, but then again possibly not. Young Miles is especially off kilter. The opening of the film is stunningly stark and nicely ambiguous. The falling rose petals and the beetle and the turtle and the sense of decay and decadence are palpable. The house, as in The Haunting (1963), is somehow alive. Deborah Kerr manages to portray the main character in a suitably unaccountable manner. Is she overly repressed? That final kiss is so very unsettling. The primness of things simply intensifies the audacious happenings. This is a film that delivers its shivers generously. The two ghosts are strangely there; note the drops of water on the desk after one of the ghosts appears and then disappears. Having no lines, they nevertheless manage to communicate a malevolence that pervades the house and grounds of this stately country manor. 

Eyes Without a Face (1959), directed by Georges Franju. Franju said his studio wanted a horror film without blood and without a mad scientist. The film he delivered had a doctor/scientist who may be obsessed, but he is not crazed. As for blood, there is a small amount, just enough to make the viewer (or this one anyway) squirm. The plot involves a doctor who has come up with what he terms a way of grafting skin, called heterograft. He uses his technique to try and remake his daughter's face which has been severely disfigured in a car crash. Before working on humans, the good doctor has worked on dogs and he has a large number of canines in a spooky kennel beneath his mansion. These dogs will find release and revenge, of this you may be sure. The whole thing is quite delicious, and the movie has proven influential. Here's a snippet from the Wikipedia entry on the film.

"The film was re-released in its original and uncut form to American theaters on October 31, 2003. Based on 54 reviews collected by Rotten Tomatoes, Eyes Without a Face received an average 98% fresh rating with an average rating of 8.4/10. The reviewers commented on the film's poetic nature and noted the strong influence of French poet and filmmaker Jean Cocteau. Jonathan Rosenbaum of the Chicago Reader praised the film, referring to it as "absurd and as beautiful as a fairy tale". J. Hoberman of The Village Voice declared the film "a masterpiece of poetic horror and tactful, tactile brutality".[26] The Encyclopedia of Horror Films agreed with the assertion of Cocteau's influence, stating that "Franju invests [the film] with a weird poetry in which the influence of Cocteau is unmistakable". David Edelstein, writing for Slate, commented that "the storyline is your standard obsessed-mad-doctor saga, one step above a Poverty Row Bela Lugosi feature ... [b]ut it's Lugosi by way of Cocteau and Ionesco". In the early 2010s, Time Out conducted a poll with several authors, directors, actors and critics who have worked within the horror genre to vote for their top horror films. Eyes Without a Face placed at number 34 on their top 100 list."

 

A few Mizoguchi films:

Sisters of the Gion (1936), directed by Kenji Mizoguchi. The final words of the film, spoken by one of the two geisha sisters, Omocha, are: "Why do there even have to be such things as geisha?" The film follows two sisters who work as geishas in the "pleasure district" of Kyoto, one traditional in thought and action and the other (the younger sister) rebellious and cynical. Neither finds the peaceful or prosperous life they might wish for. I will not outline the plot except to say that the older sister finds herself left behind by the man who had her loyalty, and the younger sister finds herself tossed from a speeding automobile by the young man she has jilted. Men, as in the earlier Osaka Elegy, are selfish and irascible. The film has beautiful tracking shots, moody lighting, and long narrow streets and alleys that suggest the confinement the characters experience. No one in this film has much room to move or to develop or to breathe. For a film of the mid 930s, it is forward looking. The only Hollywood film I can think of that is perhaps similar in its view of women is Lloyd Bacon's Marked Woman (1937).

Osaka Elegy (1936), directed by Kenji Mizoguchi. Mizoguchi often focuses on a woman in distress, and this film is his first exploration of the theme. A young telephone operator at a pharmaceutical firm, Ayato Murai, lives at home with parents who argue most of the time. Her father owes some 300 yen and he does not have the money to pay the debt. Ayato, meanwhile, finds herself the object of her boss's attentions; in short, he wants her to be his mistress. After talking with a young man and finding little help, except for his affection, she decides to meet her boss and take money from him so she can pay her father's debts. Events follow that farther entrap Ayato in a life she does not want until finally she and her young beau, Nishimura, find themselves questioned by the police. Nishimural says he has no interest in Ayako and the police let him leave. Then they offer a stern warning to Ayako and leave her under the authority of her father. She returns home where she receives, to put it mildly, an icy reception. Neither her father nor her brother (she has also taken money from a second man to pay for her brother's tuition) have any respect for her and think she should leave. She leaves home, wanders onto a bridge, meets the doctor of the family who, in effect, tells her she really has no recourse but a life of "delinquency." She walks slowly toward the camera and the film ends. Mizoguchi offers a lyrical yet sharp look at the difficulties of a woman's life. The film has elegant tracking shots and much murkiness and shadow.

Women of the Night (1948), directed by Kenji Mizoguchi. Despite the title, much of this film is photographed during the day, a nice way of pointing out that for the women in the film, pretty much all time, night or day, is dark. This is a raw look at post-war Japan, and especially the women, or at least some of the women, who have lost everything in the war and now have to scrabble to put their lives back together, as often as not failing in the endeavour and ending in prostitution. Mizoguchi shoots his film on the streets of Osaka using inferior film stock that renders the look of the film close to the Neo-realist films coming from Italy at the same time. Once again we have two sisters, a predatory boss, and many uncaring people. The prospects for the women here are dim, to say the least, and the final scene shot amid the rubble of a bombed out church is harrowing. The shot of the stained glass window depicting Madonna and child only reinforces the sorry state of things for these women. In this scene a gang of prostitutes gather like feral felines and attack one of the sisters and her young friend. Fusako, the elder sister, is beaten, whipped, and nearly stoned after she tries to protect her young friend and after she asserts her intention of "going straight." Mizoguchi shoots the scene from above showing the women behaving like a pack of wild animals. The action is furious and deeply troubling. A hospital does offer a sort of sanctuary for prostitutes, some of whom carry STDs, but this hospital is as much prison as it is medical centre. Surrounding it is a high stone wall topped with barbed wire. From the opening scenes in which Fusako's tubercular child dies to the unsettling end in the churchyard, the film is unrelenting in its examination of ruined lives.

Street of Shame (1956), directed by Kenji Mizoguchi. This is Mizoguchi's final film, and it is an ensemble piece, focusing on five prostitutes who work for a brothel named Dreamland in Tokyo's Red Light District. Each woman has her dream of somehow finding a better way of life, and each woman finds this dream elusive, if not downright impossible. Melodrama is the order of the day, but effective melodrama. One of the women speaks of "tackling" men in order to lure them into the brothel, and this pretty much sums things up nicely. The plot, such as it is, involves the anxiety raised by the Diet's consideration of a bill that would make prostitution illegal. We see enough to know each of the five women well and understand her plight. One wants to leave and live with her now grown son, another just wants to care for her ill husband and infant, another works her tricks to save enough money to find her way into another life (she becomes owner of a shop that supplies fabric to the brothel), another marries and finds married life just another trap, and yet another simply wants to have as many material things as she can have. Near the end, another prostitute arrives, a young virginal girl terrified of the life she has entered. Her arrival, along with the defeating of the anti-prostitution bill in parliament, suggests a continuation of the street of shame. Perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of this film is the musical score by Toshiro Mayuzumi. The sounds and clang and unusual notes provide a cacophonous accompaniment to lives lived on the edge.