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."