We start with a chicks vs. dudes drag race! The girls' car crashes through the side of a bridge into a muddy river. One dazed survivor, Mary, pulls herself to shore. A few days later, Mary continues on her way west to her new job as a church organist in Salt Lake City. En route, she starts to hallucinate, seeing pale, scary faces staring at her. After confirming her job and finding a room in a boarding house, she even goes to see a doctor after one such hallucination. She's convinced it's residual trauma from the car crash.
Mary settles into her new life with her sweet landlady and pushy, cheeseball neighbor who literally won't take no for an answer when he asks her out. Mary goes along with him only so far because she's a tough cookie: she doesn't want a boyfriend or any friends, really; she likes her job at the church but isn't religious; she stands up to her doctor when he tries to boss her around. Things are eerie, however, and she finds herself drawn to the abandoned Saltair resort on the shores of the Great Salt Lake.
She drives herself out there and wanders around, finding more of the scary, dead-looking people. Back in town, she slowly starts to go mad, unable to get the place out of her head. She gets fired from her church job for playing "profane music" - which makes all the dead dance. Mary can't escape it, however.
Carnival of Souls is slow, seemingly l o n g at only 78 minutes. It is a gorgeously shot film and the scene at the Saltair - shot at the actual Saltair - is really creepy when the dead are dancing. This movie has become a classic and has influenced many subsequent films, including George Romero's Night of the Living Dead. What stuck with me, aside from how beautiful some of the shots were, was the intrenched sexism of the time: how all the men manhandled Mary and how skeezily pushy her desperate-for-a-date neighbor was.
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