Depression, Horror, and Carnival of Souls

By Fred Pryce

CONTENT WARNING: Depression, Suicide

Depression is a hard thing to portray. It’s blurry and slippery and enigmatic, not tied to any particular feeling or behaviour.  I think many visual depictions go a little too blunt-force in their attempts, literalising the problem in a physical way (I’m now thinking about all those drawings of a black goo monster climbing out of a teenager’s backpack), but I find that rarely resonates with my experience.  Rather than try to show what depression is, I think a far better strategy is to show how it feels -- becoming fully entrenched in a character’s perspective, and creating a pervasive atmosphere that reflects this. In the book The Aesthetics of Disengagement, Christine Ross emphasises how depression tends to impair people’s perceptions, hindering their ability to connect to people and the world. If an aesthetic is how an artwork communicates its ideas to the viewer, than depression would entail this connection becoming faulty -- so in representing depression, any cinematic ‘style’ should necessarily be vague, unclear. This disengagement, the loss of connection to anything outside of yourself, is profoundly frustrating, so recreating this sensation can be done through an inescapable detachment, with any solutions or sense of understanding left ambiguous and just out of reach. And given that this feeling is utterly horrifying, it makes sense that there are so many horror films about it. 

Saying that a horror movie is “actually about grief” has become a meme at this point, an attempt to try ‘elevate’ the genre to a more prestigious pedestal, as if horror being “about” something is a new phenomenon. Horror is metaphorical by design, a way of taming our overwhelming anxieties and primal fears by expressing them. And yes, a lot are easily read as narratives about emotional baggage such as grief, which is also pretty hard to deal with. But I find many movies, or at least interpretations of them, seem to treat sadness and depression as interchangeable, rather than complete disparate experiences. They also tend towards the backpack-goo-monster strain of visualisation, as using a monster is a pretty reliable way to create drama and tension. A good example of this would be The Babadook, wherein the shapeshifting gay scarecrow man (“it’s the titular role!”) is an obvious symbol of our main characters unhappiness following her husband’s death, but I find it far more effective as a representation of her grief, rather than mental health issues. Maybe the worst recent example of this I’ve seen is in Lights Out, where the scary creature is so tied to a mother’s mental health issues that the only way to defeat it is for her to end her own life -- an abhorrent conclusion that the film presents as completely logical. Melancholia swings about as far as you can along this path, using the literal end of the world (via a meteor colliding with Earth) as a manifestation of Kirsten Dunst’s internal struggles. 

Then I watch Carnival of Souls, which is probably the best possible example of it to stumble upon, as well as connecting with me in a huge way, despite the film’s constant detachment. It’s a very low-budget indie horror movie from 1964 (in black-and-white! Truly horrifying), and the premise, as well as a very trashy poster, imply something a lot pulpier than the result. The story follows a woman (Candace Hilligoss) who seemingly drowns after her car flies into a river during a daytime drag race, before emerging hours later, apparently unscathed. It’s unsettling, and noone can make any sense of it, but she continues on with her life as usual, travelling to Utah to be employed as a church organist. The rest of the movie is less concerned with plot than atmosphere, as our protagonist struggles to figure out what’s happened to her, and whether she’s really alive. A ghoulish figure (the film’s director, Herk Harvey) appears to her again and again. She is drawn to an abandoned amusement park, rising unnaturally out of the flat nothingness of the rural landscape. The unsettling tone grows to become overwhelming, and she becomes more and more distraught amidst a tidal wave of detachment and wrongness that’s tangible only to her, until she disappears altogether, lost to this plane between life and death - an emotionally devastating parallel of suicide if I've ever seen one. 

A more traditional ghost story was clearly envisioned as part of the pitch (and still serves as the bones of the film), but due to budget limitations, genius, or luck, the result is an semi-experimental film that inhabits a world both dreamlike and real. Our protagonist is a fly, caught between sliding screen doors, able to view the world around her but unable to be a part of it, to connect with it. But even though this makes sense given the ghostly vibe of the film, to me this is all down to technique. It begins immediately and without introduction, with the youths already beginning their friendly race, and the lack of fanfare or traditional movie-ish structure makes it feel less like a movie and more like a window into a world that has always existed, that never acknowledges the presence of an outside viewer. The cinematography alternates between occasionally breathtaking lyricism, making the plains of Utah both beautiful and haunting, and a visual efficiency that’s often used in horror and thrillers. The square, black-and-white frames really forces you to focus on what's in it and not get lost in the scenery, creating a claustrophobia necessary to the film’s perspective, and showing the deliberation behind all its compositions. Its stylish without seeming like it has any particular style at all, the mundanity of its images making it seem all the more real (something that found-footage horror has taken to its logical conclusion). The all-organ score isn't something I would ever listen to by itself, and it feels almost half-completed in a way that totally fits with the mood, like we're only hearing snippets of a more beautiful orchestration, on the other side of the glass.  Even when scares come in the form of the zombie-like figure, they often aren't even emphasised by a shocking cut or music cue, but these 'dead' scares are paradoxically even more terrifying for how numbing they feel. The overall effect is unnerving to the extreme, but with a crystal-clear precision to it, a fully-formed artistic object with no pretensions or ambitions. 

The way this lost soul navigates the dreamworld is extremely relatable, dead behind the eyes even if not literally dead, trapped in endless cycles only she can see and noone can comprehend, turning her mundane existence into something so painfully, cosmically insignificant that she just can’t cope anymore. Horror movies usually follow people that society considers ‘lesser’ in some way - children are often used because what adult would believe that their kid really saw a monster under the bed? If noone listens to the characters, it keeps them isolated, alone, afraid. This also explains why horror movies are almost always centred around women, who have to deal with the horrors of existing in a dangerous and sexist world, on top of any abnormal horrors in the movie world. In Carnival of Souls, Candace Hilligoss is not only demeaned as a woman, but as someone with psychological issues, at a time where both of these leave her being dismissed as merely ‘hysterical’. A doctor freely admits to not being a psychologist, before advising her that she’s fine anyway. She ends up desperately pleading with a creep she previously rejected to not leave her alone in her time of need, and he leaves her anyway. Her social isolation is tied to her spiritual and mental isolation, leaving her completely disengaged from any form of help, stumbling around a crowded city completely alone. It’s hard to describe what’s so effective about this 80-minute whatsit, but it feels like the ‘purest’ form of horror to me, one that cuts straight to the neurotic heart of our fears - that we are fundamentally trapped inside our own minds. 

SPOILER WARNING

It’s influence is seen clearly in the unclassifiable films of David Lynch, which aren’t strictly horror but still contain some of the most skin-crawling sequences in film history (check out Eraserhead, or the diner scene from Mulholland Drive, or the opening half-hour of Lost Highway). They share Carnival of Souls’ surreal atmosphere, its claustrophobia, and its detachment from anything other than its immediate perspective. But maybe my favourite example of ‘detached horror’ is the 1998 Japanese film Cure, about a mysterious ‘virus’ that causes people to murder others, than themselves. It’s a film tied not only to psychological alienation but that of urban living and capitalism, this strange illness seemingly emanating from the lights and sewers of the city, a single killer living among millions. The camera often lingers far from its subjects, showing their vulnerability amidst cold, mundane surroundings, and its chief villain is so scary mainly because he’s so detached. He’s apathetic and emotionless enough to be completely inhuman. 

There are plenty of movies about things like depression and alienation that I like fine, but horror can surpass merely being about something, and actually be that experience. I can’t relate to ghosts following me around in an abandoned amusement park, but I can relate to how alone, and how scared, that must make you feel. Being terrified can be incredibly cathartic.