Carnival of Awesome!

My love affair with The Internet Archive continues madly. We’re getting married soon. You’ll all get invitations, of course.

Why are things going so well, you ask?

Well, because they’ve just made available – for free download, remember! – one of my all-time favorite horror movies: Carnival of Souls.

Carnival is not only a great movie, but a great production story.

The movie is about a woman who moves across the country to take a job as an organist for a small church. In her new town, though, she’s menaced by a ghostly figure and feels an irresistible, inexplicable pull to an abandoned fairgrounds outside the town.

It’s a great production story, too, because the film is the ultimate in indie moviemaking. Financed by a group of local dentists for $35,000 and made by a pair of friends who made industrial/educational filmstrips by day, the movie had a lot going against its success. But despite all that, Carnival of Souls ended up being a terrific, atmospheric, scary, engaging movie.

Like Night of the Living Dead, Carnival of Souls is one of those 60s horror movies that didn’t get copyrighted properly and so has been available in a million knock-off DVD editions over the years. There are a number of different cuts of the movie out there, but this one is pretty close (at least in running time) to the definitive edition from The Criterion Collection.

So, if you like an atmospheric horror movie with a great story behind it, check out Carnival of Souls.

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Coming soon, a catalog of all the great, old horror and science fiction movies the Internet Archive has. There are a ton!