[Editorial] You Can Hear Me: Navigating the Aural Gaze in Carnival of Souls (1962)

When engaging critically with a film, we often talk about its gaze. Film is, after all, a visual medium, and how we look at the objects and characters on the screen shapes our relationship with the story. Film is not solely a visual medium, though. How we hear the characters can matter just as much as how we look at them. Carnival of Souls (1962), the dreamy and disturbing horror classic from director Herk Harvey and writer John Clifford, examines the aural gaze as well as the visual gaze, interrogating what it sounds like when a woman refuses to conform to society’s expectations of her.

Mary Henry (Candace Hilligoss) is a church organist who moves to a new town after walking away from a car crash that killed two of her friends. Everyone in the film who hears Mary play the organ stops to listen and marvel at her talent. The minister (Art Ellison) of her new church even remarks, “We have an organist capable of stirring the soul.” The people who listen to her music assume that Mary is similarly moved, but as she repeatedly tells people, playing a church organ is just a job to her. It’s not a higher calling or an expression of her faith; it’s simply a way to earn a living. Each time she tells someone about this pragmatic approach, she gets rebuked for her soullessness. They love listening to her play when they think she has the same religious beliefs as they do, but they are appalled to hear her say something they deem sacrilegious. A woman who cares about money but not about God is seen as sinful and unnatural. 

Mary’s “strangeness” is frequently brought up by the other characters, and the film comes shockingly close (by 1962 standards, at least) to outright saying that Mary is queer. The car crash she walked away from was caused by a pair of reckless young men who challenged Mary’s friend to a drag race. Though Mary’s friend was eager to flirt and engage in the dangerous pastime, Mary seemed disgusted and fearful even before the men’s car started to crowd them off a rickety old bridge. It’s a theme that comes up time and again with Mary: though she sometimes tries to force herself to, she doesn’t connect with men (or possibly any gender) sexually or romantically. 

When Mary finds a room at Mrs. Thomas’s (Frances Feist) boarding house, she meets the lecherous John Linden (Sidney Berger). Linden’s gaze is predatory, both visually and aurally: he surreptitiously watches Mary get dressed after he tries to manipulate his way into her apartment — at which point the camera adopts his perspective and eyes Mary up and down through the crack in the door — and he listens to her movements to know when she will be most vulnerable. When he offers Mary alcoholic coffee one morning, he tells her that he knew she was up because he heard her alarm. When the two first meet, it’s strongly implied that he listened to her conversation with Mrs. Thomas and waited until he heard Mary draw a bath so that he would catch her in the nude. 

Mary resists Linden at every turn. During the sole conversation they have where Mary seems engaged and “friendly,” to use Linden’s word, they still talk past each other rather than talking to each other. Mary uses words that Linden doesn’t understand; as happens with nearly every other character in the film, he hears her without actually listening to her. Because Mary allows him into her apartment and speaks with him, he assumes she is open to a sexual relationship with him, but he doesn’t comprehend what she’s saying and thus doesn’t see — or hear — Mary for who she really is. 

Even when Mary is desperate for someone to keep her company because of the staring ghoul that has been terrorizing her ever since she arrived in town, she can’t stand for Linden to touch her. As Mary tells Dr. Samuels (Stan Levitt), who finds her panicking in a park when she believes she has seen the ghoul again, she has “no desire” for a boyfriend: “I’m surprised to find myself saying that, but it’s true. I have no desire for the close company of other people...I don’t seem capable of being very close to people.” The repeated use of the phrase “no desire” coupled with the fact that Dr. Samuels uses the word “boyfriend” while Mary switches to a gender-neutral expression by simply saying “people” all but confirms that Mary is queer. Whether she is asexual and/or aromantic or just not interested in men, she doesn’t fit society’s heteronormative view of a woman who craves male attention and affection. 

Interestingly, when Mary speaks to Dr. Samuels about the eerie things that have been happening to her since the car accident, he keeps his back turned to her as he takes notes. He refuses to gaze at her with his eyes, using his hearing as the only method of perceiving her. Still, he doesn’t fully understand her. In the park he calls her “hysterical,” using a loaded misogynistic term for her distress, and he seems shocked that she doesn’t want a boyfriend. He presents himself as an authority on her state of mind even though he himself admits that he is not a psychiatrist. In one of the film’s most effective scares, Mary visits Dr. Samuels for a second time, only to find that the man with his back to her is actually the ghoul that has been following her throughout most of the film. 

Significantly, the ghoul who is haunting Mary is played by Harvey himself. Mary’s face and voice are caught in the ghoul’s gaze just as Hilligoss’s face and voice are caught in her director’s gaze. The first time Mary sees the ghoul, eerie organ music begins playing on her car radio as she passes by an old pavilion. She turns the radio dial, trying to listen to something other than the bizarre and troubling song, but she can’t escape the sound. Gene Moore’s organ score truly becomes a character in its own right, keeping the audience off balance at all times and signaling when the otherworldly ghoul is about to intrude on Mary’s waking life.  

The only person who believes Mary about the ghoul’s existence is Mrs. Thomas. It’s fitting that the only other woman in the main cast is the one who understands Mary rather than dismissing her or calling her crazy. However, Mrs. Thomas doesn’t want to understand. Rather than sympathizing with Mary, Mrs. Thomas gets frightened and tells her to be quiet and stop telling scary stories. Just like Linden, Mrs. Thomas listens to Mary in her apartment. After Mary sees the ghoul in the mirror and tries to block off access to the apartment to keep herself safe, Mrs. Thomas tells Dr. Samuels that she heard Mary moving furniture around all night. She hears and comprehends Mary’s story at first, but in order to maintain her own position in society as a respected woman and a successful landlady, she ignores Mary’s truth. 

Sound design is an integral aspect of any film, but it is especially important in Carnival of Souls. Mary has moments where she completely loses touch with the world — or rather, it loses touch with her. While out dress shopping, she suddenly discovers that she can’t hear ambient noise anymore. Though she can still see everything that’s happening around her, no one else can see or hear her. The viewer sees her walk, confused and afraid, through large crowds and past construction workers with jackhammers, yet all we hear are the sounds of Mary’s own footsteps and that eerie, inescapable organ music. 

The second time the world loses touch with Mary, an extraordinary thing happens. She is in a panic, trying to find a way out of town to get away from the ghoul and the organ music that both seem to follow her everywhere. She clings to a locked gate at the train station after begging a conductor in vain to let her in. The camera zooms out then pauses in a jerky way as if the camera itself is startled; then the camera begins to zoom back in as Mary says, “You hear me! You can hear me.” She is speaking directly to the audience at this moment. She stares straight into the camera with a pleading, hopeful look on her face as she realizes that someone in the world can still hear her and recognize her for who she is. 

Just as quickly as Mary recognizes us, though, the scene cuts to her trying another route of escape. The jarringly fast cut is in keeping with the rest of the film’s editing (courtesy of Dan Palmquist and Bill de Jarnette), which is artful in its abruptness. Mary turns her car's ignition and suddenly she’s pulling on an organ stop. A gas station attendant points into the darkness to give directions and a door suddenly opens into a dark room. The odd transitions surprise the viewer visually and aurally, drawing our attention to the sound of the film and alerting us to the fact that not everything is as it seems here. Carnival of Souls lulls you into a trance and then jerks you out of it, constantly making the viewer question how we perceive reality and each other. 

Being heard is vitally important to Mary. Just as she wants to be heard, so too does she want to understand why she can’t stop hearing the eerie organ music that seems to emanate from the deserted pavilion she passed on her way into town. The structure is a palimpsest of pleasures gone by, interpersonal pleasures that seem foreign and frightening to Mary. The bathhouse turned dance hall turned carnival now sits abandoned, and when she explores it at the end of the film, she finds dozens of ghouls dancing to that infernal organ music. Among the ghouls is Mary herself; her sunken eyes and vacant stare tell us that she has succumbed to the mindless dance. She refused to dance when out on a begrudging date with Linden because she has no desire for the company of men, but the constant hounding from everyone around her to stop being so “strange” has led her to this nightmarish moment. All sound drops out for a second, even the seemingly inescapable organ music, as Mary watches herself. She can’t even hear herself anymore as she takes in her own smiling ghoulish face while her tormentor dips her in a dance she never wanted.

Mary runs away, followed closely by the laughing ghouls and the organ music. When they finally descend on her, she disappears, only to be found in her friend’s car that a search crew has dredged up from the bottom of the river. No one ever saw — or heard — Mary for who she really was. They didn’t listen to the reality of the sounds she made in the world, because her authentic self wasn’t valid or real to them. Mary told Dr. Samuels about the moments when the world lost touch with her: “It was as though — as though for a time I didn’t exist. As though I had no place in the world. No part of the life around me.” Mary was a queer woman who had no interest in pretending to subscribe to other people’s worldviews or keeping up social pretenses to make others comfortable. Despite all her best efforts, she had no place in the world because the world refused to hear her; because she didn’t meet their narrow expectations, they never recognized her music for being beautiful in its own right. 

RELATED ARTICLES

---

---

EXPLORE

---

MORE ARTICLES

---

---