It's safe to say it's probably unlike any movie you've ever seen before.
The movie opens with Candace Hilligoss as Mary, a young woman riding around with her friends. A group of guys meet them on a bridge and challenge them to a drag race. Things go horribly wrong and the girls' car plunges into a river. Police search in vain for the wreckage, convinced there were no survivors. They are startled when Mary turns up — alone, shivering and dazed — on a nearby sandbar.
To say much more would do the film a disservice. No single event, when described, will give you any sense of the strange, hypnotic power this movie holds. There's a cumulative effect to this thing: the slow piling up of small, strange details, to take you somewhere truly weird and deeply unsettling. It uses this setup to, very quietly, explore some heady notions about dreams, reality, life and death. It's an odd little film, not quite sure of itself and with some truly clunky writing and stiff performances, that somehow, almost accidentally, managed to create an entire new film idiom that would later be explored by filmmakers like Lynch, Greg Araki, Darren Aronofsky and David Cronenberg.
"Carnival of Souls" came and went to the drive-ins with almost no notice back in 1962 (I can't imagine how this played to necking Midwest teenagers in their parents' borrowed pickup trucks) and it went underground quickly thereafter. But it managed to stick around, and slowly over the years it grew into a bonafide cult classic. It famously influenced Romero's "Night of the Living Dead," and was later adopted by 70s midnight movie auteurs like Lynch and John Waters. It even got its own Criterion DVD release in the early 2000s.
In terms of the overall arc of film history, it's a blip. But an important blip.
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