Carnival of Souls and the Organs of Horror

Abstract

Watch a horror movie and there is a good chance you will hear an organ, probably a pipe organ. Screenwriters and directors even add organs to stories whose literary sources have none. Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde contains no mention of a pipe organ and yet the 1931 film of the story by Rouben Mamoulian opens with Dr. Jekyll playing one in his grand home; the Edgar Allan Poe story to which Edgar G. Ulmer’s 1934 The Black Cat alludes (admittedly only vaguely) likewise has no organ even though the film does. Herk Harvey’s one-off, low-budget cult film Carnival of Souls of 1962 is perhaps the ne plus ultra of horror movies with an organ. Its central character is an organist, its soundtrack consists exclusively of organ music, and the film moves to and from two locations of organ imagining: a church and an abandoned fairground-cum-entertainment pavilion. The minute we hear the organ underscoring we know something is up. Much as K. J. Donnelly argues we can consider films to be generally haunted by the “ghosts” and half-remembered sounds of film music, that “repository of reminders, half-memories and outbursts of emotion,” we might consider this film to be thoroughly haunted by organ music, certainly to the same extent as its central character seems haunted by demons and ghosts.1

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