Carnival of Souls

Chicks, man. When are they going to learn not to visit small towns alone, stay in strange guest houses alone, bathe alone? Norman and Marion made the dangers palpably clear in 1960, yet here we are in 1962 having it spelled out to us all over again, only this time, there’s zombies.

It might seem like a redundant idea: take an old zombie flick (Herk Harvey’s 1962 Carnival of Souls), screen it muted with a live band, live foley artist and four voice actors playing dozens of parts. Why not just watch the film? The answer, according to creator Leon Radojkovic, is that the original sounds like crap. An average soundtrack and abysmal dubbing undercut what tension there is in Hervey’s prototypical film, and Driver and team wanted to give his impressive cinematography and weird storyline a chance to shine.

And so it is performed with every moment of sound recreated for us live. The performers are all dolled up in 1960s threads, which lends the event an air of nostalgia and a useful framing device. The new score, composed by Radojkovic, is a blend of vintage tunes and contemporary synth and succeeds in scaring patrons out of their seats at several crucial moments. The cast (Chelsea Preston Crayford in the lead as beleaguered heroine Mary Henry; Charlie McDermott, Bronwyn Bradley and Cameron Rhodes as everyone else) pitch their performances at the perfect meeting point of homage and invention, rarely falling into parody but always with a healthy dose of irony.

The film itself is at once fascinating and incredibly average. The plotting is wafer thin (young, independent woman improbably survives car crash, moves towns, is pursued by the undead and suffers all sorts of psychological malfunctions) and almost charmingly retrograde in its morals (ladies, if you don’t want boys to touch you it’s probably because you’re secretly undead yourself!). Still, that doesn’t stop creepy faces appearing in mirrors from being terrifying, or Harvey’s bizarre sequences set at an abandoned fun fair from being strangely ahead of their time in aesthetic. In the end, Radojkovic’s score and concept, combined with Oliver Davies’s direction and the pitch-perfect accuracy of the performances tilts the balance in favour of unsettling over ridiculous.