Customer Reviews

Carnival Of Souls (1962 Film)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This is not a true soundtrack album, but just some music taken directly from the movie put on CD. The producers tried to hide the fact by often fading the tracks out whenever a voice or sound effect is heard. The bonus tracks seem to be played on a completely different organ and I wonder why the producers could locate unused material but not the actual recordings made for the movie. Maybe this material isn't any "unused material" at all, but completely different music. It's a shame Moore's interesting score is so poorly presented here.

This CD, supposedly Gene Moore's score from the classic film soundtrack, is actually nothing more than a cheaply produced recording of the mixed film soundtrack, with dialogue, footsteps, noises, etc. along with the music. If you think - as I did - that you'll be able to hear the admirable organ score better on this CD than you can with your own videotape - think again. This is a completely worthless CD, as you can easily make a cassette or CDR recording off your VCR that will be EXACTLY the same, except for some irrelevant organ hymn music that was never in the film in the first place.

If you are a fan of the movie, you will like this eerie and sometimes scary soundtrack. Filled with organ music and voice clips from the movie, it conjures up images from the film. A great buy if you like this type of stuff.

Many of the tracks are brief (only a few seconds in duration), and some of the score would not be missed if left off the disc, but overall, a truly worthy soundtrack to an eerie, surreal film. There are some sonic glitches (the disc sounds like it was recorded straight from the film, and not from a separate sound source), and the sound quality isn't going to win any awards, but all this somehow adds to the final result. The brief spoken-word interludes are a nice addition, too.

Highly, highly recommended. Gene Moore created the perfect soundtrack to Herk Harvey's eerie atmospheric American landscape classic. In the film, Mary Henry (Candace Hilligoss) seems to channel her organ playing from another dimension and Gene Moore has delivered a soundtrack that is at once ethereal and yet at the forefront of the film. As a side note, the Criterion DVD has a bonus feature with amazing film outtakes where the entire organ soundtrack is spliced together seamlessly in one piece. Well worth repeated viewings/listens. I have been looking for this for years and am so happy to have found it! Hopefully someday the soundtrack will be released in a more deluxe fashion...like the Criterion DVD has done to the film. Until then, this is it.

"Carnival of Souls" (the 1962 version, not the rip-off 1998 Wes Craven re-make) was a great little movie, considering the budget and the people who made it: Herk Harvey and John Clifford, two nice and friendly filmmakers from an educational and industrial film production company called Centron in Lawrence, Kansas. I don't know if it's the movie or the soundtrack that is better, but this soundtrack certainly is not better in sound quality. Some of the music comes through pretty good, but tracks such as "Hot Bath" and "Second Departure" are very quiet, and fortunately the spooky and eerie organ music is not too bad in sound quality. Some may consider "Travel Music" a good break from the spooky music, and the small jazz combo on the two "At the Bar" numbers sounds pretty good. Then there are the songs not used in the movie at all, which are okay, except for the annoying "Psycho Carnival Organ." And I can see why there just wasn't any place in the film for "Carnival Rock."

For anyone interested in truly bizarre and disturbing music, this CD is for you! The organ music is so strange and eerie that you feel like you are inviting a haunting of your own. The dialogue tracks add to the surreal quality of the whole experience. A deffinite must for any horror buff or conneiseur of the macabre. AWESOME!!!

The music on this CD is some of the best sublime organ music I ever heard. I am comparing it to all the great Italian Giallo organ soundtracks, Olivier Messiaen pipe organ music , Jazz organ music(all eras), Library music and any kind of organ grooves I ever heard (and I'm talking literally about thousands of LP's and CD's). I take this music seriously as I do the film.