PART ONE: THE RUNNERS-UP
Carnival of Souls (1961)
Herk Harvey, a director of industrial documentaries and educational shorts (anybody here seen Pork: The Meal With a Squeal? What about What About School Spirit?) turned his hand to narrative films with this eerie cult favorite about a professional organist (Candace Hilligoss) who survives a terrible car accident and is thereafter pursued by a man only she can see. The filmmaking and acting are often rough and amateurish, particularly at the start, but when the heroine takes a new job in Utah the movie develops an undeniable, spooky power that builds to a nightmarish twist ending that has been echoed by everyone from M. Night Shyamalan on down. Much of the film's weird power is grounded in its unique soundtrack — all organ music — and the scenes shot in a derelict amusement park along Great Salt Lake (in real life the old Saltaire pavilion) that obsesses the heroine and provides the setting for a most disturbing climax. A real original, and a textbook example of how to transcend limitations of budget and technical expertise.
The Howling (1981)
When he was still better known as a novelist than an independent filmmaker, John Sayles raised moviemaking cash by batting out a series of cleverly written scripts for B-movie king Roger Corman. Thus, while art-house patrons went to see Return of the Secaucus Seven, the twin-cinemas down the street (this was the pre-multiplex era, remember) were showing Sayles-scripted items like Piranha, Alligator and Battle Beyond the Stars — each, in its own way, an above average genre film loaded with movie buff in-jokes. The Howling is by far the best of the bunch, adapted from a no-account horror novel about a traumatized TV anchorwoman (Dee Wallace Stone) whose trip to a New Age resort brings her face to fang with a colony of werewolves. The idea of an encounter group for lycanthropes may not be as funny nowadays as it was in the immediate aftermath of the Seventies, but the film gave director Joe Dante the best showcase for his weird junk-culture sensibility. It also gave Rob Bottin and Rick Baker a first run at the splattery transformation effects they would go on to use in The Thing and An American Werewolf in London. The film is a treasure trove of movie geek references — Sayles and Dante even twitted Corman's parsimonious ways by giving him a cameo as a man checking a coin slot for spare change — but it also delivers the scares when needed.
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