An Evening with Morbid Anatomy: Carnival of Souls

Midnite weekend screenings happen on Friday & Saturday nights (meaning arrive on Friday and/or Saturday night by 11:45pm for seating, the movie starts after midnite)!

Run Time: 100 min.

Morbid Anatomy and Nitehawk Cinema present an evening of spirit photography, seances, spiritualism and mediumship with a 35mm presentation of CARNIVAL OF SOULS preceded by the 2013 short documentary CATCHING THE GHOST: SPIRIT PHOTOGRAPHY, presented by The Midnight Archive. The film’s subject, New York photographer Shannon Taggart, will join filmmaker Ronni Thomas to discuss her work photographing mediumship and seances over the past 18 years.

Morbid Anatomy has been surveying the interstices of art and medicine, death and culture, since 2007. Their means of communication have included a blog, an open to the public collection and research library, classes, lectures, exhibitions, spectacles, symposia, field trips, books, screenings and parties.

Catching the Ghost: Spirit Photography (2013)

Director: Ronni Thomas Run Time: 5 min. Format: Digital

Produced by The Midnight Archive, CATCHING THE GHOST follows photographer Shannon Taggart, a New York based photographer whose globe-spanning work focuses on spiritualism, mediumship and seances. This film gives a brief history of the real-life Victorian phenomena of spirit photography.

Carnival of Souls (1962)

Director: Herk Harvey Run Time: 78 min. Format: 35mm Rating: PG

Starring: Candace Hilligoss, Frances Feist, Sidney Berger

Herk Harvey’s macabre masterpiece gained a cult following through late night television and has been bootlegged for years. Made by industrial filmmakers on a modest budget, Carnival of Souls was intended to have the “look of a Bergman” and “feel of a Cocteau,” and succeeds with its strikingly used locations and spooky organ score. Mary Henry (Candace Hilligoss) survives a drag race in a rural Kansas town, then takes a job as a church organist in Salt Lake City. En route, she becomes haunted by a bizarre apparition that compels her to an abandoned lakeside pavilion.