Unable to Escape Death

 

I followed a fun watch-along with a favorite horror YouTube podcaster who had participated in a live stream of "Carnival of Souls" (1962). The scene above I mostly remembered but the brief mirror image escaped me. And it is damned creepy. It's death. It doesn't fucking care whether or not you want to live. At some point, death will be so close, it is nibbling on your chin, wanting to caress, a tease that will eventually get what it wants. Hilligoss, to her credit, sure does what she can to avoid director Herk Harvey's Death, unavoidable, a nuisance just unwilling to let her be. She's teetering between this walk of life and death. She tries to exist where she no longer belongs, but Death keeps calling to her. His Carnival quite a lure that pulls and pulls her towards it. No matter where she goes, organ playing at a cathedral despite no soul behind the music, a diner with a sleazy neighbor, or a clothing store, Death follows. Death even pretends to be her therapist. The bus has members of Death's entourage, as does the abandoned Carnival. Hilligoss just doesn't belong among the living. Eventually she has nowhere left to run. The beach, where her prints among others stop at the point where Hilligoss has came to rest with those she belongs interrupting her evasive attempt to play keepaway, reveal to a search party, a doctor, and former priest employer that she was once occupying real estate despite being an intruder. And returning to where she actually belonged, in the car with her friends at the bottom of a lake, Death reconciled her best efforts to avoid her destiny.