Carnival of Souls

Mary Henry survives a car that plunges off a bridge into a river, dragged out hours later with no memory of how she escaped. She moves to a new town to start a job as a church organist, but she is drawn to an abandoned pavilion on the shore, and she keeps seeing a pale, grinning man no one else can see. Herk Harvey made the film for around thirty thousand dollars on weekends, with a crew borrowed from industrial film work. The organ score and the empty fairground imagery give it a dreamlike dread that influenced later horror. Mary keeps slipping out of the world entirely, becoming invisible and silent to the people around her, and the film never explains why in a neat way. The film was largely ignored on release and found its audience years later through television. It entered the public domain due to non-renewal of its copyright.