Podcast: Carnival of Souls
Closing out 2026 Pride with an accidental piece of queer experience in cinema
Bring Me The Axe! Horror Podcast
Episode 110: Carnival of Souls
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Bring Me the Axe! is a comedy podcast celebrating the best (and worst) horror from a time when the video store ruled the night. Every other week, brothers Bryan and Dave White (and the occasional guest) heed the call of nostalgia and evaluate the classic 70s and 80s horror movies they loved in their childhood to determine whether the movies are still relevant today or should be allowed to fade into obscurity.
We round out our 2026 Pride series with a title that isn’t typically included in the queer film history milieu but Dave is going to make a pretty solid case for how it absolutely fits with its themes of alienation and ennui. Carnival of Souls is a significant picture in the cult movie world and it’s spooky as hell. In the tradition of directors who made one great movie and nothing else (e.g. Charles Laughton and Night of the Hunter, Leonard Kastle and The Honeymoon Killers), Herk Harvey made an extremely eerie and deeply paranoid movie that gets deeply under your skin and it’s a shame that he never worked in features again.
What begins with a fatal car accident leads the lone survivor, Mary, on a trip to Salt Lake City where she will play organ for a church. But along the way she finds herself stalked by a phantom as she tries to fit into this new city, navigating new relationships that she’s barely interested in in the first place. By the time the film closes Mary will uncover the truth about the phantom stalker and what happened that day during the car accident.
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