VIDEODROOM 2022: MIAUX x 'Carnival of Souls'

MIAUX performs her own score for ‘Carnival of Souls’ live during the film’s screening

Born in Sarajevo but settled in Antwerp for quite some time now, MIAUX is the alter ego of Mia Prce. Armed with a Casio and devastating songwriting skills, she makes minimalist, melancholic music that’s steeped in mystery. 

Miaux has released three albums on Dennis Tyfus’s label Ultra Eczema, as well as releases on Feeding Tube, Alien Passengers, Taped Sounds and Lal Lal. 

For VIDEODROOM, she will provide the cult classic ‘Carnival of Souls’ with a completely new score, which she will perform live. The original score’s church organs make way for Miaux’s analogue synthesiser.

CULT CLASSIC: ‘CARNIVAL OF SOULS’

‘Carnival of Souls’ is an American psychological thriller from 1962, produced and directed by Herk Harvey, with a screenplay by John Clifford. 

The story follows Mary Henry (played by Candace Hilligoss), a young woman who moves to a new city after a car accident, but doesn’t feel at home there. She is pursued along the way by a bizarre apparition – ‘The Man’, played by director Harvey himself – who forces her to go to an abandoned pavilion by the lake. 

The B-movie classic ‘Carnival of Souls’ was meant to “look like a Bergman and feel like a Cocteau” – a feat that the film, with its striking locations and haunting organ score, ultimately achieves. Harvey used various guerrilla filming techniques and shot the film on a shoe-string budget of $33,000. It was his only feature film and failed to receive much attention when it was first released in 1962 as a double feature with the now largely forgotten ‘The Devil’s Messenger’. Yet this macabre masterpiece would go on to acquire cult status thanks to screenings in arthouse cinemas during the Halloween period in the late 1980s and broadcasts on late-night television. 

The film has since come to be considered a classic by many film schools, with praise for its cinematography, lighting and sound. Critics and film scholars alike praise Gene Moore’s organ score, which sets the film’s sinister tone perfectly. The film continues to inspire filmmakers to this day, with directors David Lynch, George A. Romero and Lucrecia Martel all having stated that the film had a great influence on them.

American film critic Leonard Maltin called ‘Carnival of Souls’ an “eerie” and “imaginative low-budget effort”. Critic Roger Ebert compared the film to a “lost episode of ‘The Twilight Zone’“. The Washington Post wrote: “Harvey’s camerawork [makes] the most mundane places and people imaginable seem like ghastly hallucinations, and the director shows a flair for elegantly employing existing locations and lighting for maximum disorientation value.” On Rotten Tomatoes the film has a rating of 86% based on 37 reviews, with the consensus being: “Delightfully chilling proof that when it comes to telling an effective horror story, less can often be much, much more.”