Carnival of Souls

Cinema Year Zero and A Place With Such A Name

Mar 19, 2026

∙ Paid

NOT BY LYNCH continues tomorrow, Friday 20 March at The Cinema Museum with Herk Harvey’s Carnival of Souls (1962).
Below, film critic and folklorist Kirsty Asher introduces the film as a liminal terrain. Alongside her role as Associate Editor of Cinema Year Zero, Kirsty runs the Substack A Place With Such A Name.
Tickets are available here, and come with a print booklet which includes the essay.

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“I hope she does leave.”

“I hope she can.”

Carnival of Souls, Herk Harvey’s only feature film, was relatively overlooked by critics and audiences upon release in 1962. With only around $30,000 to spare for his neo-noir fantasia, most of the location filming in Salt Lake City was done either at night in empty buildings or guerrilla-style with bribed locals playing brief parts.

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A guest post by

A Place With Such A Name

Folklorist and film critic. I specialise in Internet/Web 2.0 rituals, local characters as folk figures, the folklore of resistance and landscape, and the psychogeography of England.