Carnival of Souls 1998

In 1977, young Alex Grant witnessed a carnival clown Louis Seagram—a brutal sadist—rape and murder her mother, Elaine, a trauma that would color the years to follow. Twenty years later, [Alex Grant] lives above the Mermaid Bar, a seaside tavern she inherited from her mother, where she works as a bartender alongside her younger sister Sandra Grant, an aspiring singer. The memory of that night lingers in every room of the tavern and in every quiet moment she spends alone, shaping a life that feels both ordinary and haunted.

When Louis Seagram is released from prison, he tracks down Alex and accosts her in her car, pressing her into driving to the carnival where he once worked. His menacing threat targets Sandra as well, promising violence if his demands aren’t met. In a desperate bid to escape, Alex drives the car off the pier and into the cold darkness of the water below. She awakens later in her bathtub, convinced the whole sequence was a nightmare, a terrible nightmarish echo of the past.

What follows is a mounting fog of waking dreams and visions in which Seagram—or the memories of him—reappears in ever more lurid, carnivalesque forms. The memories include a painful recall of her first childhood encounter with him at the carnival, a moment that foreshadowed the profound danger he would pose to her and her family. To cope, Alex begins digging into Seagram’s whereabouts, only to discover that he has recently been murdered after his release. Meanwhile, Sandra and Sid, the tavern’s manager, grow increasingly worried about Alex’s deteriorating grip on reality.

As a mysterious regular named Michael begins to draw close to Alex, she finds herself torn between tangible affection and fear that her visions might be steering her toward ruin. The relationship intensifies as they take a boat trip together; what should be a moment of intimacy becomes a surreal nightmare when Michael morphs into a ghastly form that shifts into Seagram. When Alex surfaces from that encounter, she’s back on the ferris wheel at the carnival, the line between dream and reality utterly blurred.

The pressure of the apparitions mounts, and Alex’s life spirals through a series of disorienting episodes—each one more destabilizing than the last—until the truth crashes back with brutal clarity. In time, it’s revealed that Seagram did attack her in the past, and the fateful crash into the water was not merely a dream after all. The final shocks reverberate through the seaside tavern when Sandra answers a ringing phone only to hear the unnerving sounds of a carnival on the other end, leaving the fate of Alex and Michael, and the lingering specters of Seagram, unresolved and ominous. In the end, the tale lingers as a stark reminder of how the past can return with a merciless, carnival-like inevitability.