“CARNIVAL OF SOULS”: An unofficial contribution to Sean Collins’s “Thirteen Days of Halloween” series, in which he discusses his 13 favorite horror flicks.

“Carnival of Souls” is basically the distilled back-from-the-dead/”they don’t know they’re dead” movie. Carnival locale; disaffected protagonist; isolation (Kansas and Utah film sites helped with this, apparently); slow, draining, but engrossing pace; makeup for a generation of Siouxsie and Bauhaus fans. It’s great, though, for two reasons:

1) It is so distilled. It’s so completely what it is. There’s nothing in that movie that isn’t essence of postmortem. Nothing is unnecessary, nothing is out of place. “CoS” captures the absurdity and wrongness of death–and the horror of being trapped in a psychologically isolated “death in life” state–more completely than pretty much any other movie I know.

2) Candace Hilligoss. She’s the lead. First off, she can act standoffish and remote like nobody’s business. She’s like a photograph from another world, tacked onto the small-town church and carnival settings she inhabits. Something about her is fundamentally not there.

Second, and relatedly, she has The Face. Her curls and her high cheekbones were made for horror, maybe more so than “Scream Queen” Barbara Steele’s more famous features. She has a high-contrast, grainy, almost solarized face–a traumatized and Medusa-like beauty.

You’ll want to turn to stone when she looks you in the eye.