Elizabeth Erwin

For both its detailed mythology building and its relative obscureness among the general viewing public, Carnivàle occupies a unique space among the annals of HBO’s prestige television. The show centers on two seemingly opposite core characters: Ben (Nick Stahl), a healer who travels with a troupe of freak show performers and Brother Justin (Clancy Brown), a Methodist minister who lives with his sister who becomes an overnight radio sensation. Set in America in the mid-1930s, Ben and Brother Justin share a prophetic vision in which good and evil are destined to collide. As their fates interweave in horrific fashion, the line between which characters represent good versus evil blurs significantly.

Although it lasted only two seasons, the show remains notable for its cult like following, its sensory driven visuals, and its complicated, supernatural infused narrative. Specifically, the critically acclaimed season one episodes “Babylon” and “Pick a Number” situate the show squarely within the realm of folk horror by shifting the narrative focus to an isolated landscape which harbors secrets from the past that must eventually be reckoned with in the present. Further, the way in which the episodes play with established folk horror tropes, specifically the arrival of an outsider to the community and the casting of a young woman as a temptress, complicates traditional views on the genre by presenting time as a malleable construct. In most folk horror, the line between what constitutes the past and present is clearly drawn. But in Carnivàle, a show already situated in the not so distant era of the Great Depression, this line is less fixed and the implications on how that impacts folk horror tropes is significant. In his book Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange, Adam Scovell theorizes the Folk Horror Chain, which he argues, has four components: landscape, isolation, skewed moral values, and ritualistic death.  Combined, the presence of these elements enables folk horror to treat “the past as a paranoid, skewed trauma.” Carnivàle leverages the Folk Horror Chain in a way that both reflects and challenges the audience’s historical memory of a bygone era. Read more