He made workplace-safety reels, driver's-ed shorts, educational filmstrips. He drove past a rotting lakeside pavilion and could not stop picturing dead figures dancing inside it.

So Herk Harvey gathered his industrial-film crew, about five people total, hired one professional actress, and shot a horror movie on his vacation time. He made CARNIVAL OF SOULS (1962) for roughly $33,000 in three weeks.

A church organist walks away from a car crash, takes a job in a strange town, and finds herself pulled toward that lakeside pavilion by a pale, silent man who will not stop following her.

Harvey wanted, in his words, the look of a Bergman and the feel of a Cocteau. With almost no money and a wheezing organ score, he got it.

It played theatrically at the bottom of double bills, then drifted onto late-night television, where it eventually grew into one of the most influential horror films ever made.

George Romero named it an influence on Night of the Living Dead. David Lynch's dream-logic dread traces back to it. Much of modern art-horror owes it a debt.

Harvey never made another feature. He went back to making educational films for the rest of his life. And the pale man who haunts the picture, the ghoul at the pavilion, is Harvey himself.