Joan Rivers: "I wasn't invited to the prom. I invited
the guy and I had to buy my own orchid.
Carrie had a better time at her prom
than I did."
That Carrie can be referenced in the punchline of a joke without benefit of clarification is a testament to how deeply rooted
in our cultural consciousness Brian De Palma’s 1976 film (vis à vis Stephen
King’s 1974 novel) has become. Indeed, contrary to the circumstances of her character in the film (she’s such a non-entity at her school that the principal repeatedly misidentifies
her as “Cassie”) and the teaser ads for the forthcoming sequel (You Will Know
Her Name); I'd say that by now, everybody knows exactly who
Carrie is.
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| Sissy Spacek as Carrie White |
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| Piper Laurie as Margaret White |
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| Betty Buckley as Miss Collins |
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| Amy Irving as Sue Snell |
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| William Katt as Tommy Ross |
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| Nancy Allen as Chris Hargensen |
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| John Travolta as Billy Nolan |
And then there was the woefully under-hyped Carrie. Here we had a film by a director
whose only other work I’d seen at the time - Phantom of the Paradise - I remembered primarily for Paul Williams' music, and whose sole
marketable cast member, John Travolta, I recognized only as a somewhat annoyingly omnipresent fledgling teen idol from the execrable sitcom Welcome Back, Kotter (plus, his whispery
pop single, “Let Her In,” had turned the summer of ’76 radio-listening into an absolute
nightmare for me). Everything about Carrie, from its no-name cast to its overly explicit poster art, gave me the impression it was strictly drive-in fare, a movie suitable for a double-bill with one of those low-budget releases from AIP or Crown International about Bigfoot or small-town redneck serial killers.
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| Eve was Weak Margaret White's religious fanaticism adds an effectively ominous overlay of sin, sacrifice, and retribution to the story of an awkward teen and her coming-of-age awareness of her telekinetic powers. |
It was only through the persistent badgering of a close friend that I even came to see Carrie at all. My friend, a sci-fi/ horror / Dark Shadows buff, had already seen Carrie and used his desire to see it again as an opportunity to call in his marker for the time I’d pestered him into attending a screening of Barbarella with me against his will. As I took my seat in the packed San Francisco movie theater where Carrie was playing, I seethed with resentment over what I perceived as my friend extracting a particularly mean-spirited payback for what... the heinous crime of exposing him to the sight of a naked, zero-gravity Jane Fonda? I wasn't much of a horror fan in those days and was resistant to the strain of sadism and brutality that seemed to be their raison d'être based on their ad campaigns. Carrie promised no less.
However, some 98 minutes later, I emerged from the theater, red-eyed (from crying—that Sissy Spacek really gets to me in this movie...even today) and overwhelmed. Wow! I had NOT been expecting that!
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| Macabre Martyrdom |
Just out of high school myself (an
all-boys Catholic School, but let’s face it, high school is high school), it
felt more than a little cathartic to see a film that depicted everyday
schoolyard torments with the graveness of Greek tragedy, meting out suitably
catastrophic retribution to the guilty.
I
was sold by Carrie’s first
five minutes - the volleyball game and the gym shower, both of which
established: a) the then-atypical horror film setting of a high school; b) the
female-centric thrust of the story, wherein the concerns, agency, and
motivations of the women in the film appeared essential to propelling the plot
forward; and c) the obvious subjective perspective the film was going to take
regarding Carrie herself. Carrie absolutely
floored me. I saw it three more times that month, and it has since remained one
of my all-time favorite movies. A motion picture I’d readily list among the
best horror films ever made.
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| Split-diopter framing at its best Brian De Palma is known for his use of the literal split-screen, but Carrie is also full of sequences in which the natural framing of a shot encourages the audience to take note of the dual/conflicting experiences of the characters as they occupy the same space. |
WHAT I LOVE ABOUT
THIS FILM
Given that adolescence was a living hell for the vast
majority of us, there’s something conceptually ingenious about a horror film set
in an American high school—a “house” as haunted by the ghosts of the tortured
and tormented as the dungeon of any Gothic mansion. The hierarchy of school cliques
and the day-to-day cruelties teens inflict upon one another seem to be perfect subjects
for a meditation on the banality of evil; a concept explored in many of the films that have proved most influential in the horror genre (Rosemary’s Baby, The Stepford Wives, Invasion of the Body Snatchers).
Unlike Stephen King’s novel, which expands the scope of Carrie to include news and science investigations into what happened at the prom, De Palma’s film wisely maintains a much narrower subjective focus (few things happen outside of the scope of the high-schoolers), heightening our identification with and empathy for Carrie and her rather tragic existence. I’m reminded of a review of Carrie that made the insightful observation that it was so fitting for Carrie to have only destroyed her high school in the film (as opposed to half the town in the novel); because to a teenager, high school IS the whole world. I honestly think the intimate scale of De Palma's Carrie is what makes it work so well. Carrie's nightmare is merely every adolescent's anxieties (public humiliation, social ostracism, the desire to fit in) writ in blood.
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| School Days, School Days
Carrie was made at a time when "bullying" was seen simply as kids-just-being-kids behavior
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Unlike Stephen King’s novel, which expands the scope of Carrie to include news and science investigations into what happened at the prom, De Palma’s film wisely maintains a much narrower subjective focus (few things happen outside of the scope of the high-schoolers), heightening our identification with and empathy for Carrie and her rather tragic existence. I’m reminded of a review of Carrie that made the insightful observation that it was so fitting for Carrie to have only destroyed her high school in the film (as opposed to half the town in the novel); because to a teenager, high school IS the whole world. I honestly think the intimate scale of De Palma's Carrie is what makes it work so well. Carrie's nightmare is merely every adolescent's anxieties (public humiliation, social ostracism, the desire to fit in) writ in blood.
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| Adolescent trauma meets Grand Guignol |
Defying accepted Hollywood logic that horror films don’t receive Academy respect, Carrie's two (and only) Oscar nominations went to the impossible-to-ignore performances of Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie. Taking wildly divergent acting
paths—Spacek playing her keyed-up naturalism against Laurie’s theatrically idiosyncratic stylization—the actresses share a symbiotic chemistry in their scenes together that elevates Carrie far above what is usually considered
possible in a horror film.
I never buy it when someone tries to convince me: "Nobody goes to horror movies for the acting. They just want to be scared!" Not when experience has shown me—through Mia Farrow, Ellen Burstyn, and Audrey Hepburn—that nuanced, dimensional performances make a movie scarier by humanizing the protagonists, making the audience more invested in their fate.
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| "Carrie" was given a midnight sneak preview at theaters across the country on Saturday, October 30, 1976. It began its official run in San Francisco on Wednesday, November 24th. |
Spacek doesn't amp up the cliché-ridden acting cues that would signal an outcast character. Instead, Carrie's awkwardness appears to stem not from any innate strangeness (she's actually better adjusted than most of her peers...Chris Hargensen, for example, is so messed up, she could star in her own horror movie) but from an overabundance of feelings she doesn't understand and a lack of emotional outlets. Carrie's slowly developing telekinesis is a perfect metaphor for what happens when emotions are repressed.
And Piper Laurie...what risks she takes! And she makes them work! Grounding her performance in a reality alien to normal behavior yet familiar and accessible to the deeply disturbed character she plays, Laurie inhabits this monster of a woman and finds a way of tapping into a kind of twisted truth. I wind up not only believing in this broadly drawn character, but recognizing her. Her religious fanaticism comes from a genuine place, and Piper Laurie's performance makes Mrs. White a truly terrifying character. One who makes you shudder even when her eccentricities are making you laugh (Ruth Gordon pulled off a similar miracle in Rosemary's Baby).
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| Born Into Sin |
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| One of the great unsung performances in Carrie is that of Betty Buckley as the sympathetic gym teacher. De Palma must have really appreciated her incisive portrayal, because he always seems to leave the camera on her just long enough to capture the brief flickers of emotion that play across her face at the end of scenes where she's forced to be tougher than she'd like to be, or when she's saying something she hopes to be true, but doesn't really trust in. Ironically or inevitably, depending on how you look at it, the sweet-natured Buckley assumed the role of Carrie's mother in the ill-fated 1988 Broadway musical of the film. |
THE STUFF OF FANTASY
The trademark Brian De Palma bag of tricks: slow motion, swirling camera, split-screen, complex tracking shots, subjective sound, Bernard Herrmann-esque scores, Pino Donaggio's sensual music used as violence counterpoint, copious bloodletting--have never been put to as effective use as in Carrie. And no sequence in Carrie better illustrates the seamless blending of visual style with narrative theme than the bravura prom sequence. One of the most amazing bits of film as storytelling as you're likely ever to see.
A tour de force sequence that conveys tenderness, romance, joy, pathos, suspense, and terror in an uninterrupted flow that's close to operatic. Like my favorite scene from Hitchcock's The Birds --the Tides Restaurant bird attack--the climactic prom at Bates High School is a sequence that has retained every bit of its impact over the years. It's such a marvelously effective scene. It grabs me each and every time.
Contemporary filmmakers (especially those enamored of the horror genre's tolerance of excess) who strive to blow us away with the spectacle of sadism or a reliance on CGI, can take a lesson from De Palma here. Were this sequence all about the destruction and blood, I think Carrie would have gone the way of obscurity long ago. Carrie endures because De Palma has taken the time to bring us into Carrie's dream come true before he turns it into a nightmare.
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| Last Dance |
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| Grand Grotesquery The eruption of the "curtain of fire" is one of my favorite film moments. It is so horrifically beautiful...I recall getting goosebumps when I saw it on the big screen. |
THE STUFF OF
In speaking of Rosemary's Baby, director Roman Polanski is fond of saying that his intent was to make a horror film that looks like a Doris Day movie, yet reveals itself to be something dark and sinister. To me, Carrie works in a similar fashion: it starts out resembling one of those teen-empowering After School Specials of the day (a series of TV movies targeted to adolescents in the '70s and '80s), only to throw us a nasty curve as the heretofore reassuring ugly-duckling wish-fulfillment fantasy turns into a bullied teen's worst-case scenario.
I wish the 2013 remake a lot of luck, but just as Mia Farrow is and always will be the one and only Rosemary Woodhouse; I've got a hunch that Sissy Spacek's touchingly raw performance will wind up being impossible to beat. Perhaps there only needs to be...and only ever will be...one true Carrie.
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| "If only they knew she had the power."
Movie poster tagline
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BONUS MATERIAL:
Carrie was made into an infamous Broadway musical in May of 1988. Directed by Terry Hands, the show was written by Lawrence D. Cohen, who also wrote the film's screenplay; songs by Michael Gore and Dean Pitchford (who wrote many of the songs for the film Fame); and choreography by Debbie Allen, also of Fame. It even starred Betty Buckley, this film's slap-happy gym teacher, Miss Collins, as Carrie's mother. What made the musical infamous was the brevity of its Broadway run...a mere five days.
I did get around to seeing director Kimberly Peirce's 2013 Carrie remake. I found it both forgettable and unnecessary, albeit better acted than I expected. The big prom scene finale trades De Palma's poetically nightmarish spectacle for protracted explicitness. It's a well-done if artless sequence; the underlying, deeply-felt tragedy of the first film being replaced by the superficially cathartic pleasure of seeing the guilty parties getting what's coming to them.
There seemed to me to be a deep misunderstanding of the material present in this version, or at least a deep misunderstanding of what goes into making an effective horror film.
De Palma's Carrie has haunted me for a lifetime. I struggled to remember the details of Carrie 2013 a week after seeing it.
