Carrie

Just in time for Halloween!

1976 was the year that Brian De Palma would direct Carrie, the classic horror film based on Stephen King’s novel of the same name. Carrie is widely considered to be one of the best film adaptations of a Stephen King novel ever made. It made over $33 million in the box office upon its release from United Artists, heavily turning a profit on its $1 million budget. The film was also critically acclaimed for the most part, with most of the praise heaped upon Sissy Spacek’s portrayal of Carrie White. The film was a rarity among horror films, as it was nominated for multiple Academy Awards. Spacek was nominated for Best Actress and Piper Laurie was nominated for Best Supporting Actress.

Carrie is a character study and a horror film. It focuses mainly on the character of Carrie White (Spacek) as she comes of age and learns of new abilities blossoming within her. White is a socially discriminated teenage girl. Her mother, Margaret White (Laurie), is heavily religious and has turned her back on the world ever since Carrie’s father left. Margaret is immensely protective of Carrie and despises the world around her, attempting to convert everything that moves to Christ and representing the most hyperbolic of religious stereotypes every step of the way. She sees Carrie receive her period and believes that Carrie was sinning to receive it, so she forces her daughter to pray. Along with dealing with her relentless mother, Carrie has to deal with a group of bullies at school that torment Carrie because she’s “different.”

The film also stars John Travolta in one of his earliest roles, Betty Buckley, Nancy Allen, Amy Irving, William Katt, and P.J. Soles. The cast is relatively okay, although no other performance comes close to touching Spacek’s spooky turn as Carrie White. Spacek was so dedicated to the role that she was said to have arrived at her audition with Vaseline rubbed into her hair and an unwashed face. She wore a sailor dress that her mother had made her with the hem cut off to add to the creepy effect.

The cheesy 70s direction, complete with split-screen and colour wash prints, comes from Brian De Palma, the director of Scarface and Carlito’s Way. The split screen is a De Palma trademark, something that I’m not too keen on, but it does fit with the camp of the piece in general. De Palma also shoots using a long take quite frequently, which is an homage to Hitchcock. In Carrie, some of the longer takes work quite well to a nice effect, like the shot of Carrie exiting the burning building towards the end of the film. Some of De Palma’s directing choices don’t work quite so well, however, like the red washing of the shots at the beginning of the end. Still, De Palma does capture the mood relatively well and creates anticipation towards the moment in which Carrie White actually snaps.

In script and the novel, Carrie actually burns down the entire town as a way of putting those who have tormented her to permanent rest. Budget issues came up, however, and those scenes were left off of the filming process. There are also many homages to Hitchcock within Carrie, including the name of the high school as “Bates High” as an homage to Hitchcock’s Norman Bates character from 1960′s Psycho. The four-note violin theme from Psycho is also used throughout Carrie as a sign of things to come. This creates a tension on one hand, but also adds a campy eternal value to the film. Overall, the filming of Carrie was said to be complicated and problematic. De Palma worked with a few different cameramen to shoot the film because of various conflicts, leading to Mario Tosi, an Italian cinematographer, as the final cameraman for the film.

All in all, Carrie is a fun film that doesn’t skimp on the details of character. It has highly entertaining characters and features some of the most famous scenes in film history, especially the “pig’s blood” scene. The film is not particularly frightening, but it does have a delicate mood that is often shattered by some of De Palma’s campy direction. For the most part, however, Carrie is enjoyable horror that deserves its place in the pantheon of the genre. Spacek is tremendous.

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