Carrie (

1976

) ½

I love it when a horror movie doesn't reveal all its cards right from the start. Audition (1999) spends the first half of it's run-time masquerading as a somber indie romance, From Dusk Till Dawn (1996) devotes an absurd amount of care to being a crime movie until the vampires turn up out of nowhere for the climax, and The Frighteners (1996) is a supernatural comedy until by degrees it turns into a supernatural horror film. Sure, it's rare for an audience to be caught genuinely unaware of the game a film is playing, as marketing (or the film's placement in the horror section of the video store) almost always gives the game away, but I appreciate the effort all the same. Carrie, though, is on a whole different level of generic masquerading, as it tips its hand in the very first scene and then quietly goes back to pretending to be a light-hearted teen drama until it's time for the blood to really start flowing at the climax. Even more impressive is the fact that director Brian De Palma almost gets away with it, too,  being hampered more by the “based on a novel by Stephen King” in his opening credits than anything else in his film.

It's a hell of an opening sequence, too. We begin with a camera slowly tracking through a crowded girls' locker room as nubile girls frolic and chat in various states of undress while soft music plays in the background. It's an idealized setting, as I doubt there has ever been a girls' locker room so clean or idyllic in any high school in America. I also doubt that many teen girls spend their time after showers frolicking like Nymphs in a Rubens painting, nor is it very likely that there was ever a class of High School girls as uniformly pretty and fit as the bunch we see here. That is because strict adherence to realism is often an impediment to conveying a mood or ambiance; the real world is complex and messy, and sometimes art must streamline reality to make a point. Here, De Palma is using every tool at his disposal to give the film the innocent, idealized, and slightly erotic atmosphere of a Nudie Cutie. With every inch of celluloid, De Palma is telling the audience: “Relax, this is just a harmless Nudie Cutie. Have a beer, maybe jerk off if you're watching this alone.” Adding in some soiled underwear and fat chicks is only going to work at cross purposes.

To hammer this home, the camera then glides into the misty shower to focus on our protagonist, Carrie White, as she gently washes her body. The scene continues the mixture of the innocent and the erotic that we've seen so far, at least, until we see the blood. The viewers at home will quickly realize that Carrie is just having her period, but even this is a bit of a jolt. Nudie cuties never bother themselves with unsavory bodily processes; that is the domain of the weirdo fetish stuff. For poor Carrie, who doesn't know what a period is, the sight of blood sends her into a panic as she immediately starts to worry that she's dying. She won't get much help from her classmates, who think it is hilarious that the weird girl is freaking out over her period. So they surround her and pelt her with tampons, screaming “plug it up” until the gym teacher, Miss Collins, intervenes, tells off the bullies, and slaps a bit of sense into Carrie.

It's a great opening that quickly introduces the major characters of the story, shocks the viewer into paying attention, and efficiently deploys the exploitative elements at its disposal. More impressive, though, is the way it captures the entire film's unique tone and story structure and recreates it in miniature. This is a light breezy high school drama that ends in a flash of horrific blood.

It also quickly establishes the film's identity independent from its source material, the famed Stephen King breakout novel. Most of the major events of the novel and the film are identical, the characters are all reproduced more or less faithfully, though, as always, some characters in the novel are given greater depth than the run-time of a film will allow (Billy Nolan being the most obvious example, with his cinematic counterpart being reduced to a generic thug). However, the film and the novel differ on how to deal with the central challenge of telling this particular story. Carrie is not an especially easy horror story to tell, because almost nothing horrific happens until the very end.

In King's novel, the author solved this problem by framing the narrative as an investigation of that event, so the reader knew right from the start that something terrible was going to happen and was reminded of it throughout the novel by the framing narrative that showed up between chapters. This approach keeps the pressure on until the action really kicks off at the end. De Palma opts for the opposite approach and disguises his horror film as a teen drama. So, after artfully teasing the coming horror in the opening minutes, the film reverts to just the sort of harmless fluff it was masquerading as before.

As you might have gathered from the fact that she did not know what a period is, Carrie is an impossibly sheltered girl. She has been raised in what amounts to seclusion by her religious nut-job mother, Margaret White, a lady who dresses like a witch and constantly rants and raves about sin and purity in a way that probably will remind you of General Jack D. Ripper. In addition to being a religious nutter, Margaret is also not going to win any awards for her great parenting, as her response to the news that her daughter has had her first period is to lock her up in the broom closet so she can pray to an extremely creepy statue of Saint Sebastian (I have no idea what the patron saint of cyclists is supposed to do about any of this aside from foreshadow Margaret's own death by pointy projectiles).

Carrie is also a latent psychic who has the power to make the Psycho (1960) soundtrack play at will (oh, and also move objects with her mind). At the start of the film, her powers are mostly latent, and she can only use them by accident, like when she causes a light bulb to explode while she's freaking out over her period or when she knocks a kid off his bicycle after he calls her “scary Carrie.” However, as the film progresses, she learns more about her powers, thanks in no small part to some research at the school library, which has a surprisingly large collection of books on the occult and supernatural. As she learns more, her powers become more formidable and controllable, which is mirrored by a change in Carrie's personality as she becomes more confident in herself and assertive.

The girls who tormented Carrie in the shower are mostly narrative non-entities, with nothing to distinguish them from their peers aside from hairstyle and wardrobe choices (of particular note here is the one girl who never takes off her baseball cap, not even when she's at Prom). Perhaps they feel a momentary twinge of guilt over their poor treatment of their classmate, but they don't bother to articulate or examine these feelings at all, being content just to suffer through their penance of Miss Collins' boot-camp detentions. Only Sue Snell feels a more nagging sensation of remorse. She pities poor Carrie. Reasoning that it's not her fault that she's an unloved freak with the crazy mother, Sue resolves to do something nice for Carrie. Balancing out the benevolent Sue is the Queen bitch Chris Hargensen, who doesn't understand why she is even being punished for tormenting Carrie. In Chris's mind, girls like Carrie exist only to be tormented for the amusement of girls like her. Alone among all the girls, Chris refuses to take her punishment from Miss Collins, meaning she won't be allowed to go to the senior prom. If Chris hated Carrie without any provocation, having to miss out on Senior Prom turns her into a vindictive bitch. She vows to get even with Carrie White, come hell or high water.

Sue goes about trying to make things up to Carrie by getting her hunky boyfriend, Tommy Ross, to take the emotionally-abused weirdo to the prom. Tommy is completely pussy-whipped, so despite having no interest in Carrie (and possibly suspecting this is an elaborate shit-test from his girlfriend), he grudgingly goes along with Sue's plan. He even goes so far as to ask Carrie out again after being initially rebuffed (a rejection he was plainly relieved to receive). One has to wonder just how far Sue intended for Tommy to go with this pretend date. I can't imagine that she would have been very happy with Tommy if she learned that he smooched Carrie at the Prom after it was revealed that, in addition to being a latent psychic, Carrie was also a latent babe. Once Chris learns that Tommy is taking Carrie to prom, she has her boyfriend, a low-life thug named Billy Nolan, rig up a trap that will let her splatter Carrie with pig's blood in front of the entire school. Amusingly, both Sue's desire to help Carrie and Chris' desire to hurt her are essential for the tragedy that unfolds at the film's end. I suppose there is a lesson in that about how all the worst events are a product of both malice and benevolence.

The result is, of course, the famous scene where Carrie stands on the prom stage in front of all the kids in school, covered in a bucket of pig's blood, her humiliation from the start of the film recreated on a larger and more public scale. It's all too much, and Carrie snaps, unleashing a psychic attack that sees the entire graduating class (minus Sue, who is locked out of the auditorium) and much of the school's faculty dead. I have seen some reviewers online argue that this is a cathartic moment where Carrie gets her well-deserved vengeance on all the little blighters who have wronged her. However, that's not really what is happening here. Most of the kids at the prom night massacre are blameless in Carrie's victimization; indeed, even sympathetic characters like Miss Collins, who has done nothing but support, protect, and guide Carrie, are cut down in the carnage. The only people you can argue deserve to be killed by Carrie are Chris and Billy, and they don't even die in the initial gymnasium massacre and probably would have survived if Chris didn't try to run Carrie over with Billy's car for some reason.

This is not a cathartic revenge story like Thriller: A Cruel Picture (1973) or I Spit on Your Grave (1978); hell, it's not even a morally complex revenge story like Old Boy (2003) or Straw Dogs (1971). It's a lamentable tragedy where a bunch of innocent people (along with a few downright noble people) are killed for being in the wrong place when a poor, mentally abused girl finally snaps. Amusingly, the people clapping and writing “you go girl” reviews are usually the same sort of people who are quick to lecture others for their lack of “media literacy.” Physician heal thyself!

The main draw here is De Palma's grandiose cinematography, and boy does he ever deliver. Carrie is a good example of the younger, hungrier De Palama, who is working his ass off to make every single shot at least memorable if not outright striking. At times, it gets a bit ridiculous. The sequence at the end where Sue's gaze follows the rope from Chris' hiding place up to the bucket of blood perched in the rafters is downright ludicrous and feels like it belongs in a cartoon. But even when it becomes absurd, the film always oozes style and personality. Personally, I prefer when a movie goes too far in the pursuit of a unique style rather than not far enough. Minimalism is for cowards.

The central role sounds, at least from how she's described in King's novel, basically impossible to cast. Where are you going to find a girl who looks suitably strange that she can play an awkward social outcast, suitably beautiful that she can transform into a prom queen, and suitably horrifying that she can sell the final gruesome massacre? Normally, when a Hollywood film needs to sell an ugly duckling narrative they just find a babe, tell her not to comb her hair, put her in thick-glasses and hope the audience will be fooled (see She's All That (1999) and The Princess Diaries (2001)), but since Carrie then needs to go from prom queen to mass-murderer, this approach won't work. Sissy Spacek was an inspired casting choice, as where else could you hope to find an actress so beautiful and yet simultaneously so strange-looking? It is not an easy role by any measure, and Spacek pulls off all three modes of her character with style.

Ok, that's all the praise out of the way. I would be lying if Carrie didn't have some serious problems in addition to the impressive acting, moving pathos, and brilliant cinematography. Tellingly, all these problems are contracted by the film being a more or less faithful adaptation of Stephen King's debut novel. I am not one of those snobs who look down on King's work because it's popular; mind you, I actually quite like a good number of his novels and stories. Sure, he can't write an ending to save his life, and the child orgy at the end of It was misguided to say the least, but for the most part, his oeuvre boasts some impressive displays of imagination and even a few genuinely chilling scares. However, his first novel, Carrie, is one of his weakest and displays two of his signature problems: His inability to discard the initial inspiration for his story when it no longer fits with the story it has generated, and his inability to give sympathetic motivations to certain character types.

We will tackle the lesser sin in Carrie first, the unnecessary attachment to the moment of inspiration. Carrie, the novel, found its origin when King, while working as a janitor, cleaned up a soiled tampon in the girls' locker room. From this comes the opening scene of the film, where a naive girl in the shower thinks she's dying because she got her first period. As mentioned above, it's a hell of a scene, the mix of eroticism with horror while quickly telling us a great deal about how sheltered and naive our protagonist is. The problem is that King wanted Carrie to be a senior in High School as he wanted the novel to end with the explosive destruction of her senior prom, which would mean that at the youngest, she would have to be 17. The problem with this is that girls almost always have their menarche long before this. Failure to menstruate after age 15 or so would almost always be treated as a medical problem. Indeed, it's rather difficult to believe that a doctor wouldn't have inquired about Carrie's menstruation at regular checkups, though I suppose it's possible that her crazy mother simply never took her to an annual physical. The bigger problem is that Carrie in the movie is played by a normal 25-year-old who has breasts and pubic hair that she shouldn't have if she were still prepubescent.

Something had to be done about this to make it at all sensible. Either Carrie had to be aged down considerably (making her a 14-year-old Freshman would at least strain credulity less) or the event had to be set sometime in the more remote past. Significant enough that the mean girls would still tell cutting jokes about it, and traumatic enough that Carrie still bears the psychological scars. However, King didn't bother to re-work his initial idea, and De Palma was far too busy artfully composing his shots to trouble much about whether or not the story made sense in terms of biology.

Carrie's absurdly late period is only a minor issue, though, compared with the problems stemming from her mother. Stephen King, like a lot of liberal boomers, has a worldview-defining hate-boner for Christians and Christianity. This is fine in and of itself, but it seems to have given him a rather warped view of the religion and its practitioners. So here Margaret White is a zealous Christian who not only doesn't believe in sex outside of marriage, but she's opposed to sex inside of marriage. Normally, it is the opposite, with Christians who do marry tending to breed like rabbits once they have tied the knot and gotten God's a-OK for coitus. Seriously, just look at the size of Catholic families a couple of generations ago or Mormon families today; these people take God's command to “be fruitful and multiply” very seriously.

Normally, King's pathological anti-Christianity is good for a laugh or two, and doesn't detract much from the story he's telling. Here, though, Margaret White's bizarre religious practices are central to her daughter's plight. Without her lunatic mother and her hangups about sexuality and menstruation, Carrie is just a regular girl with psychic powers. She cannot go on her climactic rampage unless she has some pretty significant psychological scars from dear old mom. So, it hurts the story when Margaret is an absurd cartoon character who dresses like a witch and preaches a doctrine of Christianity that has almost no resemblance to the real religion. It's doubly frustrating because there is an easy way to make a character like Margaret make sense. Rather than have her be a religious nutter a priori who gets married with no intention of carrying out her biblical duty to “be fruitful and multiply,” have her be a regular girl who was raped. This rape, which could be her sole sexual experience and could be what produced Carrie, is a fact that Margaret subconsciously resents her for. Margaret can blame herself for the ordeal and project all her, now explicable, hangups about sex onto her daughter. You can even keep her as a religious nutter to boot, with her ramblings about sin now having some grounding in her personal history. However, this would mean writing a religious character as a human being, and there are some things that even King, with his admirable imagination, simply cannot fathom.