Carrie (1976)

De Palma's all-over-the-place movie with great acting at its heart.

Most of the 1976 posters gave away the majority of the plot! I suppose you know it anyways, but just in case, this poster doesn’t. From TheMovieDB, fair use.

Carrie (1976). Grade: B

The character of Carrie White was almost played by Carrie Fisher, and Amy Irving almost appeared in Fisher’s role in Star Wars. During the casting for the latter, one of George Lucas’s friends was hovering in the background, taking notes. That friend was Brian De Palma, and Lucas let him sit in on his auditions so long as Lucas had first dibs on anybody he wanted for the roles.

I always found it weird that Lucas, De Palma, Spielberg and Coppola ended up friendly. With Lucas and Coppola, both liked basing their work out of the Bay Area, and both were (at one point) independent filmmakers. Spielberg and Lucas obviously shared a love of sci-fi and adventure movies.

De Palma was more of a prankster than the other three, and the least interested in giving audiences just what they wanted. In Pauline Kael’s review of The Fury, she wrote how in Close Encounters, “what happens is so much better than you dared hope that you have to laugh; with De Palma, it's so much worse than you feared that you have to laugh.”

In Vincent Canby’s NYT review of Carrie (he didn’t like the movie), he complains that this is “the most benignly unscary horror film ever made,” and I’ll mostly agree — I don’t find most if the big “horror” scenes to be remotely frightening. But that’s not the point of the movie. The point is to put you inside Carrie’s head, so that the true horror is what’s done to her. She’s horribly emotionally (and almost physically) abused by her mom; she’s the shy girl at school that ALL the others pick on. And the one time she feels she might have a life-line, she gets terribly betrayed (or at least thinks she is). So that the way she reacts is not recommended to others, yet you’re totally right there with it. It’s the scream of a broken soul.

This is adapted from Stephen King’s 1974 novel, his first to be published. I haven’t read it, and it appears to be something of an oddity. I’ve mentioned how every book I’ve read by King (mostly his 21st-century work) has a protagonist (or two) I really care about and want to do well. In King’s books, that sometimes happens… and it sometimes doesn’t. There’s happy and tragic endings, both.

There’s been good film adaptations of King’s work (the Mike Flanagan ones, The Dead Zone, Misery), and bad (most of the 80’s ones without Tim Curry in them). But I’ve never seen a King movie where I’m emotionally wrapped up in the fate of the protagonists the way I am in the books. Until we watched this one. The degree to which I actually cared what happened to Carrie was really strong.

Well, guess what? That’s NOT in the book! Not according to Tim Robey here; in the book, the character’s apparently “unsympathetic.” (That might be a function of how King framed it, as a series of letters and articles trying to piece together “what happened” after the fact.) And the character’s physically far different from what Sissy Spacek looks like. But even King liked Spacek in it; and he generally was pretty critical of movies made from his books.

The adaptation’s by one Lawrence D. Cohen (with De Palma’s input). It’s not an especially graceful script, particularly where the dialogue is concerned. But it simplifies the narrative and makes a key change; in the book, Carrie feels betrayed, thinks it over for awhile, then acts; in the movie, she reacts immediately. It makes the actions more as though something in her heart has snapped.

Right from the start, the movie sets up how awful everything is for Carrie (Sissy Spacek, in her second major film role). It’s one of those awful ways of doing gym class where the class rotates through doing a different sport every few weeks,¹ and this time the class is doing volleyball. Someone screams “hit it at Carrie” and as the camera glides closer to Spacek, we see the ball fly by and Spacek miserably flail at it. Everybody mocks her for being such a loser.

Then we’re in the locker room, and the girls are showering, and you may have to remind yourself that these are all women in their early 20s, we’re not seeing nekkid teens, here. Still, the scene feels pretty exploitative… until Spacek ends up with blood running down her leg. She has no idea what it is; she’s never heard of menstruation. (Not even in a 1970s educational film featuring Mike from Breaking Bad?) Spacek, terrified, asks the other girls for help and they become brutal, hurling insults and tampons at her as she cowers naked in the shower. (On a “Acting Carrie” feature on the MGM DVD, Amy Irving said this scene actually scared her; it was like she could sense real mob mentality at work.)

When Spacek gets sent home early, she’s chewed out by her fundamentalist mom, Piper Laurie. Laurie tells her that “the curse” only happened because Spacek had impure, sinful thoughts. So she drags her into a prayer closet and tells her to beg God for forgiveness. The closet, and other parts of the house, are full of creepy religious imagery that may strike you as so over-the-top that they’re funny; guess what, both some modern critics and Kael in 1976 thought the film had a wickedly funny side. So, for that matter, did Piper Laurie.

Laurie, so memorable in The Hustler, had put acting on hiatus shortly after that movie was made; she didn’t like the quality of scripts she was getting. So she moved to the Woodstock area. De Palma found out that one of the studio executives at United Artists had a house in Woodstock near Laurie, and she’d expressed a willingness to try acting again, given a good-enough part. Once Laurie saw the humor in the script, she was in.

It’s a towering bughouse performance, right from an early scene where Laurie is trying to push some crummy religious literature on a neighbor (not even a Bible, but a guidebook on how to be a terrible parent like herself). While Spacek is all adolescent gawkiness, Laurie (at 44) is someone who’s incredibly sensual (even in her witchlike robes) and intensely proud of how much she scorns herself for it. There’s a late scene where she’s revealing her own past of “lustful thoughts” to Spacek, and it’s like Laurie is burning with joy at how painfully it’s adding to her daughter’s humiliation.² Whenever these two are on the screen together, the movie hits actual horror heaven.

The scenes with the other teens aren’t anywhere near as compelling, although there’s a neat dynamic that develops between Amy Irving and Nancy Allen (both in their first major roles). After the girls humiliate Spacek in the locker room, their gym teacher (Betty Buckley, also a movie newcomer) is determined to make them pay for how mean they were; they’re got detention for a week, and if they skip any of it, they’re going to lose their prom privileges. Allen, a prototypical mega-Mean Girl, is infuriated by this, and blames Carrie for it all the more; Irving tries to tell her to get over herself. The message doesn’t land.

Brian De Palma, who gave us the mad (and brilliant) Phantom of the Paradise, is partially doing what he did in that movie — throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks. You had a camera moving in a circle around a singer there? Now you’ve got a camera moving around a dancing couple here, and it’s FASTER. (Mrs. twinsbrewer hated it and had to look away.) You had split screens there? You’ve got ‘em again here (and not as effectively). Some of De Palma’s wild “try everything” approach doesn’t work; there’s too much buildup right before the big climax. But then again he’ll do something like a long tracking shot moving up into the rafters above a stage, and all his visual trickery seems worth it.

And De Palma’s got Sissy Spacek. She was married to the production designer of Phantom, Jack Fisk (they’re still married!), and did some crew work on that film. De Palma wanted her to try out for one of the Mean Girl parts. But Spacek had read the book and really wanted the Carrie role, so she showed up for the audition with Vaseline in her hair and an old “sailor dress” her mom had made for her in junior high, to look as pathetic as she possibly could. She got the part.

Spacek IS pathetic in the movie, yet undergoes a neat transformation. Gradually, she starts to gain a little self-confidence, bit-by-bit. Out of guilt, Amy Irving asks her dreamboat athlete boyfriend (William Katz, another first-timer) to take Spacek to the prom, and in working up the courage to defy Laurie, we see Spacek starting to shine. She’s gone from mousy to beautiful. It makes you long for the change to last… even though the plot has strongly indicated that it’s not gonna work out for long. I can’t believe there’s been TWO remakes of this already — who would want to try and top Spacek in this role? It’s idiocy to even think about it. (Idiocy on the part of the filmmakers who tried, not the actors playing Carries, who I’m sure did their best.)

There was also a Broadway musical version! Larry Cohen, who did this screenplay, appears in a short featurette on the DVD talking about it — I guess he was involved with the musical, too (which had nice gym teacher Betty Buckley from this move playing the Piper Laurie role). Cohen gushes about how great the musical was, and he’s a boring, pompous ass. What he doesn’t say is that it cost $6 million, it closed in three days, and inspired a book called Not Since Carrie: Forty Years of Broadway Musical Flops.

Cohen’s in the featurette “Visualizing Carrie,” too, and ruins it. But that “Acting Carrie” one, about 40 minutes long, is really entertaining. It has interviews with Irving, Allen, Spacek, Laurie, Katz, Betty Buckley, and P.J. Soles (who played one of the other Mean Girls). They talk about how the shower scene was as embarrasssing/uncomfortable as you’d expect. How DePalma made Buckley keep slapping Allen for real several time. (BAD Brian! BAD Brian!) And how the general mayhem of a big scene was really pretty harrowing; Soles got water so hard in her ear that it broke her eardrum! (It did heal just fine.)

Yet all of them seem to have, overall, positive memories about the experience; they at least all liked each other. It’s nice to know that in the shower scene, the person in the shower putting the fake blood on Spacek was her husband, Fisk. (He also dumped other things on her, including pumice, which was her idea.)

The score here’s by Pino Donaggio, who’d do the luxuriant music for Dressed to Kill.³ The cinematography’s by Mario Tosi. Both elements can be entirely “too much” at times, like during that shower scene. But when they click, they REALLY click. As Spacek approaches her house near the end, with the colors all aglow and the music propelling her forward, it’s one of the great moments in all of horror movie history; this lighting, this music, Spacek’s body language have a majesty like Elsa Lanchester’s revulsion in Bride of Frankenstein.

This site, one of those “83 facts about Movie X” ones, has some stuff on it that might be dubious,⁴ but here’s one I believe. De Palma wanted some of the visual design to resemble a 1851 painting by Gustave Moreau called The Study of Lady Macbeth, another “woman scorned.” Here’s what that painting looks like:

From this site, fair use.

Yep, that’s definitely some imagery which is similar to the big climax of the movie here.

This is a movie that might bring back some uncomfortable memories for people — it reminded me of how much everyone at our high school hated our senior prom and just felt awkward and embarrassed. (Spacek said the worst thing about it for her was having to wear makeup.) But the power — and the high Gothic humor — of those Spacek/Laurie scenes makes this a must-see despite the uncomfortable subject, and despite some of the sloppy try-everything flaws.

It’s too bad that I can’t think of too many movies where someone’s religious faith is shown in a positive light rather than a crazed-fundamentalist one. At least, not Christianity, not very often. (Thirteen Lives showed how the trapped people’s Buddhist faith helped them survive.) I suppose that’s what religious faith in movies deserves, though, after 50 years of Cecil B. DeMille movies like The Sign of the Cross and other patronizing crap. (That one’s gaudily amusing patronizing crap.) But there are some good documentaries about nice Christians! The Overnighters about a North Dakota pastor who tries to help homeless oil rig workers. A Time For Burning about a Lutheran minister who tries to integrate his church in 1960s Nebraska. Which, guess what, you can watch right here.

For those of us who knew fundamentalism in our personal lives, there’s something refreshing about seeing its naked need for total domination played as boldly as Laurie plays it here. Or to see it go down the way it does at the end. Where Spacek’s embodying the Id of every teenager who ever had their mind warped by twisted judgmental teachings on sexuality. Which, even today, is not a zero number.

1. We did this in junior high and high school, and I stunk at every sport… except softball. I had a lot of practice with backyard softball, and I could hit a little. No threat to take Reggie Jackson’s place, but I could hit softballs OK.

So it was really rewarding when the bullies would all yell “play in, easy out” and I would smack that ball right over their dang heads and they had to go running after it.

But the rest of the time, I WAS the worst at any sport, and got picked on mercilessly over it. Except in one class…

2. The story’s about how her husband essentially forced her to have sex. Which, by the way, is how Laurie lost her virginity, to a rough a**hole. Not her husband; an actor she was working with. Named Ronald Reagan.

3. There are some strings borrowed from Bernard Herrmann’s score for Psycho, although this movie’s not similar in plot or technique. (And the teens attend Bates High School, also a nod to that movie — De Palma was a big Hitchcock fan.) When they were assembling a rough cut of the film, they used some existing music from other movies to get a feel for how things were going. (This is common.) And then De Palma just liked the Psycho strings enough, he kept them. He said “I hope he’ll forgive me for using his violins.” That’s polite to Herrmann, who had died in 1975. Herrmann’s last score was for Taxi Driver, and De Palma had encouraged him to work on the movie.

4. Like how it says Spielberg would sometimes visit the set and hit on every female member of the cast. He DID marry Amy Irving for awhile, though.