Carrie (1976)
Posted on September 18, 2005
Filed Under The Occult
The high esteem in which Carrie is held has as much to do with its portrayal of high-school life as it does with any of the film’s shocks or scares. Although it’s been a very fertile area for all manner of teen films - good and bad - since, Brian de Palma’s classic was one of the first films to really get inside the brutal caste system that many teenagers grow up with. Sissy Spacek plays Carrie White, an emotionally crippled schoolgirl who has developed powers of telekinesis, which enable her to move objects with her mind. Of rather more concern to her is the bullying she receives at school and the terrible treatment she gets at home from her psychotic, bible-bashing mother. The situation improves when a concerned classmate sets her up with a date for the prom, but as her confidence grows, she has no idea that the tempestuous Christine Hargenson is planning one last humiliating prank - a prank which forces Carrie to use the full extent of her powers to devastating effect…
The cast of near-unknowns play the whole thing faultlessly, with many of the school scenes, particularly those involved John Travolta’s Billy, having a loose, natural feel which contrast heavily with the almost operatic confrontations between Carrie and her mother. Spacek delivers a knockout performance as Carrie, her southern accent and rather lopsided features marking her out as a total outsider from her confident, more sexually aware peers. But in the run-up to the prom the transformation she undergoes is palpable; compared to her pasty awkwardness in the early shower scenes, she takes on a rather fragile beauty - still very much the outsider, but now with a charming delicacy that the other girls lack. In all fairness, anyone’s going to look good sitting next to William Katt’s Tommy Ross, sporting the most outrageous poodle perm in cinema history and clad in a tuxedo that even Jon Pertwee’s Dr Who would have balked at. Still, it’s interesting to note that whilst everyone else’s appearance roots them very firmly in the mid-70s, Carrie’s prom dress and styling have dated the least - whether this timelessness was intentional or not is a moot point, but it makes the film seem less like a product of its age.
Having had some indication of the plot before I watched it, the film confounded my expectations as to its tone. Having watched Carrie grow in confidence, I expected her revenge to be her vindication, a determined stand against the bullies on behalf of all the little people people crushed by the high school system. In the event, Carrie’s tormentors get their just deserts, but her allies suffer as well, and what’s more she undoes all the positive change she has brought about for herself. At the beginning of prom night, she’s an independent young woman; a few hours later she is driven back into the arms of her insane mother. The DVD box bills this movie as “the ultimate revenge fantasy”, but I’d describe it more as a revenge tragedy; everyone’s punished, the deserving and the undeserving. There can be no satisfaction in the outcome, and no-one is left to learn from it.
At a lean 90 minutes, Carrie is a taut little film, and the excellent screenplay sensibly keeps things linear. It’s a shame, then, that de Palma doesn’t always let the script and the cast speak for themselves. His direction occasionally feel heavy-handed, such as the unnecessarily foreboding thunder and lightning when Carrie announces her decision to go to the prom to her mother. And unforgivably, he uses some appalling and inexplicable split-screen trickery over Carrie’s revenge, which robs the scene of potential scale and horror and instead makes it look like a cheap MTV video. These slip-ups are few in number, but do give the impression that the director was perhaps trying a little too hard.
Like all the best horror films, Carrie is powerful because it essentially tells a very human story, and uses its arsenal of shock, scares and blood to elevate everyday problems to an almost epic scale. Yes, the ending is a very up-front bloodbath, but far more powerful is its sickening emotional impact. At the prom, Tommy does genuinely fall in love with Carrie and in a strange way we do too, making her subsequent unravelling quite harrowing to watch. Ultimately, the supernatural plays second fiddle to the human, which really is as it should be.
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