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CARRIE
Rating: 
USA. 1976.
Director – Brian De Palma, Screenplay – Lawrence D. Cohen, Based on the Novel by Stephen King, Producer – Paul Monash, Photography – Mario Tosi, Music – Pino Donaggio, Special Effects – Gregory M. Auer, Art Direction – Jack Fisk & William J. Kenney. Production Company – Red Band Films/United Artists.
Cast:
Sissy Spacek (Carrie White), Piper Laurie (Margaret White), Nancy Allen (Chris Hargensen), William Katt (Tommy Ross), Amy Irving (Sue Snell), John Travolta (Billy Nolan), P.J. Soles (Norma Watson), Betty Buckley (Miss Collins), Sidney Lassick (Mr Fromm)
Plot: Carrie White, the teenage daughter of a religious fanatic, has her first menstrual period in the school locker-room shower and is so sexually ignorant that she thinks she is bleeding to death. The rest of the girls cruelly taunt her and pelt her with tampons before they are caught by a teacher and punished. Afterwards two of the girls plan to make it up to Carrie each in their own way:– Sue Snell talks her boyfriend Tommy Ross into inviting Carrie to the prom; the other, Chris Hargensen, rigs it so that Carrie is elected prom queen and then sets a bucket of pig’s blood above the stage to drench her at the moment of her crowning. But they have reckoned without Carrie’s telekinetic powers, which she uses to exact a sudden and horrible revenge.
Carrie (1974) was Stephen King’s first novel and was also the very first Stephen King book ever adapted to film. Indeed you could argue that the success of the film adaptation of Carrie was one that really cemented Stephen King’s reputation with the public and helped him to then become the world’s best-selling author that he is today.
Carrie was made by director Brian De Palma. Brian De Palma had emerged through quirky indie comedies such as Greetings (1968), The Wedding Party (1969), Hi Mom (1970) and Get to Know Your Rabbit (1971) then drawn attention as a genre director with the marvellously twisted psycho-thriller Sisters (1973) and the genre parody rock opera The Phantom of the Paradise (1974). De Palma would subsequently go on to build a sometimes controversial reputation within the genre as a director of a series of stylish, sometimes Hitchcock-derivative psycho-thrillers such Obsession (1976), Dressed to Kill (1980), Blow Out (1981) and Body Double (1984), although has fairly much abandoned genre filmmaking from the mid-1980s onwards apart from returns like Raising Cain (1992) and Mission to Mars (2000).
In his genre films, Brian De Palma has proven himself a master of visual flamboyance. De Palma’s films brim with stylistic effect – split-screen, slow-motion action, gimmicky sequences that pull back to reveal they are dreams or fantasies, and pastiches of Hitchcock. Carrie is arguably the most stylish of De Palma’s films and in this author’s opinion is Brian De Palma’s best out-and-out genre film. In the novel Stephen King opted for a kind of cod-true story approach, alternating straight fiction with multiple viewpoints from articles and pseudo-interviews. But Brian De Palma abandons Stephen King’s soberly realistic approach altogether and Lawrence Cohen’s script conflates King’s realistic narrative into something much more torrid, bitchy and melodramatic – at times the film operates on a level akin to the camp cult classic High School Confidential (1958).
De Palma launches into it with a florid display of cinematic pyrotechnics that becomes a kind of bravura excess. The prom climax – full of tracking shots that alternate elaborately staged set-ups with slow-motion and split-screen, and where the soundtrack is silent except for Pino Donaggio’s eerie score building as a single note underneath – is superlative. Elsewhere De Palma runs rife through religious imagery with visions that are striking and beautiful – there’s one scene with Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie sitting in a darkened room lit by lightning, which De Palma manages to turn into a gorgeous tableaux of the Last Supper.
Although as often De Palma’s images attain symbolic overkill – Sissy Spacek is tossed into a closet with a glowing figurine of Christ, its sides pierced with spears, and later in Carrie’s psychic revenge Piper Laurie symbolically becomes a similar figure skewered by kitchenware; or the house’s final descent into a Hellish fiery pit. And De Palma often uses effect without always narrative sense – there is a twist ending, which is another of De Palma’s cheat endings, that makes no sense other than to manipulate the audience into a last shock jump and was imitated in subsequent films like Friday the 13th (1980). But whatever you say about the point of it, it’s certainly effective and is the one scene in the film that the audience always leaves talking about.
Carrie would be little without its actresses’ ability to convey enormous conviction. Both Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie received Academy Award nominations for their performances. Piper Laurie dumps Stephen King’s picture of an inhumanely repressed Baptist and gives a fierily passionate barnstormer of a performance in flaming red hair filled with a shivery sexually repressed fervour. She would take the whole film were it not for the amazing emotionally wrought performance of Sissy Spacek. Sissy Spacek’s performance is a real Ugly Duckling transformation – an analogy to which De Palma is not unaware, briefly transforming the ball into something from a fairy-tale, lit up like an Aladdin’s cave of sparkling lights. Spacek has never ever given a performance as good as this again. Nancy Allen (later Mrs De Palma) should have been Academy Award nominated for her plum role as uber-bitch, Chris Hargensen. A young John Travolta also gives a fine performance as her bad boy boyfriend.
The film was followed by a terrible sequel, The Rage: Carrie 2 (1999). The Stephen King novel was later remade as a three-part tv mini-series Carrie (2002), starring Angela Bettis in the title role and with Patricia Clarkson inheriting the role of the mother. Although not without some interesting aspects, this was a considerable, the least of which was not the replacement of Brian De Palma by a generic tv director. Carrie was parodied in Pandemonium/Thursday the 12th (1982), Zapped! (1982) and Bloodbath at the House of Death (1984).
Brian De Palma later returned to the theme of psychic powers in The Fury (1978). Still on psychic themes De Palma also announced at one point his intention to direct a version of Alfred Bester’s sf novel The Demolished Man (1953) about a future where telepathy outlaws all crime. Although one suspects that Bester would lose to De Palma, this is a production that one would like to see some day.
Other Stephen King genre adaptations include:- Salem’s Lot (1979), The Shining (1980), Christine (1983), Cujo (1983), The Dead Zone (1983), Children of the Corn (1984), Firestarter (1984), Cat’s Eye (1985), Silver Bullet (1985), The Running Man (1987), Pet Semetary (1989), Graveyard Shift (1990), It (tv mini-series, 1990), Misery (1990), a segment of Tales from the Darkside: The Movie (1990), Sometimes They Come Back (1991), The Lawnmower Man (1992), The Dark Half (1993), Needful Things (1993), The Tommyknockers (tv mini-series, 1993), The Stand (tv mini-series, 1994), The Langoliers (tv mini-series, 1995), The Mangler (1995), Thinner (1996), The Night Flier (1997), Quicksilver Highway (1997), The Shining (tv mini-series, 1997), Trucks (1997), Apt Pupil (1998), The Green Mile (1999), Hearts in Atlantis (2001), Dreamcatcher (2003), Riding the Bullet (2004), ‘Salem’s Lot (tv mini-series, 2004), Secret Window (2004), Desperation (tv mini-series, 2006), Nightmares and Dreamscapes: From the Stories of Stephen King (tv mini-series, 2006), 1408 (2007) and The Mist (2007). Stephen King had also written a number of original screen works with Creepshow (1982), Golden Years (tv mini-series, 1991), Sleepwalkers (1992), Storm of the Century (tv mini-series, 1999), Rose Red (tv mini-series, 2002) and the tv series Kingdom Hospital (2004), as well as adapted his own works with the screenplays for Cat’s Eye, Silver Bullet, Pet Semetary, The Stand and The Shining. King also directed one film with Maximum Overdrive (1986).
Copyright Richard Scheib 1990
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