Brian De Palma (1976)
Brian De Palma’s sensuous, lyrical approach to horror is evident from the start. A group of high school girls have been playing netball and friendless Carrie White has again distinguished herself as hopeless at the game – as she is at everything else. The girls go to shower and change; De Palma’s camera – rapt, languorous and voyeuristic – moves over their naked or nearly naked bodies. The palely wobegone Carrie gets some relief from showering alone until blood from between her legs mingles with the running water and she is terrified by this, her first menstruation. An horrific change of mood during a refreshing shower naturally recalls what happens in Bates Motel but De Palma’s rhythm is very different from Hitchcock’s. Besides, the audience of Psycho shares Marion Crane’s paralysed terror whereas we can see that Carrie is not ‘bleeding to death’, even though she fears that she is, screaming and begging the other girls to help her. What’s more startling here is that Carrie is so vehemently despised by her classmates that, instead of reassuring her, they pelt her with tampons and sanitary towels, before the games mistress Miss Collins arrives to intervene. When Miss Collins explains to the school principal what’s happened, he expresses surprise at seventeen-year-old Carrie’s ignorance. It turns out that her mother Catherine, a sexophobic religious maniac, has never told Carrie about menstruation but the viewer may share some of the principal’s puzzlement: hasn’t Carrie seen evidence of periods – or, at least, heard them being discussed – among her classmates?
This is just the first improbability of De Palma’s famous horror film that you have to overlook. (I don’t know if the fault lies with Lawrence D Cohen’s screenplay or in the original Stephen King novel.) Carrie White is transformed from a withdrawn no-hoper into the school prom queen; Chris Hargensen, the nastiest of the girls in her class (in a stiff competition), has been disciplined by Miss Collins so that she can’t herself attend the prom. Chris, with her boyfriend Billy, plots revenge on Carrie to ruin her big moment as she basks in the glow of attention and applause at the prom. Chris’s revenge is shocking but it’s nothing compared to what the telekinetic Carrie then unleashes on the gathering. But how does Chris know that Carrie will be prom queen – who else does she involve in her plot to rig the vote? Doesn’t the family of another of Carrie’s classmates, the morally ambiguous Sue Snell, think it odd that Sue’s boyfriend Tommy is taking Carrie to the prom instead, and that Sue doesn’t have a partner for the occasion? And what happens to Carrie psychologically to enable her suddenly to stand up to her rabid, domineering mother and overrule – verbally rather than telekinetically – Catherine’s forbidding her daughter to attend the prom?
Carrie’s telekinetic powers are in evidence from very early on so that it’s clear they’ll be used whenever necessary. De Palma is less interested in suspense or surprise than in realising the dream-into-nightmare highlights of the material. His approach to these highlights is operatic – not only in the sense that it’s intensely theatrical but also in his elaborating an event or detail after you’ve got its point. This tends to diffuse – or defuse – the horror in Carrie, not least in the film’s final sequence, when the dead heroine’s hand reaches out to grasp that of Sue Snell, who has brought flowers to Carrie’s grave. The terrifying embrace is then revealed to be part of Sue’s bad dream and De Palma keeps the camera on the girl and her mother: Mrs Snell comforts her screaming daughter and the shot is held long enough for De Palma to help the viewer too recover from the shock of the hand thrusting up out of the earth. (This is one of the few bits I remembered from seeing Carrie on its original release and it was still immediately startling, even though I knew it was coming.)
The essential theme of the story is a strong one. A girl, isolated by her peer group because of her perceived difference (and consequent inferiority), uses another difference – an unsuspected and more powerful difference – to wreak havoc not just on those who’ve humiliated her but on the whole community, friend or foe. But the lack of clarity around who is sympathetic and who is hostile towards Carrie works against clear distinction between just and unjust desserts for the victims of the mayhem that she eventually causes (although there’s the odd exception: the well-meaning Miss Collins suffers a particularly harsh fate). De Palma’s preoccupation with the visual possibilities of Carrie’s revenge means that he never bothers to explain clearly how she is victimised – whether, in particular, accompanying Tommy to the prom makes her more or even less popular. (Are all or only some of the prom queen votes that Carrie receives motivated by malice?) When it comes to working through an image, though, De Palma, with the help of his DoP Mario Tosi, is meticulous. Bloody details recur from that early menstrual scene in the shower onwards: Catherine White knows her daughter’s pale pink ball dress will be red in due course; the hand clutching from the grave is bloodstained. And the delicate score by Pino Donaggio is mostly very effective: the only bits of music that don’t work so well are the jabbing chords that herald telekinetic action. These so much echo the shower attack in Psycho that they repeatedly, if momentarily, stop Carrie in its tracks and turn it into an Hitchcock hommage (the name of the school – Bates High School – has a similar effect.)
De Palma’s operatic tendency extends to Piper Laurie’s highly accomplished performance as the nutty mother. She is immediately, flamboyantly bizarre. Both the lighting and set decoration in Catherine’s home reflect her personality: there’s no ordinariness here for the extraordinary events of the story to emerge or depart from. (Piper Laurie’s portrait of Catherine comes, however, to what is, in every sense, a perfect climax. When kitchen knives, launched by Carrie’s telekinesis, penetrate her body, the sex-hating Catherine, on the point of death, succumbs with sounds of orgasmic fulfilment.) Other senior actors – Betty Buckley (the needy, verging-on-lesbian Miss Collins), Priscilla Pointer (Mrs Snell) and Sydney Lassick (an English teacher, and no less odd here than he had been in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest the previous year) – are overemphatic but this quality adds to the unsettling atmosphere. The younger actors are all strong. Sissy Spacek, although in her mid-twenties, had already proved in Badlands (1973) an exceptional ability to convince easily as a teenager and she’s outstanding as Carrie – her Cinderella transformation is lovely. William Katt, as Tommy, is also very effective in the prom sequences and, in the good boy-bad boy partnership, he’s superbly complemented by John Travolta as Billy. The latter’s first scene, with Billy and Chris driving in his car and ‘Heatwave’ playing on the radio, provides the film with a large jolt of energy: Travolta’s mixture of brutality and vulnerability is disorienting and the relationship of his volatile face with the camera is extraordinary. The vividly transparent Nancy Allen (Chris) and the opaque Amy Irving (Sue) are a well-balanced combination too.
5 August 2014
