Carrie vs Carrie 2

It's about Female Trouble, Teen Angst & Psychic Trauma

By Thomas Doherty

Femme Fatales Magazine

December 3, 1999

Flowing from Stephen King's nightmarish vision of arrested adolescent development, Brian DePalma's CARRIE (1976) was a multi-layered, absorbent strength-mix of telekinesis and menstruation, two messy effusions of mind and body. With CARRIE 2: THE RAGE arriving as a very late sequel (former waif Sissy Spacek is now playing the mom in BLAST FROM THE PAST), and with director Katt Shea unspooling a few vivid seconds from DePalma's model by way of blood ties (she does herself no favors by inviting comparison), the original bears a second look. Turns out, the years have done little to dry the primal torrent of the blood-caked horror classic. CARRIE is a force to be reckoned with at any time of the month.

The plot you know: a mopey misfit (Spacek, who received a surprising, but deserved Oscar nomination from the usually horror-adverse Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences) wreaks havoc at the senior prom when drenched by a bucket of pig's blood. Acting out a lurid fantasy of teenage revenge, she single-mindedly zaps and sizzles all the popular gals and laughing boys who have made her life a living hell at Bates, yes, Bates High School. Like so many Hollywood educational institutions, Bates is stacked with winsome beauties of malicious temper and high testosterone hunks of low IQ. A slovenly dresser and a hopeless volleyball player, Carrie does not fit in, which among this crowd is all to her credit.

The film's indelible opening sends up the red flag for the color-coded cascade of the telekinetic climax. Shot in steamy slo-mo, squads of nubile lovelies frolic in a girls locker room until the soft porn atmospherics merge into a surprise lesson of gynecology. Kept ignorant of the biological basics by her religious nut case mother (Piper Laurie), late bloomer Carrie experiences her first period in the shower and freaks out. Harpies all, a female pack comprised of hot numbers -- like Amy Irving, Nancy Allen and P.J. Soles -- laughs and tosses tampons at the hysterical girl quivering on the shower room floor. In terms of social skills and peer group acceptance, Carrie makes the other members of the Stephen King Pantheon of Pubescent Misfits look like the cast of "Beverly Hills 90210."

King's ingenious hook was not the gift of teenage telekinesis, but the depiction of high school as a living hell. The high school has been a ripe site for teen-targeted terror since at least I WAS A TEENAGE WEREWOLF (1957), when a lupine Michael Landon fled down the halls of his Alma Mater, transformed into a hairy incarnation of juvenile deviance. No American teenager needs to journey to a Transylvanian castle for chills and thrills when monsters aplenty lurk in the cafeteria, gym class or parking lot after school. Decades later, memories of secondary education can still induce cold sweats in survivors, a cultural legacy confirmed in the hilarious moment in TOP SECRET (1984) when the rock and roll espionage agent played by Val Kilmer dreams of wandering through a school corridor, late for class. He wakes up from the dream to discover he is being brutally whipped. "Thank God," he gasps, as the lash comes down, "I though I was back in high school."

Yet, of all the horrific fates meted out during school days, perhaps the worst is to be rejected by the gang for terminal uncoolness, especially in matters of sexuality. Never a hospitable locus for erotic fulfillment, the high school is nonetheless the first testing ground for puppy love, dating rituals and, with luck, clumsy culmination: a tense state of constant lust and prolonged frustration. If, in the Hobbesian world of high school sexuality, girls and boys tend to devote most of their energies to insecurities and cruelties aimed at the opposite sex, a goodly number of humiliations can be inflicted by folks on the same side of the gender line. For girls, the teenage sisterhood is as apt to be predatory as protective, ready to scratch the eyes out of a bosom pal who gets in the way of the senior class Alpha Male (hence, the appeal of the friendly female bonding in BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, where the girl-girl spats end in warm hugs all around).

Significantly, the boys in CARRIE are ciphers. From first to last, in body and soul, this is a woman's picture. As Carrie's good-natured and ill-fated prom date, the golden-haired Tommy (William Katt) models the most elaborate coiffed of either gender, but precious little seems to be going on under his curls. Likewise, in his first big pre-SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER screen role, John Travolta affects the manners and intellect of an early Elvis impersonator, but he is putty in the hands of red-lipped, cold-blooded Chris (Nancy Allen), the true bane of Carrie's existence. The one good girl is Sue (Amy Irving), who repents her tampon tantrum and altruistically sets up drippy Carrie with dreamboat Tommy. Throughout, the teenage girls behave like a distaff tribe from Lord of the Flies. The adults, however, can be quite understanding: the most solicitous soul around Bates is the Girls Phys-Ed teacher, Miss Collins (Betty Buckley) who, in tormenting Carrie's tormentors, unwittingly unleashes the swinish machinations of the sinister Chris.

At home, meanwhile, when not ranting about the blood of the lamb and the lust of Eve, bible-thumping and child-abusing Mom locks Carrie in a closet with a creepy icon of the crucified St. Sebastian. She thinks her daughter's emergent sexuality and Yuri Geller act are signs of possession by... could it be... Satan? As usual, King's tedious anti-Christian screeds detract from the psychic center of the film: a teenager's home life is seldom as emotionally charged as her school life. Yet what makes even the overwrought domestic melodrama compelling is Spacek's performance as the child abused by parent and peer group alike. The pathetic keening of her Texas drawl, the downcast, defeated eyes, and the permanent slouch are heartbreaking signs of internal affliction. Gradually she emerges from fear and skepticism into a growing awareness of her powers and trust in the prom date from heaven. Wounded and wary, Carrie is just coming out of her shell when... splash!

Of course, director Brian DePalma has a hell of a time with all the psychic trauma and female trouble. CARRIE showcases what had become DePalma trademarks: the prolonged suspense montages, with the bucket of blood perched precariously above the heroine; the split-screen action between a wide-eyed, catatonic Carrie and the death trap she makes of the prom decoration committee's work; even the way he slyly frontloads the female nudity over the credit sequence. CARRIE remains DePalma's only true teen pic and, with the higher budget but lower quality of THE FURY (1978), one of his few authentically supernatural narratives.

Throughout OBSESSION, DRESSED TO KILL, BODY DOUBLE and his other variations on REAR WINDOW, VERTIGO, PSYCHO, the Hitchcock apprentice has always been more intrigued by the precision orchestration of suspense than the blunt bludgeons of horror. However, despite a versatile career that has spanned genres as diverse as gangster films (SCARFACE), comedy (WISE GUYS) and combat films (CASUALTIES OF WAR) and encompassed commercial hits like THE UNTOUCHABLES and MISSION IMPOSSIBLE, he has never escaped the wrath of being too derivative a talent. Ironically, or with poetic justice, one of his iconic still images, pace PSYCHO is from a shower scene -- a female soaked in blood.

Though setting no style on prom dresses, CARRIE had a profound impact on teen pic horror in its famous postmortem jolt, the kiss-off shock that kicks-in right when the film seems to be winding down for the end credits. The device soon became a ripe cliché in the he-won't-stay-dead codas to a dozen "body count" movies of the late 1970s and early 1980s: but back in 1976, that final bloody arm reaching out from hell to grab Amy Irving packed a wallop. Ask anyone who saw the film in a theatre during its original release.

Why does CARRIE still grip audiences -- especially girls and women -- when so many horror teen pics of the era play now only as gotcha-comedy? In Tim Burton's biopic about another auteur of teen-targeted horror, with appreciably less technical virtuosity than Brian DePalma, none other than Bela Legosi explains the primal fear of horror on the female imagination. "It's the blood," he tells Ed Wood.