A lot of my film buff friends don’t have much respect for Brian DePalma. He takes a lot of criticism for his rather obvious "borrowing" of Hitchcock’s favorite film techniques in his own early work, but for me – especially in the case of his adaptation of Stephen King’s book Carrie – it’s a case of using what works best for the story.

King’s novel, along with a lesser-known Thomas Tryon book called The Other, (also made into a horror film) formed my first look at the horror story as it applied to a contemporary urban environment. For the first five years or so of my obsessive interest in the genre, I was doing the Poe thing, the Lovecraft thing, reading Algernon Blackwood’s The Willows with all the lights on at 2 am and thinking there was no way things could get any scarier. Things were scary, all right, but they were still fairly distant. They were tucked away in a castle somewhere in Europe, about a hundred years ago.

Carrie was high school. It was my high school, less than a mile from my house. A fifteen-minute walk away.

Thanks a lot, Steve.

I’m sure as hell not telling fans anything when I say his style is visual, that his work moves like film, is potently melodramatic like film, is full of visual symbols. These are all reasons why his stuff has been adapted – usually with questionable results. Of all the film adaptations, Carrie is my favorite. I think it is the surest of the lot, in terms of getting the heart of the story right. And that’s what is important. The heart of the story is Carrie White, and she lives in the film just as she lives in the novel. She is both an archetype – the Ugly Duckling – and a real human being with individual characteristics, which is what we (fiction writers, that is) are always trying to capture.

Carrie is the film, so DePalma gets us involved in her utterly screwed up life from scene one, which takes place in a girls’ shower room. Carrie, confronted with the undeniable physical reality of her first period, goes off the deep end. She thinks she’s bleeding to death. Her mother, a religious fanatic (and I mean that in the most extreme sense of the word), has never told her what happens, what to expect. This is pretty much her whole life in microcosm. Completely socially inept, she is always the target for ridicule. Viciousness is a fact of life in high school, and it’s the Carrie Whites who bear it – the ones who walk around staring at their shoes all day, avoiding direct eye contact, trying to be invisible.

The scene is drawn from the scene in the book that King started with – and quite literally trashed, according to what he told me at Satyricon in Knoxville, Tennessee way back in 1983 (he shared a great little anecdote about the story "Grey Matter," too … but that’ll have to wait for another article). His wife, Tabitha, fished it out of the garbage and encouraged him to continue. In the book and the film, it totally sucks you in. For women, it’s the complete frisson of watching something you’ve been through yourself – something that is painful and scary even if you’re educated.

If you’re male, it’s the feeling of experiencing something that’s a bit like a secret club with meetings you’re never allowed to attend. Being in a women’s shower room, watching Carrie take a shower. Watching blood trickle from between her legs.

Blood. Yes. For men, I think the uncomfortable point is the blood. In the male experience, blood never means anything normal. Blood every 28 days just ain’t part of the core experience of being male. Seeing it in the film makes you cringe, and seeing what happens next makes anyone with a conscience cringe. Ever had one of those dreams where you were in school naked? We’ve all experienced humiliation. Our first contact with Carrie is one in which we share in that feeling with her. Identification is total, and the whole of the film rides on that first scene. If it doesn’t work, you have nothing to bank with for the next hour and a half.

Obviously, it does work, and the movie is a character tour de force playing off this archetype of the Ugly Duckling (or the Outsider, as Colin Wilson might call her). DePalma’s visual "language" is expressed here clearly; he’s particularly adept at using visual environment to emphasize character. Carrie’s house, seen from the outside, is shot in soft focus, under intense sunlight, in the early establishing scenes; it’s all clean lines and whitewash and white picket fence and serenity. Inside, it’s a claustrophobic maze of dimly lit corridors and tiny, sloped-ceiling rooms, with a "prayer closet" barely large enough to accommodate the girl who’s supposed to use it for worship. The closet contains a bizarre, almost pagan altar, with a truly disturbing image of the crucifixion, a lunatic Jesus with glowing eyes staring down from the cross. There’s no question that what’s going on here is unhealthy. The space – the very light – is unhealthy.

The girls who ridicule her in the first scene form the other half of the story, the opposing army. They are punished for their cruelty by a gym teacher who assumes the role of protector for Carrie. One of the girls, Sue Snell, actually feels badly enough about her behavior to have her boyfriend – one of the popular kids – ask Carrie to the Prom. Carrie eventually says yes, which is the beginning of her rebellion against her mother. The girls’ revenge is against Carrie, of course, and takes the form of a prank that is beyond cruelty, beyond the kind of sick joke that kids play on one another every day in every high school in every state in America. They kill a pig, drain its blood into a bucket, and tie the bucket to a crossbeam above the stage in the gymnasium, where the King and Queen of the Prom will be crowned. Then the rig the ballots so that Carrie and her date, Tommy Ross, will win.

The plan, of course, is to douse Carrie in pig’s blood just as the pictures are being taken. It works. In the film, Sue tries to stop it, but it happens … and the apocalyptic end of the film’s second act is marked by the controversial (but wonderful, in my humble opinion) collage of split-screen effects that allow us to see both Carrie and what she is doing to the her victims in the school gymnasium. It’s marvelous, gruesome, eerie stuff, lit in red and liberally doused with stage blood (mostly doused on Carrie herself). For me, the split-screen enhances the claustrophobic feeling of the scene. You’re locked in the gym with her … and boy, is she pissed.

The film is a little unusual structurally, tying up the plot’s main thread at the end of the second act while reserving the third act for subplot resolution. The structure works, and it works because DePalma is talented in his own right, and not just a third-rate regurgitator of somebody else’s tricks. The scenes that provide closure for the two threads are twins: both tight and tense, filled with strange light, bizarre angles and jagged, spearing music in the score. They feature similar action, with Carrie’s revenge on her schoolmates extended to revenge on her mother for an entire lifetime of repression. Her mother’s death is played perfectly – broadly, some might say, but again, the form calls for it – by Piper Laurie. She dies, impaled and crucified in the same position as the nightmare figure of Jesus in Carrie’s closet. Carrie drags her mother into the closet with her, and as the house collapses around them, they are both trapped there. They both die there.

Carrie is triumphant at the end of the second act, and the end of the third act – featuring a scene that could only work in a movie, and is not a part of King’s novel – she is triumphant again, lavishing a kind of cruelty on Sue’s dreams that none of her earthbound tormentors were capable of visiting on her. The movie becomes a parable with that final scene, as horror films so often do, with Carrie’s bloodied hand stabbing upward through black earth to grasp and clutch at Sue’s arm. It’s the perfect EC comics ending, too. The corpse lurches up from the grave, a reminder of the sin preferred forgotten.

Ghosts are nothing if not symbols of guilt, the dark deeds of the past revisiting the present. Sue is the only survivor, and Carrie is now a part of her life. Forever.

Article copyright Dave Duggins

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