Stephen King’s Carrie has always been close to my heart as a novel. It was my first toe in the water of horror; even if the genre has many more thrilling and terrifying entries, Carrie is still steadfast in its place at the hall of fame, regarded widely as part of horror’s very own canon.
I cannot quite explain the comfort that came with reading Carrie at thirteen, pages upon pages of language manipulated into one cohesive tragedy, doomed from the start, yet deeply charming and charismatic. Years after first consuming it, I still adore the novel and will recommend it to anyone willing to listen. However, only recently have I sat down and watched Brian De Palma’s cult classic 1976 film adaptation. Strangely, and to my great disappointment, I was not as impressed as I had expected to be.
There is no doubt that De Palma has taste and skill within his cinematic vision, things the 2013 adaptation lacks, and the 2002 adaptation just can’t quite mimic. But there is also a level of disturbance present in De Palma’s film that is alien to the original text.
King’s novel provokes moments of unease and discomfort, but never downright repulsion, and certainly never downright repulsion for Carrie; King wrote Carrie as an exploration of a teenage girl’s madness induced by years of religious oppression and social isolation, doomed from the outset by the dormant presence of telekinesis. The reader cannot help being thrown into a whirlpool of sympathy for Carrie. Perhaps the most tragic thing about King’s novel is that King taunts the reader with hopeful yet almost satirical glimpses of what Carrie’s life could have been if she had been liberated from her religious mother and her bullies.
In contrast, De Palma’s Carrie is laced with scenes made for shock factor, disregarding the intelligence of the original text. Sympathy never came easy when watching De Palma’s adaptation, as I was forced into indifference by Carrie’s diminished characterisation. Naturally a movie will never be able to encapsulate all the nuances of a book, limited as it is by the constraints of film as a medium, however there is an ultimate lack of deeper thought in the film.
De Palma’s Carrie suffers the fate of most 1970s horror films, carrying echoes from the grindhouse era of the genre. Grindhouse is the symbol of horror’s transitional period from an underground artform to mainstream and is characterised by extreme gore and misogyny. Although Carrie falls under mainstream, it still has clear undertones of grindhouse that pander to a preponderantly male audience. Part of me wonders whether the iconic opening scene in the showers was less to illustrate the gruesome events of the novel and instead to pander to the audience of the 1970s. Unfortunately, this is a thought which ran through my mind for the entirety of the film: was it horror in the true sense, or a misogynistic film disguised under the cloak of horror?
It is possible that this is why I just don’t relate to this film in the same way I did to the novel. Carrie, as a character, was very dear to my heart. Like most young girls reading the book, I resonated with her struggles and insecurities; De Palma took all that away, or at least he made her very surface level.
Part of De Palma’s failing can be accounted for by his casting of Sissy Spacek as Carrie. In the original novel Carrie was very much the ugly duckling: she was notably overweight, dressed like a puritan, and had more pimples than a leopard has spots, making it understandable (not moral, but understandable) why her peers were so cruel to her. Sissy Spacek was, and still is, far from an ugly duckling, which is what made her so wrong for the role. In De Palma’s adaptation, Carrie was just as conventionally beautiful as her peers. No longer was she a victim of brutal social torture due to her natural misfortune, but rather a victim of senseless bullying, thus drawing away from what made Carrie so relatable in the first place.
The climax of the film only ruined it further. Sue Snell (Amy Irving), the lone survivor of prom night, is shown to be plagued by nightmares of Carrie coming back to haunt her from the dead. In this way, De Palma seems more than willing to frame Carrie as a malevolent force. Perhaps, if this wasn’t the final scene, one could argue that De Palma was merely trying to represent the destructive effects of prom night on Snell, however as the camera slowly draws away from a screaming, shaking Irving, I was left with a sense of distaste for Carrie. Sue Snell, rather than she, was now the victim of this tale.
Which summaries the problems with De Palma’s Carrie rather well: it shows Carrie as anything but a victim. In King’s novel, she was doomed by the narrative, set up for failure. Yet in the film, Carrie’s failure did not make her the victim: it demonised her, feeding into a heavily misogynistic interpretation of women’s suffering under society.
