Post by petrolino on Feb 25, 2018 0:11:34 GMT
'Carrie' is a supernatural horror movie based on Stephen King's first novel 'Carrie' (1974). High school student Carrie White (Sissy Spacek) is being regularly teased, harassed and tormented by other girls at her school. Her paranoid mother Margaret (Piper Laurie) constantly pushes Carrie to the point of breakdown and abuses her at will. A ray of light comes into Carrie's life when she's asked out to the school prom by hot ticket Tommy Ross (William Katt).
'Carrie' was the first story I read by Stephen King. It's a horror novel that's teeming with anger and I think this is transmitted by Brian De Palma's film which breaks through several technical boundaries in the process. De Palma is my favourite proponent of split-screen techniques in suspense cinema and he works carefully here with editor Paul Hirsch to rearrange cameraman Mario Tosi's ruptured shreds of soft-focus and hard-focus colour-contrast imagery. Stepping up some of the technical tricks he'd used in 'Sisters' (1973) with a bigger shooting budget, De Palma fosters the early innovations of Georges Melies by projecting Carrie's head as a mind control unit during scenes of extraordinary carnage. 'Carrie' is a momentous split-screen feature like Norman Jewison's trend-setting crime caper 'The Thomas Crown Affair' (1968).
The lush musical cues of composer Pino Donaggio are off-set by some humorous musical passages in 'Carrie' which intensifies the rollercoaster of emotions being felt by Carrie White as she's manipulated by those around her. The opening theme captures the film's prevailing mood with its open romanticism and haunted features but the music soon becomes darker. Donaggio uses talkative strings, a plaintive woodwind section and lonely piano melodies to etch a vivid sense of the old world mentality Carrie's being raised with by her zealous mother. What I enjoy when I listen to the film's soundtrack in its entirety is how Donaggio captures the isolation felt by Carrie using different musical techniques, exhibiting total dexterity and a persuasively deft touch.
Sissy Spacek breaks my heart every time I watch her performance; for me, she's one of America's great actresses. Piper Laurie brings magnitude to one of those horrifying religious nutters King writes so well and Betty Buckley really should have received an Oscar nomination for her sensitive handling of a difficult characterisation as gym teacher Miss Collins. Amy Irving and William Katt are charming as two of Carrie's more sympathetic fellow students and Nancy Allen, P. J. Soles, Edie McClurg and John Travolta are truly revolting as callous school bullies.
'Carrie' is followed by Katt Shea's enjoyable sequel 'The Rage : Carrie 2' (1999). There's a television remake which I've seen - 'Carrie' (2002) starring Angela Bettis - and a new remake that I've not seen - 'Carrie' (2013) starring Chloe Graze Moretz. In the 1980s, Betty Buckley played Margaret White on Broadway in 'Carrie : The Musical'.
"Creepy Carrie! Creepy Carrie!"
Carrie
'School Days' - The Runaways
Carrie
'School Days' - The Runaways
'Carrie' was the first story I read by Stephen King. It's a horror novel that's teeming with anger and I think this is transmitted by Brian De Palma's film which breaks through several technical boundaries in the process. De Palma is my favourite proponent of split-screen techniques in suspense cinema and he works carefully here with editor Paul Hirsch to rearrange cameraman Mario Tosi's ruptured shreds of soft-focus and hard-focus colour-contrast imagery. Stepping up some of the technical tricks he'd used in 'Sisters' (1973) with a bigger shooting budget, De Palma fosters the early innovations of Georges Melies by projecting Carrie's head as a mind control unit during scenes of extraordinary carnage. 'Carrie' is a momentous split-screen feature like Norman Jewison's trend-setting crime caper 'The Thomas Crown Affair' (1968).
"Of all the established directors out there, I find myself consistently struggling with where to place Brian De Palma. There have been times in his career where he shows pure brilliance, and even more times where De Palma has delivered some of the most insanely idiotic pictures in film history. He is back once again, directing his first film in over five years, 'Passion'. The trailer, released this week, suggests a possible return to form for De Palma is on the cards, which means either it will be a seductive thriller or an outlandish embarrassment. A stylish and creative eye, Brian De Palma is sometimes consumed by his flair for the melodramatic to an annoying fault. Though he is never one to shy away from edgy material, and when he hits the mark he is as good as anyone of the disciples of the 1970s American film movement. Do his strokes of genius outweigh his misfires? Is Brian De Palma a mad genius, or is he a hack who gets lucky from time to time? I would argue he is a combination of both, some sort of brilliant hack.
A savant of schlock if you will. Brian De Palma was a key cog in the film revival of the 1970s which saw the likes of Francis Ford Coppola, William Friedkin, Peter Bogdonavich, Dennis Hopper, George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg burst onto the Hollywood scene with fresh ideas and invigorating directions in which to carry the industry. The 70s were a breath of fresh air for new voices and visions. De Palma found influence in the films of Alfred Hitchcock, sometimes blatantly plagiarising his work over the years while managing to tell his own tale. He didn't find his footing as quickly as his peers, making smaller films like 'Sisters' and 'Obsession' while Coppola was picking up Oscars for his 'Godfather' films. But in 1976, De Palma cemented his spot in film history by directing Sissy Spacek in 'Carrie'. The landmark film is vintage De Palma, where he first implemented his now famous split screen shots where characters in the foreground and background were in focus simultaneously. 'Carrie' was a major success, an inventive and gritty thriller, and De Palma took off on the roller coaster of a career unmatched by most in its ups and downs."
- Larry Taylor, What Culture
"De Palma’s set-pieces all stem from drastic shifts in the narrative, for which he unapologetically accentuates and transforms his style. The prom sequence in his 1976 adaption of Stephen King’s Carrie is emblematic of this sense for chaos as the multiple characters revolving around Carrie all come together. Finally, each of their personal storylines come crashing into each other dangerously. De Palma depicts the rising tension and the intertwining of their intentions with tact, vividness and suspense via slow-motion, cross-cutting and close-ups on faces traversed by emotions. But, placed in his hands, this story of a girl’s desperate attempt to come of age from an oppressive upbringing into a cruel world could only lead to an emotionally and formally explosive ending. Carrie eventually overturns adversity through telepathic destruction, which translates into split screens and kaleidoscopic effects that both visually set her apart from her deceitful peers, and turn the violence of her revenge towards the celluloid itself."
- Manuela Lazic & Matthew Thrift, '12 Masterful Brian De Palma Set-Pieces'
"Quentin Tarantino frequently cites Brian De Palma as one of his key influences, and declared 'Carrie' one of his favourite films of all time in both the 2002 and 2012 Sight & Sound polls. This stylish, streamlined chiller was the first screen adaptation of a Stephen King novel, and inarguably remains one of the finest. Sissy Spacek is mesmerising as the painfully introverted Carrie White, whose utter humiliation on the night of her high school prom sets the stage for an eye-popping display of supernatural revenge. 'Carrie' effortlessly straddles, and frequently blurs, the line between exploitation trash and serious-minded cinema, in a manner that Tarantino has sought to emulate throughout his career. De Palma clearly revels in the bloodshed and pyrotechnics of the grisly final act, but first goes to great lengths to ensure that viewers are utterly invested in the plight of our protagonist, and incensed by the misery inflicted on her by both her peers and her religious nut mother, played with ferocious aplomb by Piper Laurie. Tarantino essentially reverses this approach in 'Kill Bill', front-loading Volume 1 with technically dazzling murderous mayhem, before spending Volume 2 exploring both the motives for and the human cost of The Bride’s (Uma Thurman) “roaring rampage of revenge”."
- Paul O'Callaghan, The British Film Institute
"The story of a butt-of-all-jokes high-school teenager, Carrie is a revenge-of-the-nerds tale, made all the more eloquent by its binary oppositions of light and shade, gothic imagery and, thanks to Lawrence D. Cohen’s script, intricate characterisation. The film’s overarching concern, however, shows a mythic view of woman as Force of Nature, a Furie whose destructive capacity is unleashed by primitive rites of passage brought on by the flow of menstrual blood. De Palma had been making experimental, caustic social satires since 1968. Beginning with Sisters in 1973, however, he wanted to create films with more polish and professionalism. This first unsettling psychological thriller was followed by Phantom of the Paradise (1974) and Obsession (1976). But it was Carrie that marked the epicentre of his ‘red phase’, which culminated with Body Double in 1986, and was briefly resurrected in 1992 with Raising Cain.
De Palma has since gone on to win a grudging mainstream success with his action blockbusters, but his ‘red phase’ still remains problematic for many. One reason why audiences may find this phase of his career so unsettling could be because of the films’ subliminal content. By that I mean that his films masquerade as slick modernist parables while, on a subterranean level, they continue an archetypal discourse which destabilises our view of a rational order with brutal, symbolic truths. Let’s take, for example, Raising Cain. On one level it is a split-personality absurdist thriller of the stranger-within variety. Yet, running beneath that, is a record of one man’s journey towards self-actualisation as a larger-than-life woman — a kind of steeped-in-blood hermaphrodite rising out of the ashes of a formerly split and uncertain male self. In De Palma if men are not hyper-masculine (Scarface [1983], The Untouchables [1987]), they are often in danger of sliding into some form of ritualistic transsexualism or, at the very least, sexual ambiguity (Dressed To Kill [1980], Phantom of the Paradise).
Carrie is a ‘woman’s film’ of a peculiar kind. Although it does not altogether exclude men from the screen, in the manner of George Cukor’s The Women (1939), it portrays a world from which men are either absent (Carrie’s [Sissy Spacek] father abandoned his family, Sue Snell’s [Amy Irving] father is never mentioned), or relegated to the periphery as awkward headmasters and ineffectual boyfriends, manipulated by the women. Nor does Carrie enlist our sympathies through the portrayal of maternal self-sacrifice for the benefit of a beloved daughter in the style of Stella Dallas (King Vidor, 1937) or Mildred Pierce (Michael Curtiz, 1945). Carrie White’s world is a danse macabre, a medieval tableau of grotesqueries, freaks, angels and demons; of murk and gloom, with occasional flashes of light and poetry that are quickly swamped by more chthonic darkness."
- Dmetri Kakmi, 'Myth And Magic In De Palma’s Carrie'
Piper Laurie & Sissy Spacek
'Anxiety' - Pat Benatar
A savant of schlock if you will. Brian De Palma was a key cog in the film revival of the 1970s which saw the likes of Francis Ford Coppola, William Friedkin, Peter Bogdonavich, Dennis Hopper, George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg burst onto the Hollywood scene with fresh ideas and invigorating directions in which to carry the industry. The 70s were a breath of fresh air for new voices and visions. De Palma found influence in the films of Alfred Hitchcock, sometimes blatantly plagiarising his work over the years while managing to tell his own tale. He didn't find his footing as quickly as his peers, making smaller films like 'Sisters' and 'Obsession' while Coppola was picking up Oscars for his 'Godfather' films. But in 1976, De Palma cemented his spot in film history by directing Sissy Spacek in 'Carrie'. The landmark film is vintage De Palma, where he first implemented his now famous split screen shots where characters in the foreground and background were in focus simultaneously. 'Carrie' was a major success, an inventive and gritty thriller, and De Palma took off on the roller coaster of a career unmatched by most in its ups and downs."
- Larry Taylor, What Culture
"De Palma’s set-pieces all stem from drastic shifts in the narrative, for which he unapologetically accentuates and transforms his style. The prom sequence in his 1976 adaption of Stephen King’s Carrie is emblematic of this sense for chaos as the multiple characters revolving around Carrie all come together. Finally, each of their personal storylines come crashing into each other dangerously. De Palma depicts the rising tension and the intertwining of their intentions with tact, vividness and suspense via slow-motion, cross-cutting and close-ups on faces traversed by emotions. But, placed in his hands, this story of a girl’s desperate attempt to come of age from an oppressive upbringing into a cruel world could only lead to an emotionally and formally explosive ending. Carrie eventually overturns adversity through telepathic destruction, which translates into split screens and kaleidoscopic effects that both visually set her apart from her deceitful peers, and turn the violence of her revenge towards the celluloid itself."
- Manuela Lazic & Matthew Thrift, '12 Masterful Brian De Palma Set-Pieces'
"Quentin Tarantino frequently cites Brian De Palma as one of his key influences, and declared 'Carrie' one of his favourite films of all time in both the 2002 and 2012 Sight & Sound polls. This stylish, streamlined chiller was the first screen adaptation of a Stephen King novel, and inarguably remains one of the finest. Sissy Spacek is mesmerising as the painfully introverted Carrie White, whose utter humiliation on the night of her high school prom sets the stage for an eye-popping display of supernatural revenge. 'Carrie' effortlessly straddles, and frequently blurs, the line between exploitation trash and serious-minded cinema, in a manner that Tarantino has sought to emulate throughout his career. De Palma clearly revels in the bloodshed and pyrotechnics of the grisly final act, but first goes to great lengths to ensure that viewers are utterly invested in the plight of our protagonist, and incensed by the misery inflicted on her by both her peers and her religious nut mother, played with ferocious aplomb by Piper Laurie. Tarantino essentially reverses this approach in 'Kill Bill', front-loading Volume 1 with technically dazzling murderous mayhem, before spending Volume 2 exploring both the motives for and the human cost of The Bride’s (Uma Thurman) “roaring rampage of revenge”."
- Paul O'Callaghan, The British Film Institute
"The story of a butt-of-all-jokes high-school teenager, Carrie is a revenge-of-the-nerds tale, made all the more eloquent by its binary oppositions of light and shade, gothic imagery and, thanks to Lawrence D. Cohen’s script, intricate characterisation. The film’s overarching concern, however, shows a mythic view of woman as Force of Nature, a Furie whose destructive capacity is unleashed by primitive rites of passage brought on by the flow of menstrual blood. De Palma had been making experimental, caustic social satires since 1968. Beginning with Sisters in 1973, however, he wanted to create films with more polish and professionalism. This first unsettling psychological thriller was followed by Phantom of the Paradise (1974) and Obsession (1976). But it was Carrie that marked the epicentre of his ‘red phase’, which culminated with Body Double in 1986, and was briefly resurrected in 1992 with Raising Cain.
De Palma has since gone on to win a grudging mainstream success with his action blockbusters, but his ‘red phase’ still remains problematic for many. One reason why audiences may find this phase of his career so unsettling could be because of the films’ subliminal content. By that I mean that his films masquerade as slick modernist parables while, on a subterranean level, they continue an archetypal discourse which destabilises our view of a rational order with brutal, symbolic truths. Let’s take, for example, Raising Cain. On one level it is a split-personality absurdist thriller of the stranger-within variety. Yet, running beneath that, is a record of one man’s journey towards self-actualisation as a larger-than-life woman — a kind of steeped-in-blood hermaphrodite rising out of the ashes of a formerly split and uncertain male self. In De Palma if men are not hyper-masculine (Scarface [1983], The Untouchables [1987]), they are often in danger of sliding into some form of ritualistic transsexualism or, at the very least, sexual ambiguity (Dressed To Kill [1980], Phantom of the Paradise).
Carrie is a ‘woman’s film’ of a peculiar kind. Although it does not altogether exclude men from the screen, in the manner of George Cukor’s The Women (1939), it portrays a world from which men are either absent (Carrie’s [Sissy Spacek] father abandoned his family, Sue Snell’s [Amy Irving] father is never mentioned), or relegated to the periphery as awkward headmasters and ineffectual boyfriends, manipulated by the women. Nor does Carrie enlist our sympathies through the portrayal of maternal self-sacrifice for the benefit of a beloved daughter in the style of Stella Dallas (King Vidor, 1937) or Mildred Pierce (Michael Curtiz, 1945). Carrie White’s world is a danse macabre, a medieval tableau of grotesqueries, freaks, angels and demons; of murk and gloom, with occasional flashes of light and poetry that are quickly swamped by more chthonic darkness."
- Dmetri Kakmi, 'Myth And Magic In De Palma’s Carrie'
Piper Laurie & Sissy Spacek
'Anxiety' - Pat Benatar
The lush musical cues of composer Pino Donaggio are off-set by some humorous musical passages in 'Carrie' which intensifies the rollercoaster of emotions being felt by Carrie White as she's manipulated by those around her. The opening theme captures the film's prevailing mood with its open romanticism and haunted features but the music soon becomes darker. Donaggio uses talkative strings, a plaintive woodwind section and lonely piano melodies to etch a vivid sense of the old world mentality Carrie's being raised with by her zealous mother. What I enjoy when I listen to the film's soundtrack in its entirety is how Donaggio captures the isolation felt by Carrie using different musical techniques, exhibiting total dexterity and a persuasively deft touch.
"Carrie is not a horror film. At least, not according to Brian De Palma. "Horror films are Hammer films, vampires and Frankenstein," he said at the time of Carrie's release. "I love those pictures but I don't feel it's exactly what I'm doing." Carrie is not even a horror novel. At least, not according to its author Stephen King. "It's largely about how women find their own channels of power," he wrote in Danse Macabre in 1981. "And what men fear about women and women's sexuality." There you go. Not about a teenager who kills everybody on prom night after all. Carrie may be no ordinary horror film or horror novel, but horror it certainly is, exemplifying what some call De Palma's "red period" (Sisters (1972) to Body Double (1984). As King's debut, written while working for $1.60 an hour in an industrial laundry, Carrie set him on the way to becoming one of the most successful living authors — and to be fair to this commendably unpretentious man, he describes his own attempts at subtextualising Carrie as "heavy, turgid stuff". The reason why both book and film worked was that the action took place in a familiar setting, high school. Since Carrie, there have been more high school horror movies than you can shake a pom-pom at, but in 1976, after the success of Carnal Knowledge (1971), American Graffiti (1973) and on television Happy Days, awareness of high school culture was at a new high."
- Andrew Collins, Empire
"Brian De Palma's "Carrie" is an absolutely spellbinding horror movie, with a shock at the end that's the best thing along those lines since the shark leaped aboard in "Jaws." It's also (and this is what makes it so good) an observant human portrait. This girl Carrie isn't another stereotyped product of the horror production line; she's a shy, pretty, and complicated high school senior who's a lot like kids we once knew. There is a difference, though. She has telekenesis, the ability to manipulate things without touching them. It's a power that came upon her gradually, and was released in response to the shrill religious fanaticism of her mother. It manifests itself in small ways. She looks in a mirror, and it breaks. Then it mends itself. Her mother tries to touch her and is hurled back against a couch. But then, on prom night ..."
- Roger Ebert, The Chicago-Sun Times
"Based on Stephen King’s first published novel from 1974, Brian De Palma’s film of Carrie would catapult the visualist director into the mainstream consciousness through a motion picture of supreme staging and figurative melodrama. In Hollywood’s first major Stephen King adaptation of many, the writer’s oft-employed youth bullies so deplorably incite an outburst of violence and retribution that, when the eponymous character exacts widespread vengeance on her classmates, it feels almost fully justified in an extreme catharsis the likes of which only cinema could provide. Fortunately, De Palma avoids reducing King’s angry, heavy text into an exercise in shallow horror filmmaking where innocents are made victims by a central, demonized monster. Rather, the director’s approach considers with great care the emotional state of his maligned teenage protagonist. Carrie is a horror story in which the most ghastly turns come not from The Unknown or some fantastical abomination, but from the worst suspicions and contempt for women, realized through religion, social cruelty, and supernatural elements that have a direct connection to the film’s metaphor for the misunderstood and feared feminine prowess. De Palma enhances this quality further by creating an association between his characters and his own inspired technical flourishes; his high sense of cinematic style leaves every thrilling sequence drenched in visual metaphor, the material enriched by his masterful direction."
- Brian Eggert, Deep Focus Review
"The release of Kimberly Peirce’s faithful, solid, efficient, and therefore essentially pointless remake of Carrie gives me the opportunity to look back at the 1976 original, which is still one of my favorite films — and, in fact, one of the most important movies of my life. It’s one of the two films, the other being Robert Altman’s Nashville, that made me want to be a critic. And that’s because Carrie did more than thrill, frighten, and captivate me; it sent a volt charge through my system that rewired my imagination, showing me everything that movies could be. I’ll never forget the first time I saw Carrie, at my local mall the day after Thanksgiving. I was a teenage geek who was fast on his way to becoming a movie freak (in this culture, we all need a role, and that would be mine). But I was still finding my way in cinema world, so even though the film had been out for close to a month, I knew nothing about it. I hadn’t read any reviews; I had never heard of the director, Brian De Palma, or Stephen King, whose 1974 novel the movie was based on, or any of the actors.
The opening moments were like a hallucination — all those teenage girls horsing around in slow motion in a high school locker room, and then pale, freckled Carrie (Sissy Spacek), lost in a private reverie in the shower, caressing her skin and dropping the soap and getting her period for the first time, which makes her think that she’s dying. It’s a completely shocking, horrific sequence, yet it was set up with lushly tender and swelling orchestral music (by Pino Donaggio) that sounded like it came out of the most sentimental Hollywood love story ever made. It was as if Carrie was trying to freak you out and, at the same time, make you swoon over how freaked out you were getting. The whole movie was like that. It was the strangest, most exhilarating thing: a googly-eyed romantic teen-dream-turned-nightmare. Watching Carrie, I felt like I was being lured right into the action on screen, and that feeling never let go."
- Owen Glieberman, Entertainment Weekly
Sissy Spacek
'Triangles were fallin' at the window as the doctor cursed
He was a cartoon long forsaken by the public eye
The nurse adjusted her garters as I breathed my first
The doctor grabbed my throat and yelled, "God's consolation prize!"
I belong to the blank generation and
I can take it or leave it each time ...'
- The Voidoids
'(I'm Always Touched By Your) Presence, Dear' - Blondie
- Andrew Collins, Empire
"Brian De Palma's "Carrie" is an absolutely spellbinding horror movie, with a shock at the end that's the best thing along those lines since the shark leaped aboard in "Jaws." It's also (and this is what makes it so good) an observant human portrait. This girl Carrie isn't another stereotyped product of the horror production line; she's a shy, pretty, and complicated high school senior who's a lot like kids we once knew. There is a difference, though. She has telekenesis, the ability to manipulate things without touching them. It's a power that came upon her gradually, and was released in response to the shrill religious fanaticism of her mother. It manifests itself in small ways. She looks in a mirror, and it breaks. Then it mends itself. Her mother tries to touch her and is hurled back against a couch. But then, on prom night ..."
- Roger Ebert, The Chicago-Sun Times
"Based on Stephen King’s first published novel from 1974, Brian De Palma’s film of Carrie would catapult the visualist director into the mainstream consciousness through a motion picture of supreme staging and figurative melodrama. In Hollywood’s first major Stephen King adaptation of many, the writer’s oft-employed youth bullies so deplorably incite an outburst of violence and retribution that, when the eponymous character exacts widespread vengeance on her classmates, it feels almost fully justified in an extreme catharsis the likes of which only cinema could provide. Fortunately, De Palma avoids reducing King’s angry, heavy text into an exercise in shallow horror filmmaking where innocents are made victims by a central, demonized monster. Rather, the director’s approach considers with great care the emotional state of his maligned teenage protagonist. Carrie is a horror story in which the most ghastly turns come not from The Unknown or some fantastical abomination, but from the worst suspicions and contempt for women, realized through religion, social cruelty, and supernatural elements that have a direct connection to the film’s metaphor for the misunderstood and feared feminine prowess. De Palma enhances this quality further by creating an association between his characters and his own inspired technical flourishes; his high sense of cinematic style leaves every thrilling sequence drenched in visual metaphor, the material enriched by his masterful direction."
- Brian Eggert, Deep Focus Review
"The release of Kimberly Peirce’s faithful, solid, efficient, and therefore essentially pointless remake of Carrie gives me the opportunity to look back at the 1976 original, which is still one of my favorite films — and, in fact, one of the most important movies of my life. It’s one of the two films, the other being Robert Altman’s Nashville, that made me want to be a critic. And that’s because Carrie did more than thrill, frighten, and captivate me; it sent a volt charge through my system that rewired my imagination, showing me everything that movies could be. I’ll never forget the first time I saw Carrie, at my local mall the day after Thanksgiving. I was a teenage geek who was fast on his way to becoming a movie freak (in this culture, we all need a role, and that would be mine). But I was still finding my way in cinema world, so even though the film had been out for close to a month, I knew nothing about it. I hadn’t read any reviews; I had never heard of the director, Brian De Palma, or Stephen King, whose 1974 novel the movie was based on, or any of the actors.
The opening moments were like a hallucination — all those teenage girls horsing around in slow motion in a high school locker room, and then pale, freckled Carrie (Sissy Spacek), lost in a private reverie in the shower, caressing her skin and dropping the soap and getting her period for the first time, which makes her think that she’s dying. It’s a completely shocking, horrific sequence, yet it was set up with lushly tender and swelling orchestral music (by Pino Donaggio) that sounded like it came out of the most sentimental Hollywood love story ever made. It was as if Carrie was trying to freak you out and, at the same time, make you swoon over how freaked out you were getting. The whole movie was like that. It was the strangest, most exhilarating thing: a googly-eyed romantic teen-dream-turned-nightmare. Watching Carrie, I felt like I was being lured right into the action on screen, and that feeling never let go."
- Owen Glieberman, Entertainment Weekly
Sissy Spacek
'Triangles were fallin' at the window as the doctor cursed
He was a cartoon long forsaken by the public eye
The nurse adjusted her garters as I breathed my first
The doctor grabbed my throat and yelled, "God's consolation prize!"
I belong to the blank generation and
I can take it or leave it each time ...'
- The Voidoids
'(I'm Always Touched By Your) Presence, Dear' - Blondie
Sissy Spacek breaks my heart every time I watch her performance; for me, she's one of America's great actresses. Piper Laurie brings magnitude to one of those horrifying religious nutters King writes so well and Betty Buckley really should have received an Oscar nomination for her sensitive handling of a difficult characterisation as gym teacher Miss Collins. Amy Irving and William Katt are charming as two of Carrie's more sympathetic fellow students and Nancy Allen, P. J. Soles, Edie McClurg and John Travolta are truly revolting as callous school bullies.
"Brian De Palma ended up casting for Carrie at the same time his good friend George Lucas was doing the same for a little sci-fi film he was making called Star Wars. So the two made the rather unorthodox decision to hold joint auditions, which ended up becoming a bit confusing. De Palma liked Amy Irving for the lead in Carrie, but she was also considered for Princess Leia in Star Wars. William Katt also auditioned for Star Wars, alongside Kurt Russell. Before being cast as Sue Snell and Tommy Ross, Bates High School’s golden couple, Irving and Katt had actually dated. “It was like a year before we tested for Carrie," Irving explained. "We were only together for a short time and then we became friends. Suddenly, we were tested for this film together. We tested with a scene that wasn't in the film, one of our big scenes that was cut out. It was in the back seat of a car and it was very physical. We were lucky because we'd been through that; we were very comfortable with each other, it was easy. We didn't end up having much together in the final print." There was another personal connection within the film for Irving: her character’s mother in the film was played by her actual mom, Priscilla Pointer.
Though De Palma was a fan of Sissy Spacek’s work, he was convinced that he had already found his Carrie in another actress. His decision to let Spacek audition at all was mostly out of courtesy to her husband, Jack Fisk, the film’s art director. "He told me that if I wanted to, I could try out for the part of Carrie White,” Spacek recounted to Rolling Stone. "There was another girl that he was set on and unless he was really surprised, she was the one. I hung up and decided to go for it." Spacek showed up at her audition in an old dress she hadn’t worn since grade school and with her hair slicked back with Vaseline. When she was done, she waited in the parking lot while her husband reviewed her audition with the rest of the production team. After Fisk came out to tell her that the part was hers, “We sped off before anybody could change his mind,” Spacek said."
- Jennifer M. Wood, '15 Creepy Facts About Carrie'
"There had been more telekinesis planned, but one's imagination can make things more outrageous than can be filmed. We played down the crying too. I didn't want Carrie to be a little wimp who cried all the time. So anytime she cried, it was like bottling it in. There was never any release - she would cry but always push it back, so that she was like a time bomb all the time. Finally, it all comes out and she explodes. The shower sequence [Carrie experiencing her first period] was very tricky. I knew it had to be horrendous and bigger than life. She had to give the girls a motive for being so weird. I used an etching from the bible of a guy getting stoned to death. The Dore facial expressions are so intense and so much larger than life. The body movement too, I wanted to have a strange quality. When the blood hits, it's almost like she looks up to God. It's coming from the Heavens and that's where God lives. I wanted subtle touches like that."
- Sissy Spacek, Cinefantastique
"While he was going to college my brother Dave worked summers as a janitor at Brunswick High. For part of one summer I worked there, too. One day I was supposed to scrub the rust-stains off the walls in the girls' shower. I noticed that the showers, unlike those in the boys' locker room, had chrome U-rings with pink plastic curtains attached. This memory came back to me one day while I was working in the laundry, and I started seeing the opening scene of a story: girls showering in a locker room where there were no U-rings, pink plastic curtains or privacy. And this one girl starts to have her period. Only she doesn't know what it is, and the other girls – grossed out, horrified, amused – start pelting her with sanitary napkins … The girl begins to scream. All that blood!
I'd read an article in LIFE magazine some years before, suggesting that at least some reported poltergeist activity might actually be telekinetic phenomena – telekinesis being the ability to move objects just by thinking about them. There was some evidence to suggest that young people might have such powers, the article said, especially girls in early adolescence, right around the time of their first — POW! Two unrelated ideas, adolescent cruelty and telekinesis, came together, and I had an idea …
Before I had completed two pages, ghosts of my own began to intrude; the ghosts of two girls, both dead, who eventually combined to become Carrie White. I will call one of them Tina White and the other Sandra Irving. Tina went to Durham Elementary School with me. There is a goat in every class, the kid who is always left without a chair in musical chairs, the one who winds up wearing the KICK ME HARD sign, the one who stands at the end of the pecking order. This was Tina. Not because she was stupid (she wasn't), and not because her family was peculiar (it was) but because she wore the same clothes to school every day. Sandra Irving lived about a mile-and-a-half from the house where I grew up. Mrs Irving hired me one day to help her move some furniture … I was struck by the crucifix hanging in the living room, over the Irving couch. If such a gigantic icon had fallen when the two of them were watching TV, the person it fell on would almost certainly have been killed."
- Stephen King recalls writing the novel 'Carrie', 'On Writing : A Memoir Of The Craft'
"Diamond Dead, I would love to make that movie. I love the old script. It was an Australian producer. We had Ridley Scott behind it. It looked like it was really going to happen and nobody got it. We pitched it with Ridley and everybody said, “What is this?” It’s like Phantom of the Paradise if you remember that movie, the old De Palma thing which I love. They didn’t get this. It’s about a dead rock band. Nobody got it. So it sort of blew away. Right before I came out here on this trip, I got a call from this guy who said, “We have a new script and I’d really like you to read it.” I haven’t read it yet, he said he would e-mail it to me but I’m not home right now, so. Maybe it’ll come back, I don’t know. You never know, man. I can’t tell you, there’s so much sh*t that goes down on the internet. “Oh, George is doing this. Steve King, Buick 8, boom, all these projects.” Some of them you work on. I did, there was this- – Steve wrote a book called The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. I loved it. Again, you couldn’t sell it for beanstalk beans because it’s about a little girl. They said, “Well, how do you put a star in here? It’s a little girl.”
Then all of a sudden Dakota Fanning appears on the scene and then wow, man. Dakota actually said, or her mother or whoever it was, actually no. I went in to take the meeting at Ben Franks which is Dakota’s favorite place. I met with her. Her mother and her agent went and they sat outside. I go in and I’m sitting at this table with this little girl going, “Guys, I’m not!” And took this very sort of serious meeting with her and she liked it. She was mostly concerned “Do I really have to get bitten by those mosquitoes.” No, no, we can fake that sh*t. Even then, it wasn’t enough to get it financed. When I say relatively big budget, meaning 20-22, something like that in order to do all the effects, nobody wanted to risk it on a little girl. So that movie’s never been made, may never be made. Maybe once Steve stopped writing or gets hit by another van or something and they need a Steve King thing."
- George Romero, Horror-Movies.CA
'Ain't it fun when you're taking care of number one?
Ain't it fun when you feel like you just gotta get a gun?
Ain't it fun when you j... j... j... just can't seem to find your tongue
'Cause you stuck it too deep into something that really stung?
It's such fun!'
- Dead Boys
'Carrie' by Rachel Readman
'And God Made Eve' - Pino Donaggio
Though De Palma was a fan of Sissy Spacek’s work, he was convinced that he had already found his Carrie in another actress. His decision to let Spacek audition at all was mostly out of courtesy to her husband, Jack Fisk, the film’s art director. "He told me that if I wanted to, I could try out for the part of Carrie White,” Spacek recounted to Rolling Stone. "There was another girl that he was set on and unless he was really surprised, she was the one. I hung up and decided to go for it." Spacek showed up at her audition in an old dress she hadn’t worn since grade school and with her hair slicked back with Vaseline. When she was done, she waited in the parking lot while her husband reviewed her audition with the rest of the production team. After Fisk came out to tell her that the part was hers, “We sped off before anybody could change his mind,” Spacek said."
- Jennifer M. Wood, '15 Creepy Facts About Carrie'
"There had been more telekinesis planned, but one's imagination can make things more outrageous than can be filmed. We played down the crying too. I didn't want Carrie to be a little wimp who cried all the time. So anytime she cried, it was like bottling it in. There was never any release - she would cry but always push it back, so that she was like a time bomb all the time. Finally, it all comes out and she explodes. The shower sequence [Carrie experiencing her first period] was very tricky. I knew it had to be horrendous and bigger than life. She had to give the girls a motive for being so weird. I used an etching from the bible of a guy getting stoned to death. The Dore facial expressions are so intense and so much larger than life. The body movement too, I wanted to have a strange quality. When the blood hits, it's almost like she looks up to God. It's coming from the Heavens and that's where God lives. I wanted subtle touches like that."
- Sissy Spacek, Cinefantastique
"While he was going to college my brother Dave worked summers as a janitor at Brunswick High. For part of one summer I worked there, too. One day I was supposed to scrub the rust-stains off the walls in the girls' shower. I noticed that the showers, unlike those in the boys' locker room, had chrome U-rings with pink plastic curtains attached. This memory came back to me one day while I was working in the laundry, and I started seeing the opening scene of a story: girls showering in a locker room where there were no U-rings, pink plastic curtains or privacy. And this one girl starts to have her period. Only she doesn't know what it is, and the other girls – grossed out, horrified, amused – start pelting her with sanitary napkins … The girl begins to scream. All that blood!
I'd read an article in LIFE magazine some years before, suggesting that at least some reported poltergeist activity might actually be telekinetic phenomena – telekinesis being the ability to move objects just by thinking about them. There was some evidence to suggest that young people might have such powers, the article said, especially girls in early adolescence, right around the time of their first — POW! Two unrelated ideas, adolescent cruelty and telekinesis, came together, and I had an idea …
Before I had completed two pages, ghosts of my own began to intrude; the ghosts of two girls, both dead, who eventually combined to become Carrie White. I will call one of them Tina White and the other Sandra Irving. Tina went to Durham Elementary School with me. There is a goat in every class, the kid who is always left without a chair in musical chairs, the one who winds up wearing the KICK ME HARD sign, the one who stands at the end of the pecking order. This was Tina. Not because she was stupid (she wasn't), and not because her family was peculiar (it was) but because she wore the same clothes to school every day. Sandra Irving lived about a mile-and-a-half from the house where I grew up. Mrs Irving hired me one day to help her move some furniture … I was struck by the crucifix hanging in the living room, over the Irving couch. If such a gigantic icon had fallen when the two of them were watching TV, the person it fell on would almost certainly have been killed."
- Stephen King recalls writing the novel 'Carrie', 'On Writing : A Memoir Of The Craft'
"Diamond Dead, I would love to make that movie. I love the old script. It was an Australian producer. We had Ridley Scott behind it. It looked like it was really going to happen and nobody got it. We pitched it with Ridley and everybody said, “What is this?” It’s like Phantom of the Paradise if you remember that movie, the old De Palma thing which I love. They didn’t get this. It’s about a dead rock band. Nobody got it. So it sort of blew away. Right before I came out here on this trip, I got a call from this guy who said, “We have a new script and I’d really like you to read it.” I haven’t read it yet, he said he would e-mail it to me but I’m not home right now, so. Maybe it’ll come back, I don’t know. You never know, man. I can’t tell you, there’s so much sh*t that goes down on the internet. “Oh, George is doing this. Steve King, Buick 8, boom, all these projects.” Some of them you work on. I did, there was this- – Steve wrote a book called The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. I loved it. Again, you couldn’t sell it for beanstalk beans because it’s about a little girl. They said, “Well, how do you put a star in here? It’s a little girl.”
Then all of a sudden Dakota Fanning appears on the scene and then wow, man. Dakota actually said, or her mother or whoever it was, actually no. I went in to take the meeting at Ben Franks which is Dakota’s favorite place. I met with her. Her mother and her agent went and they sat outside. I go in and I’m sitting at this table with this little girl going, “Guys, I’m not!” And took this very sort of serious meeting with her and she liked it. She was mostly concerned “Do I really have to get bitten by those mosquitoes.” No, no, we can fake that sh*t. Even then, it wasn’t enough to get it financed. When I say relatively big budget, meaning 20-22, something like that in order to do all the effects, nobody wanted to risk it on a little girl. So that movie’s never been made, may never be made. Maybe once Steve stopped writing or gets hit by another van or something and they need a Steve King thing."
- George Romero, Horror-Movies.CA
'Ain't it fun when you're taking care of number one?
Ain't it fun when you feel like you just gotta get a gun?
Ain't it fun when you j... j... j... just can't seem to find your tongue
'Cause you stuck it too deep into something that really stung?
It's such fun!'
- Dead Boys
'Carrie' by Rachel Readman
'And God Made Eve' - Pino Donaggio
'Carrie' is followed by Katt Shea's enjoyable sequel 'The Rage : Carrie 2' (1999). There's a television remake which I've seen - 'Carrie' (2002) starring Angela Bettis - and a new remake that I've not seen - 'Carrie' (2013) starring Chloe Graze Moretz. In the 1980s, Betty Buckley played Margaret White on Broadway in 'Carrie : The Musical'.
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