If last weekend's box-office figures are anything to go on, the latest Stephen King adaptation, a redo of Salem's Lot, will be gone from cinemas long before the 31st, so thank goodness 1976's Carrie is back to meet our collective Hallowe'en requirements. This was Brian De Palma, in the year of the Bicentennial, gleefully besmirching the all-American coming-of-age narrative - with audiences young and old lapping up the results. In part, that may have been down to a renewed appetite for new horror myths, already amply demonstrated by the success of 1973's The Exorcist; jolted out of their complacency by Vietnam and Watergate, the cinemagoers of the 1970s were ready for and receptive to more than the usual flags, banners, marching bands and the patriotic piety they represent. De Palma could thus dare to suggest high school as hellhole, site of teenage dreams and nightmares. The dream (fantasy, rather) is right there upfront, in the sneaky, steamed-up opening surveillance of shower-block nudity in the wake of volleyball practice: for some boys, the cinema is a train set, for others, the key to the girls' locker room. The nightmare soon follows in the form of other kids, locating a weak spot in Carrie White's ethereal otherness and going in for the kill. What's still really strange and striking about Carrie is that while the film acknowledges there are elements of tragedy in King's story, and occasionally gestures towards real tenderness, De Palma - a moviebrat then closer in age to the kids than the teachers - doesn't position himself much above the bad behaviour he seeks to describe. He goes visibly funny whenever he points his Arriflex in the direction of head mean girl (and future Mrs. De P) Nancy Allen, and generally devotes himself to watching the playing out of one practical joke we sense even he may find a wicked sort of fun - the sort of wicked fun that comes into its own as Hallowe'en nears. The film's emergence as a modern classic is in part due to how unabashedly down and dirty it remains: few American movies have brought us tangibly closer to both the horror and the horniness of adolescence. Honestly, it's a miracle any of us came through it alive.
Lawrence Cohen's brisk adaptation is ruthless in paring King down to 96 minutes, but also preserves some very unsettling undercurrents: gym teacher Betty Buckley's apparent jealousy of her charges' youth and beauty, say, and everything to do with John Travolta, soon to become America's favourite dimple-chinned strutter, but here cast as a charmless groper who thinks nothing of impersonating Stepin Fetchit while balancing the bucket of blood over the prom stage. Within a few years, the teenagers in American movies would be cleaned up, reduced to their essentials, put in clean-cut John Hughes boxes; De Palma regards them mostly as sociopaths-in-waiting, with one or two honourable exceptions. Crucially, however, they aren't just pieces of meat, no matter that they might treat one another like that. They all have something going on, whether plotting to get in somebody's pants or to humiliate Carrie at what should be the happiest moment of her entire youth. (A stray observation: that humiliation and its aftermath is only the second worst thing to happen at this prom, after the performance of the band: we're still some way off Cameron Crowe and the music supervisors teen movies hired in the 1980s.) The horror is as much psychological as visceral, in other words, and it reaches fever pitch in the film's domestic scenes, where Sissy Spacek's Carrie blossoms before our eyes from screecher to sweetheart and Piper Laurie's Margaret channels something of the intergenerational confusion and mistrust that characterised the 1970s. We know within minutes why Carrie's father has fled the scene, and why the neighbours' house is up for sale. In this context, De Palma's horniness starts to seem humanising, far healthier for us in the long run than taking up arms against "dirty pillows", or honour killing. It ends, as it always does, with a blaze of purely visual storytelling that confirms the film as De Palma's Carrie rather than King's Carrie. Yes, the split screen permits more carnage per square inch; De Palma frames the prom like an assassination attempt, nudging us to wonder why we don't protect our teenagers the way we do the President. But don't overlook the image of girl silhouetted against flames, so potent it's provided the poster and marketing material for decades. Question: has anyone watched the (respectable, if comparably tame) Julianne Moore/Chloë Grace Moretz remake since it opened in 2013?
Carrie returns to cinemas nationwide today.
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