Entry #7: Carrie
The real horror story was the High School memories we made along the way. That's a sentiment I'm sure Carrie White (Sissy Spacek) would agree with. Carrie's time in High School has been fraught with bullying and cruelty as her classmates pick on her ceaselessly. Her home life isn't much better considering that she lives with an ultra-religious Mother, Margaret White (Piper Laurie), whose idea of discipline is to lock Carrie into a closet when she's convinced that her daughter has been possessed by the Devil. Yes, Carrie's life is no picnic, but she does have one interesting advantage at her disposal. Carrie is gradually discovering that she carries the ability to make things move with her mind.
A put-upon teenager discovering that they actually have superpowers? Why, this sounds like the origin story for the protagonist in an uplifting superhero comic or YA-novel! Well, considering Carrie is based on a Stephen King horror novel, you can be assured that Carrie's superpowers won't be going in any sort of inspirational or hopeful direction. However, you'd be forgiven if, like me, you forgot for long stretches of Carrie that the protagonist of this production even had superhuman abilities. Screenwriter Lawrence D. Cohen adapts King's novel by spending extensive periods of time just focused on Carrie enduring the world of High School social politics as well as bullies preparing to do something awful to Carrie during a school dance.
That's not a complaint though, on the contrary, Carrie does a fine job spending the time to make Carrie's situation feel lived-in and authentic. This is a movie that's in no hurry to rush through things just to get the bloody finale, which means we get to see things like Carrie's up-and-down reactions to an unexpected invite to a school dance. Her navigation of this out-of-nowhere prospect could have been just handled quickly in a throwaway line of dialogue, but here, we get to watch her grapple with the idea that somebody might actually wanna go to the dance with her and get to become closer to Carrie White in the process. Plus, all the build-up that comprises the majority of the movie is not devoid of the sort of chills you'd want out of a horror picture.
Carrie taking its time for so much of its story helps to instill a sense of dread in response to us knowing that Carrie is in for some kind of awful trick come the night of the school dance. Once that climax arrives, leaving poor Carrie covered in pig's blood, director Brian De Palma executes it with a potent sense of unbridled chaos, the whole world is going to hell in this sequence as Carrie's powers finally get unleashed in their most powerful form. Even the use of split-screen, sometimes thought of as a visual cheat of sorts, comes off as well as showing how widespread Carrie's carnage is across this gymnasium. This sequence is the punchline to a whole movie's worth of build-up and it manages to work thanks to De Palma's direction.
De Palma, who knew how to execute suspenseful genre fare with visual flair, lends some really clever pieces of camerawork throughout the film, including recurring uses of that old standby of a De Palma movie, the split-diopter shot. Even more of a standout than his direction, though, is Sissy Spacek's performance as Carrie White. The lynchpin of the entire movie, Spacek brings to the role a level of passive shyness that's totally unique to just this character. We've seen plenty of anti-social or quiet teenage girls in movies, but has there ever been one that seemed like they were two seconds away from just vanishing into the wind like Spacek's version of Carrie White?
Meek doesn't even begin to describe this character that Spacek brings such a distinct resigned nature to Carrie White, though she is capable of depicting the character in a state of pronounced panic in a similarly noteworthy manner. Carrie reacting to her first period or being trapped in a closet in her Mom's house calls for Spacek to bring out Earth-shattering screams and a sense of terror that she manages to deliver and then some. The rest of the supporting cast dedicated to playing Carrie's teenage classmates, including John Travolta in one of his earliest films roles, are just going through the motions in High School archetypes, but they rarely distract from the very best and most chilling aspects of Brian De Palma's Carrie.
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