Carrie (1976)--Stephen King Adaptathon #1 (Joe's Take)

In Carrie, a young woman struggles with her mother, her teachers, and even her friends. And then, she kills them all with her mind!

Carrie is a 1976 Brian De Palma adaptation of Stephen King's first novel of the same name. Carrie is definitely a first novel. But it points to one of the major successes of Stephen King's career: when he writes something bad he just keeps writing. 

The book isn't bad, but it has a lot of content that isn't central to the plot. And then the biggest most important scenes are some of the worst. In the film, the narrative arc is tight and the most important scenes are the best.

De Palma looked at Carrie, thought "I can fix her" and he was right.

It is not initially clear that Carrie will be an excellent film adaptation. It begins in a locker room full of playful nude young women, and then this scene happens:

(Jazz flute plays)

(No really, it actually does)

I would say I don't know what De Palma was thinking when he composed this shot, except that it is super obvious what he was thinking. 

Hey though, there are a couple worthwhile observations about this.

In the book, this is how Carrie is described:

"Carrie stood among them stolidly, a frog among swans. She was a chunky girl with pimples on her neck and back and buttocks, her wet hair completely without color. It rested against her face with dispirited sogginess and she simply stood, head slightly bent, letting the water splat against her flesh and roll off. She looked the part of the sacrificial goat..."

So, this ties in with a whole animal sacrifice motif in the novel. But, in the film Carrie seems to be having a sexual moment in the shower that is immediately followed by the blood. That connection creates an interesting token of guilt on Carrie's part that makes her mother's accusations in the film a little more cutting. It also enables De Palma to tie this scene to the theme of blood as punishment for desire, and more or less dump the bovine animal sacrifice angle. And lastly, it made for a much sexier intro although it really goes past sexy and into the realm of clownishly thirsty. 

"The girl was naked in the shower and she glistened... like a huge metal penis."

The shower-penis scene also introduces a technique that De Palma uses for almost the entire film called Deep Focus. With this technique, an object in the foreground and an object in the background can both be held in focus.

It's not necessarily a subtle technique! But, it can be used to craft dense images that convey incredible amounts of information. There are single shots in Carrie that are whole stories themselves.

Back to the plot: Carrie is having a hot shower and then she starts her period. She freaks out, screams at the other girls, and they all pelt her with tampons. 

There's no deep focus here I don't think. Rather, I submit this image in regards to the excellent casting of Sissy Spacek. I assume the call was for someone who could be hot in one scene but uncanny and weird in the next and Sissy Spacek answered the call! 

Anyway, the girls all throw tampons at Carrie. She's dismissed from school and goes home to her crazy mother:

You've got pure, innocent Carrie in the foreground, mother in the middle, and then Jesus in the background. And the camera zooms into this scene, so it unfolds in front of you like a pop-up book. It's like watching a mouse enter a snake's cage. Margaret beats Carrie and drags her into a closet with a creepy Jesus statue and tells her not to come out until she's prayed enough. This is the shot of Carrie emerging:

Carrie, a mouse in the background. Margaret pitiless, sinister, sewing like a spider.

From here, the plot bifurcates along the schemes of two girls involved in the locker room scene. One girl, Sue Snell, is ashamed of her role and wants to sacrifice something to make it right. She tells her boyfriend, Tommy, to ask Carrie to prom. Here is the scene where he's thinking about it:

This is my favorite scene in the whole movie. She's studious, secure, in control. He's like a child watching his western but not really watching it. They're both pure and good. They both have PERMS. 

On the other side of town, Chris is a bad girl and she wants her boyfriend, Billy, to wreck prom and get Carrie. Here, she hatches the plan in between making out with Billy, slapping him, and sucking his finger:

In the books, this symmetry is used to create kind of a Greek drama between noble and spiteful deities who use an innocent mortal as a pawn in their contest before realizing that the mortal is actually an eldritch terror.

De Palma puts that firmly in the background and brings the romance between Tommy and Carrie to the fore. And you can see why:

Tommy's withering glare is on account of his insensitive English lit teacher. But this shot brings another dynamic into focus: Tommy with his perm and Carrie with the best hair ever. He never stood a chance.

So he asks her to prom:

This is a cool shot. The screen door is used to give Carrie a different texture, like he's speaking into a painting. He's real, he's in focus, he's wearing denim. She's in her mother's biblical nightmare and she's trying to get out. 

But Carrie isn't sure, so then the gym teacher who saved her from the mean girls is like:

"Are you kidding? Look at your awesome hair, he doesn't stand a chance!"

As Carrie prepares for prom, her mother looms, a head of dark and agitated coils. Carrie and her effortless locks don't care. She applies makeup in the mirror she broke (and repaired!) with her burgeoning psychic powers, while a picture of Tommy smiles out from a news clipping and Jesus watches from the mirror! 

From here, the movie enters a stage where the deep focus technique isn't used as much, but there are still a ton of cool shots. 

Like in this scene where Carrie and Tommy are dancing and they start to spin out of control while laughing, and you've got the hint of red in the background. And then there's this sequence:

It's so good. And I didn't even include the whole red ribbon falling from the bucket of blood in the rafters that shows the audience and Sue Snell the trajectory of the blood - right onto Carrie white!

In the book, this scene is completely wasted. She just jumps off the stage "like a bull frog" and freaking runs away! She goes outside and has a cry.

Not in the movie though:

This takes the black silhouette in front of flames from the stage but places it among the black frame of the school cafeteria. In his review, my friend Paul talks about "Control" as a theme in Carrie, and I feel like that particular theme is very present in this scene, in this image.

And the best is yet to come! In the book it's explained that Carrie can imagine the schematics of processes and then operate them with her mind, which is a) horseshit and b) super boring. It's horseshit because she fucks up gas mains and utilities and water systems with her mind. I'm a 43 year old, I don't know what any of that shit looks like. I couldn't accurately imagine the structure of a gas line under the street and even if I could, the part that makes the gas go faster might be miles away! Is that even how it works? I don't know!

And it's boring because in Carrie's big showdown with her mother she just visualizes Margaret's heart and then visualizes it stopping. That is one of the all-time anti-climactic murders in any medium. But have no fear, De Palma is here and he knows just what to do:

First, he has the creepy mother hide in the background of a shot:

Oh fuck, she's behind the door! You can see her crazy hair! Then she kicks Carrie down the stairs, the music goes hysterical, and she comes out and does the sign of the cross:

With a butcher knife!

So Carrie uses her powers and kills mom with kitchen implements including a coup de gras - with a SPATULA. The camera covers her demise up close, but as it pulls back...

Margaret's death mask assumes a peaceful, beatific aspect like an altarpiece painting:

And then it pulls all the way back to a scene that I think words are wasted on:

And as the house collapses around them, Carrie hides in the closet where you can see that her creepy Jesus was stabbed in all the same places as her mother. 

I feel like I should provide some analysis or commentary here, but as I watched all this unfold I just thought things like "Fuck yeah!" and "OH WITH A SPATULA" and "Huh, so when she was in there praying she was really just thinking about stabbing her mother."

Wow. What a movie. What an incredible adaptation. I hope they're all this good! And now, questions for Paul:

JD:  As we begin this journey, where do you initially think Carrie the film ranks among Stephen King adaptations? Is it top 5? 

PH:  I refuse to answer this until Maximum Overdrive.

JD: Is the creepy Jesus even a Jesus? I thought someone else got shot with all those arrows.

PH: I actually know this!  That's St. Sebastian, and he's the Orion's belt of paintings at any renaissance art museum.  You see the arrows, you know the martyr!  But that's the only one you ever learn, because most of the other saints, like constellations, kinda seem all the same.  

JD:  Considering that she's on stage and kills everybody, I feel like Carrie could be a pretty good musical. Which Stephen King book do you think might do the best with musical numbers, and why is it Cujo?

PH:  *in ragtime* "Hello my baby, hello my darling, hello my rabid dog!"  

JD:  It's funny to think about the super hero genre in the context of Carrie, because there are lots of teenagers with powers in comics, and it always goes right. But, I think Carrie is the correct interpretation: it would all go wrong immediately. Is there any great power that could actually come with responsibility in high school? 

PH:  Is there a superhero that can make everyone go to sleep? Like Mr. Sandman, or something? I can imagine teenage Mr. Sandman just making people sleep all the time, and though it's mildly disruptive, everyone wakes up alert and ready to take on a day of good decisions and healthy eating!  

Oh, I see Marvel has a hero named "Sandman," and his power is . . . the ability to turn into sand. That also seems pretty safe for high school, depending on the size and quantity of ants in the region.  

Carrie (1976)--Stephen King Adaptathon #1 (Paul's Take)

 

[Note: This is an installment of a marathon project of writing about all of the Stephen King adaptations for screen in chronological order.  Spoilers probably follow.]

Carrie is the first Stephen King adaptation, and it might just be the best.  In the immortal words of Carrie's mother (RIP Piper Laurie) describing the whiskey-breath of her drunk boyfriend, "I liked it!"

DePalma's Carrie (1976) combines the schlock of the teenage slasher with a careening aesthetic that steals, invents, and mashes up styles.  It is both careful in the details (like the glass of milk Carrie has with dinner, or the be-glittered cardboard star adorning the bucket of blood), and unabashedly messy (at one point in a conversation, the film unaccountably fast-forwards, squealing like a VHS tape).  The result is a teetering off-balance combination of fun and dread.  In other words, high school.

There's so much to love in this film, but the mark of its effectiveness is that, no matter how many times I've seen it, I still hold out some belief that this time, Carrie will simply be Prom Queen, the pig's blood landing just to her left ("whoa, wtf, can you imagine if that landed on me??").

In the novel, King drenches the story with dread by interpolating newspaper clippings from the aftermath of the prom. In the film, the dread that Carrie just will never get that fairy-tale ending (though boy, she does get a gothic one) is just nearly fifty years of marketing like this VHS slip cover that I remember from every sojourn to the horror aisle at the video store, well before I got to taste all the terror of high school:

This story is not just about high school, but rather, about the world of women and girls.  Or I should say a world of women and girls, because it seems like a male-fantasy/nightmare of what such a world is like.  Yet, for all of its male gazey moments, the film still only barely passes whatever a male equivalent Bechdel-test might be called, as all of the major characters are women, and the story belongs to their interpersonal drama: Carrie's struggle to free herself from her mother's overbearing repressive Christianity, Sue's self-sacrificing display of generosity for embarrassing Carrie, the PE teacher's surrogate parenting of Carrie, and Chris's desire for revenge exist in a wholly separate, all-female, world.

And even if some of these motives are coded through a heteronormative sexual desire--the punishment of losing prom privileges, for instance--it never feels as though men are really all that important to the drama except as instruments to be used or trophies to be brandished.  In fact, scenes like the locker room, in which we see a fantasized version of femininity, feel more parodic than exploitative (though it winkingly does both).  The title card of the film plays over a girl brushing her hair, women cavorting playfully in the edenic steam in the background, yet this is a smash cut from the humiliating mantra of the film, Chris snarling at Carrie, "Eat shit, Carrie White."  Beneath the feathered curls and embroidered tops of 70s high school femininity is an aggressive and uncompromising Hobbesian war.

Midway through the film, both Sue and Chris convince their boyfriends to do something that neither really wants to do.  Sue gives Tommy the cold shoulder until he agrees to take Carrie to the prom.  And Chris uses sexual favors to persuade Billy to kill a pig for what must be one of the most overwrought pranks ever.  

The logic of this parallel is so convincing that it conceals just how flimsy Chris's plan to take down Carrie is. Remember, Chris's plan is to dump pig's blood on Carrie's head just as she is crowned prom queen. If any one of these contrivances fail, Carrie gets to have a decent evening!

Side quest #1: GET PIG'S BLOOD!

(1) Go down on Billy Nolan securing his loyalty to your petty revenge plot

(2) Convince Billy to break into a pig farm

(3) Have Billy kill a pig with a sledge hammer (not easy!) and harvest its blood in a milk pail (also not easy!)

(4) Drive blood, in milk pail, to school, without it sloshing all around and making a mess.

(5) Congratulations, side quest #1--GET PIG'S BLOOD--completed!  

Side quest #2:  GET CARRIE WHITE ELECTED PROM QUEEN!

(1) Infiltrate the prom committee with a shadow deep state prom committee.

(2) Create fake prom ballots.

(3) Replace real prom ballots with fake ones, kicking the real ones under a plant or something.

Congratulations, side quest #2--GET CARRIE WHITE ELECTED PROM QUEEN--completed!  

Side quest #3:  POSITION THE PAIL!

(1) Climb into the rafters with your pail of pig's blood.

(2) Aim pail

(3) Construct pulley system for the Pig Blood Trap

Side quest #4:  SNEAK UNDER THE STAGE!

Well, you get the point.  Dreamwork makes the team work!  The fact that Carrie White happens to have godlike telekinetic powers is maybe less impressive than that Chris is able to assemble and carry out a Greek-tragedy-worthy Rube Goldberg machine of revenge.

But all the creakiness of that machinery is masked behind the parallel stories of Sue and Chris.  Perhaps Sue's effort is altruistic (though one doubts--especially in King's novel), and perhaps Chris's is cruel (undoubtedly), but behind both are similar strategems of control, either for redemption or revenge.  In Carrie, the women pull the strings.  

And when the theme of control comes into focus, then we understand that Carrie's telekinetic ability, which really stays pretty dormant throughout the film until the grand finale, is the theme literalized.  Carrie can straight up move things with her mind.  If the other women in the film use and abuse their social power, Carrie's direct physical power is kept back until, of course, it isn't.

One especially key scene, easy to miss, is when Carrie has been taken to the Prom by Tommy and is about to get out of the car.  However, realizing that he is coming around the car to open the door for her, she quickly shuts it so he can do it for her.  It is an intimate moment, and one where we sense that Carrie is feeling "normal," and is learning to enjoy a certain kind of performance, but it is a performance that carries with it the implications of her growing awareness of her power.

In the book, Carrie's power is likened to nuclear weapons.  The emergency air raid sirens go off at the ending, and the whole town is razed to the ground in a series of explosions and fire.  But the movie largely dispenses with the cold war notes (there is one, where one of the pig-blood-harvesters tells the pig, "you won't have to worry about the bomb anymore,") and instead focuses on how Carrie's power emanates unconsciously, a literalization of the toxicity of high school bullying.

The film takes a bunch of liberties with the text, which in general is a good thing--as Joe's review points out.  One of my favorite additions is the post hoc rationale that Tommy comes up with for why he's asking her out to the prom--"because you liked my poem"--which wasn't even his poem!  Because, unlike almost everything else in the world of the film, Carrie is actually genuine (she gets ridiculed by the teacher for expressing her admiration for Tommy's poem).  If Carrie never quite masters the performance of invulnerability and becomes the scapegoat for the insecurities of so many of the other characters, she discovers instead the power of genuine emotion.  And murders with it!

And finally, a little detail that I never noticed until this re-watch:

P. J. Soles's red cap

Questions for Joe:

1. If there were a male locker room scene equivalent to the one in Carrie, which wind instrument would be playing the background music?

A symphony question! Paul, you shouldn't have! The flute was used to present kind of a male idealized chaste and feminine locker room. I think men and women would have different ideas about the reality of such a place, whereas an idealized male locker room would probably be the same terrible place from both perspectives. Just tubas, trombones, and probably a few piccolos. 

2. The final dream sequence was filmed backwards, with Sue walking backwards carrying flowers, and then reversed to seem as if it is going forwards (you can tell by a car that drives backwards through an intersection in the background).  What other scenes might have been improved by filming backwards?

This makes me think of Bewitched where they would play a scene in fast reverse to show Samantha's magic cleaning up a mess. What if Carrie had just wrinkled her nose and the pig's blood flew up and off and none of that happened, with a wink? 

3.  The first scene is during PE and the final one is prom.  Which is a better locale for using telekinetic powers?

My main memory of PE is pulling gym shorts out of my locker that I'd forgotten to take home the previous week. They were still damp from the last workout and they smelled BAD. And I fucking put them on. Maybe if I'd had telekinetic powers I could have just flung my entire body over the 20 foot high fence surrounding the schoolyard into someone's back yard and died. 

On the other hand, at prom, maybe I could have used the powers to fast reverse my girlfriend puking all over me. It'd just come right back out again though. So that would probably have to happen like two or three times before it occurred to me to move. But I mean, between that and yeeting myself over a fence like a catapult, I think I'd go with prom. 

The Stephen King Adaptathon Challenge

 

Eight years ago, this blog--a legitimate, for-real, no-ads, homemade-just-like-your-grandma-used-to-bake web log, or 'blog, began a challenge.  The challenge was to watch four recent straight-to-streaming horror movies a month and to write something interesting and snarky about them.  We called this the "Netflix Horror Challenge."  It was a challenge that defeated us pretty quickly.

Today, we announce a new challenge and new misplaced resolve.

We will:

(1) watch every screen adaptation of Stephen King's works available, in chronological order of release.

(2) write blog posts about each of them.  

(3) when possible and convenient, read the work each adaptation is based upon.

We call this: The Stephen King Adaptathon.  

Beyond those four rules, we aren't sure of anything else.  Will we keep the same back-and-forth irreverent snark that our reader(s) may remember?  Will we open up interactive conversations with our reader(s) to discuss our progress?  Will anyone out there join us, for a little while or for longer or forever?  Will King publish more books than we publish reviews in a year?  No one knows!

Why King? Why adaptations? Hopefully this will all make sense as we go, but if nothing else it will be a stroll down the last 45 years, which is just about how old both of us are.  Carrie, the first film on our docket, released in 1976, which is when Paul was released as well.  It will be a Gen X memory lane, full of child-murdering clowns, haunted hotels, and possessed everything, from mack trucks to muscle cars to batshit virtual reality lawnmowers.

Why us?  Are we like Stephen King experts?  No!  But we might be after this is through.  Longtime King fans are invited to join us though, and to yell at us from the comments section, because we're going to get things wrong.  

What adaptation are you most looking forward to re-watching?  Is it Tommyknockers? Is it The Dead Zone? Is it The Cat's Eye?? Oh man, this is going to be fun.

A full chronological list can be found here.  It's long.  This will not be an easy challenge.  

The first four in order are:

Carrie (1976)
Salem's Lot (1979)
"Sorry, Right Number" in Tales from the Darkside (1980)
The Shining (1980)

Next up: Carrie (dir. Brian DePalma, 1976).  See you at the Beehive for a soda after the prom!

The Stephening Day 2: Sleepwalkers (1992)

 

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man, in possession of a blue trans-am, must be in want of a high school virgin to feed to his shapeshifting mother/lover.  

So goes Sleepwalkers, the film that dares to combine explicit incest and sexual assault with cute cats and campy one-liners.  I think it somehow works, not really in bringing together unlike things to create a brand new wonderful flavor, but rather just careening from scene to scene of omg wtf like is this for real.  

Madchen Amick performs an uncomfortably long dance solo with a floor sweeper in a movie theater lobby. Alice Krige stabs a cop with a corncob and then tells grain-impaled corpse to eat its vegetables. Wayne Knight (Newman from Seinfeld) Glenn Shadix plays an aggressive pedophile creative writing teacher. Ron Perlman is in it.  So is Mark Hamill for some reason. The shapeshifters can not only shapeshift but become invisible and also have a car that can turn invisible, and their only weakness is cats.

Cats.  I really just want to talk about the cats. 

According to Amazon, Sleepwalkers is "Terrifying, Gritty, Bleak."  To this I would also add: "Totes Adorbs."

Last week I had my face melted by the pyrotechnics of Firestarter. But that doesn't hold a candle (cat-dle?) to the feline training-technics of Sleepwalkers.  How do you train a herd of cats to act together?  Oscar-purrthy performances all around.  I know I know, but look at their tiny little faces! Their little paws!

The only ones not amused are the shapeshifters, who, isolated and driven out from society, are forced, like a lonely soul scrolling into the night, to confront angst's perennial foe: oodles of cuteness.  

The Stephening, Day 1: Firestarter (1984)

 

Starting with Firestarter seems appropriate because it's right there in the title. It's not called Firelighter or Fireigniter, after all.  

I had never seen Firestarter, hadn't read the book, and just sort of missed it in the marathon of 80s horror VHSes we churned through during the latchkey years.  I had sort of filed it away under "not a great adaptation of not a great King novel" and gave myself a pass not to watch it. 

October 2021: The Stephening, A Rock, Paper, Hatchet One Offffff

 

Always kind of awkward when your blog goes dormant for years.  Especially awkward is that first post back.  This is that first post back. So so awkward *shuffles feet* Uh, hey?  How you been?

But wait, before you pop the champagne and tweetstorm about the return of your second-to-least favorite crap blog about horror, I should tell you that we're not really back for good.  That's right, this is just a for funsies one-off for October.  Because we all need an October project, and I've got an assignment for you!  Or actually for me! 

FAMILY BLOOD (2018) [Joe's Review]

In Family Blood, a mom with addiction issues becomes a vampire. Will her uncontrollable urges tear her family apart or will her vampire boyfriend do it first?!

FAMILY BLOOD (2018) [Paul's Review]

In Family Blood, a recovering addict mom meets a mildly handsome vampire at a support group.  Not answered by movie: what other methods has the vampire tried to kick his habit first?

“Hi, my name is Vlad, and this is my first time.” “Hi Vlad.” “Hey, well, uh, I’m not sure where to begin.  At first I thought I could control it, you know, just kicking a couple back after dinner or at the game.  But then it was every night and I started to sleep through the days.  I guess it really hit home when I up and murdered my whole family.  There I was, just really going to town on my wife’s neck, when I looked up into the mirror and . . . you know how it goes, I didn’t recognize myself, it was like I wasn’t there. 

I AM THE PRETTY THING THAT LIVES IN THE HOUSE (2016) [Joe's Review]

My favorite thing about I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House is the opening line:

“I have heard myself say that a house with a death in it can never again be bought or sold by the living. It can only be borrowed from the ghosts that have stayed behind.”

Why is she attributing a quote to herself? Does this mean this is something she’s said before? When the fuck did she say that? At a dinner party?

I AM THE PRETTY THING THAT LIVES IN THE HOUSE (2016) [Paul's Review]

I first watched IATPTTLITH in December 2017.  It is now halfway through 2018 and no review.  Joe and I went strong for two years, reviewing direct-to-streaming horror movies with gusto and verve and esprit.  And then IATPTTLITH happened.  Would this be the way the experiment of Rock, Paper, Hatchet ends?    

SATANIC (2016) [Joe's Review]

In Satanic, a hapless group of Millennial friends inadvertently enters a contract with the devil to go to Hell. And Hell, it turns out, is made of white plastic tarps and spray paint.

My approach with Satanic was to watch it in pieces (I have two young children, so my "me" time generally comes in 15 minute chunks, which is about 10 minutes more than what my wife gets). So, the beginning and middle of this review reflect that approach. And then like a month passes and I just bang out the rest because Paul realizes that today is the blog's two year anniversary and we have to get something up! Anyway, enough about us.

SATANIC (2016) [Paul's Review]

Hey fucktards!  Yes, I mean you, fucking goth troll dick.  Don’t be such an asshole, megabitch.  God, you’re such a prick, cumball.  Bro, I mean goth snobs.  Blow cock.  No, blow devil cock.

All of the words in the previous paragraph are spoken at some point by the terrific cast of characters in Satanic.  Being some percentage Irish, I appreciate a strong and habitual exercise of swearing: in jest, in argument, and sometimes just in exasperation at the universe.  However, I gotta admit, even I was starting to feel a bit Annie Wilkes halfway through this one.   It would not be out of character for any of these angelic youth to go to the store and demand F-ing pig feed and ten pounds of that bitchly cow corn.