You can’t deny that you know exactly what movie this is from. You even know the story. Carrie is the girl everyone picks on in school, the outcast that gets elected prom queen as a joke. Unfortunately for her high school peers, this loner has recently come into some psychic powers, and when a prank goes too far, she maniacally and painfully takes her revenge on everyone involved.
The greatest and most surprising part about this film? You sort of root for her.
Carrie was Stephen King’s first published novel, and his first to be adapted into a feature film. It stars Sissy Spacek (who a friend pointed out is Mae Tuck from Tuck Everlasting, and who is also the forgetful mother that gets sent to a senior citizens’ home in The Help), as Carrie White, the girl too weird for words.
No. I’m not talking Lilo crazy. Carrie is shy, awkward, and very introverted. But early on, we realize that her weirdness is not at all her fault. In the first scene, Carrie is teased because she freaks out when she gets her period during an after-gym-class shower. The other girls throw tampons and towels at her, laughing while Carrie huddles in the corner of the shower and cries. Soon, we find out that Carrie’s mother is a twisted religion-obsessed crazy person. She punishes Carrie for getting her period, saying that she is a sinner and the blood is a sign of her sins. She then locks her daughter in a closet with a deformed Jesus relic and forces her to pray for hours.
The film is iconically slow in its buildup. The director has stated that he drew a lot from Hitchcock, most notably that the high school is named Bates High School after Norman Bates in Psycho, and that the film uses shrieking violins every time Carrie uses her psychic powers.
Right, so Carrie discovers she has psychic powers. First it’s breaking a light bulb with her mind, then it’s a cigarette plate, and then later a mirror. All of this happens in the same day, and Carrie immediately begins researching to figure out what’s going on, and she realizes that when she concentrates hard enough (usually when she’s very angry), she can move things with her mind.
So the girls who bullied Carrie are punished with a super intense detention by the gym teacher, the one teacher that actually pays attention to Carrie. She’s amazing. Here she is slapping the main bully for defying her.
The gym teacher eventually decides this girl is banned from prom, which inspires the whole “let’s make Carrie for prom queen and pour pigs blood on her when she is on stage” idea comes from. Surprisingly, there is one “popular” girl, Sue, who reaches out to Carrie and tells her boyfriend to ask Carrie to prom, and Sue and her boyfriend are therefore left out of the plan to prank Carrie.
The whole scene is spectacularly done in my opinion. Everything from Carrie hearing she has won, all the way until the bucket of pig’s blood falls on her, is in slow motion. Carrie is the happiest she will ever be, and the film makes sure to relish those moments. Everyone is applauding her, and when it finally falls, they all begin to laugh, just as Carrie’s mother told her they would. This causes Carrie to snap, and she shuts all of the doors with her mind and burns down the whole school, escaping and walking home drenched in blood. The most terrifying part I found in this scene is that Carrie never blinks once, as if she is so in shock by what just happened. The film did so well to make us pity Carrie, that we don’t care that she is killing all of the people that bullied her. Unfortunately the gym teacher dies in Carrie’s rage (unlike in the book), which I took as a sign that she didn’t do enough to help her.
When Carrie arrives home, her mother is waiting for her to kill her, and that whole seen is perfect too. At first she conforts her, and then she pulls out a kitchen knife and stabs her, causing her to fall down the stairs. But Carrie’s powers are too great for her mother, and she is crucified up against the wall by the rest of the kitchen knives. The image is important because it reflects the contorted views of her mother, just as the Jesus in the closet had arrows through his stomach and his head turned to the right, the mother dies with knives in her stomach and her head turned to the right. It’s almost as haunting as watching her mother chase her through the house with the knife.
The film is amazing in my opinion, but the last scene is what makes it actually perfect. Sue, the girl who looked out for Carrie, is the one survivor of the whole movie. Carrie and her mother die when the house collapses. Sue goes to the rubble of Carrie’s house, and just as she reaches to put flowers over the “grave,” Carrie’s still-bloody hand reaches out from the rubble and grabs her. Sue then wakes up, shaking in her mother’s arms and sobbing. Sue may have survived, but the psychological scars from the event are a fate worse than death.
In this sense, I think the film is trying to get at the idea that no one is unharmed in bullying. Karma eventually catches up with the bullies, and the victims are harmed psychologically beyond repair. In the book, Sue writes a memoir warning people to never forget the events that took place at the prom. The book is a call for a harder cracking down on bullying, and I actually find it appropriate that they’re remaking it this year with Hugo and Kick-Ass’s Chloë Grace Moretz and The Big Lebowski and Crazy Stupid Love’s Julianne Moore.
The film was both a financial and critical success, it has a 91% on Rotten Tomatoes, and was nominated for 2 Oscars (Best Lead Actress for Sissy Spacek and Best Supporting Actress for the mother, Piper Laurie).
I could talk more about the thematic implications of the mother’s corrupted religious views, as we eventually find out that she only had sex once, when her boyfriend was drunk the night Carrie was conceived, and ever since has vowed to be pure. But I’m sort of shaken after seeing it so late at night, so I think I’m gonna go see if I can find a nightlight at my college bookstore.
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