Carrie (1976) [Pt. 2]

[Welcome to Part Two of our discussion regarding Brian De Palma's filmed version of Carrie. In the previous edition we discussed some of the changes De Palma made to the source material, along with some of the casting and directorial choices made along the way. But it seems like we only scratched the surface in our discussion of this film, so follow along as we finish up talking about that famous finale (both of them!), Brian De Palma's career in general, and Aaron demonstrate his ignorance of Judeo-Christian beliefs.]

Rik: We can get more into the actors and the screenplay or score and any other element of this film all we want, but when it comes right down to it, the real reason this film is as well-remembered as it is now, is the involvement of its hugely famous director. This film is prime Brian De Palma, and its success is, in my opinion, pretty much because he simply kills it throughout this film. I am saying this knowing full well that I am not as big a fan of De Palma’s as some people might think. I pretty much closed the book on being interested in his films following Carlito’s Way (which I loved) in 1993. Yes, I know he directed Mission: Impossible as his next film three years later, but I had to look up his credits to even remind myself of that. That is how far off my radar De Palma has fallen, and I watch at least 500 films a year on average (a low average, that is). I have not even seen De Palma’s last two films, though I did watch the four that followed Mission: Impossible, up through The Black Dahlia, which I found immensely disappointing given that I have been obsessed with that murder case for much of my adult life.

Luckily, Carrie falls right into that golden De Palma age (in my opinion), a period that runs from about 1972-1987: Sisters, The Phantom of the Paradise, The Fury, Home Movies, Dressed to Kill, Blow Out, Body Double. The Untouchables. I left out a couple of films on that chronological list for that period: Obsession (1976), because I did not see it until a few months ago (I felt it was more intriguing than it was successful as a film), and Scarface (1983), because I am actually not a fan of what I feel is a greatly overrated film (thanks to MTV Cribs for that!), but I will never say it is uninteresting or worthy of appreciation on certain levels. Oh yeah, and Wise Guys (1986), because apart from Dead Heat, Joe Piscopo roles don’t age all that well.

It’s funny, because I have recently begun talking to fellow film fans on the internet in various groups who all seem to worship every single frame De Palma has shot. I recognize that he has made some really cool films and a few truly great ones, and I used to be a drumbeater for De Palma around the same age as the guys of whom I am speaking. But I am sorry, not everything turns to gold once he films it. He has some real duds, and it will take some incredible heavy lifting on someone’s part to convince me that Mission to Mars or The Bonfire of the Vanities are worthwhile efforts.

Aaron, before we continue on with more Carrie, where are you in the Brian De Palma Appreciation Society?

Aaron: Well, it’s hard to say, actually. I haven’t seen a lot of his movies, including some of the big ones that you list as favorites, but of the films I have seen I enjoy most of them. Several I count as personal favorites, or at least films I return to frequently. The Untouchables, Carrie, The Fury, Raising Cain, and above all Phantom of the Paradise, which I adore. There are also several films in his oeuvre that I am somewhat less than enthralled with. Like you, I don’t get much enjoyment from Scarface or the first Mission: Impossible film. Mission to Mars was a film so dreadfully awful that when some friends and I went to see it theatrically, it prompted one of my buddies to say “that was so bad I want to punch someone” as the credits began to roll. And then there are some films that fall somewhere in the middle, as I tend to find something interesting concealed within almost everything he’s done. Take The Black Dahlia, which disappointed you, while I found the operatic explosion of gothic melodrama and grand guignol violence during the finale to be quite thrilling (even if the 90 minutes leading up to it were a tad dull). Or Passion, a somewhat recent remake of a French film about a professional rivalry with lesbian overtones. Amazingly, De Palma deemphasizes the sexuality in the film, which is completely against his nature, yet the film also includes one of his signature bravura split-screen sequences, and that made the film worthwhile for me.

So yes, I guess you could say I’m a fan of De Palma in general, though not one of those people on discussion boards you mention, who worship every frame he films. I feel like this resurgence in critical support is a bit of a recent phenomenon with De Palma, as only a few years ago I remember reading a lot of discussions where popular opinion seemed to consider him an overrated one-trick pony, too in love with the cleverness of his own stylistic tics. Certainly his Hitchcock obsession has been the constant source of some contention, as his critics tend to view it as creative theft while his fans see it as a thrilling integration of cinematic styles. I suppose I’m in the latter camp, as it’s clear that De Palma’s occasional aping of Hitchcock is not a sign of creative bankruptcy, but the result of De Palma thoroughly internalizing the work of a master he fervently admires, and using those techniques to probe at his own obsessions.

We’ve approached the finale of this film a couple of times so far, but I think I’d like to postpone that discussion for just a little bit. There’s at least one more bit of casting and characterization that I’d like to get into, and that’s William Katt in the role of Tommy Ross, Sue Snell’s boyfriend and Carrie White’s doomed date to the prom.

At the time I first saw Carrie, I knew Katt exclusively from his television show Greatest American Hero, which I loved as a kid. Over the years I’ve always enjoyed seeing William Katt whenever he would pop up. He has a likable presence, goofy and nerdy in a blonde, all-American way. In some ways, though it’s almost as odd to see him portray the popular jock as it is to see Travolta play the bad boy greaser. It works, however, and for me it fits better than the Travolta casting, because of a few minor changes to the Ross character. In the book there’s a bit of a cypher quality to Tommy Ross, as he’s clearly a good guy, but we see him only through the eyes of others. Always in relation to either Carrie or Sue. There’s enough of an unknown element at play that after the fatal events in the novel, people debate whether Tommy was in on Chris Hargensen and Billy Nolan’s plan to humiliate Carrie. Of course, as readers we know that Tommy’s intentions were pure, but he also seems as easily led as Billy is, though in a much more decent way.

In the film version of Carrie, Tommy gets less scenes but also seems, to me, to be more fleshed out. Take the English class scene in the beginning, where the teacher is reading a poem written by Tommy Ross, while he sits and stares ahead in good natured embarrassment. When the teacher asks for criticisms, Carrie says, almost as if she doesn’t know she’s speaking aloud, “It’s beautiful.” The teacher begins to mock Carrie for not having an actual criticism, much to the general amusement of the class. The scene is framed interestingly, with Tommy Ross in closeup along the left side of the screen, while behind him we see Carrie, sitting at her desk and never once looking up from her book. She doesn’t even seem to notice the teasing, so used to it is she. But Tommy notices, and we see the good cheer drain from his face as he’s clearly bothered by the teacher’s reaction to Carrie, culminating in a muttered “you suck” which the teacher picks up on. In this early scene we’re given to understand that Tommy is a decent guy, smart and soulful, and even at this early stage he understands that Carrie is somebody special. Or at least somebody people worthy of kindness.

One other slight change in the character that I think is noteworthy; we only see Tommy and Sue together a couple of times. In the book they spend much more time together, including a couple of romantic getaways. There is a moment when Sue believes she may be pregnant with Tommy’s child, though this turns out to not be the case. In the film, however, Tommy spends much more time on screen with Carrie, and I always got the impression that there may have been some real feelings between them. Maybe not romantic feelings – Tommy was probably never going to leave Sue for Carrie – but I always felt like Tommy did have some affection for Carrie outside of just going along to appease his girlfriend. What are your thoughts on that, Rik?

Rik: I just felt he was a decent guy who, even with that, would possibly have gone along with the joke like everyone else (because that is basically what you do to get through school and even life sometimes) if it weren’t for the interference of Sue Snell. I think he understands what Sue is trying to do, even if he is a bit reticent, but once he gets into the date, I think he does start to feel something for Carrie. And I honestly think that he could possibly leave Sue for Carrie. I don’t see why it would be so out of bounds. There is the bit with the poem, and the fact that he admits that he didn’t write the poem that she liked. There is the kiss during the slow dance, and if there is a point where you have to decide whether he is playing her or not, it is that moment. When she finds out they are on the ballot for King and Queen, he is pretty open about how stupid the whole affair is, and his approach is  “why not go for it?” (the prophetic words are actually, “To the devil with false modesty”), keeping in mind that he knows nothing at all about what is being planned once Carrie is on the stage. I think Tommy is just a good dude, and honestly, as attractive as I found Amy Irving in those days, Spacek looks pretty damn gorgeous in her prom dress, and I think she looks far better than many of the girls who are mocking her at the prom. (P.J. Soles, definitely a cutie in most guy’s books, is wearing a goddamn baseball hat to the Senior Prom!) I don’t see it as a big leap to think that Tommy might actually have a thing for her, given that they did make a connection earlier in the film.

As for Katt, this was the first time he really made an impression on me in a role, as The Greatest American Hero didn’t come on TV for a few more years (in 1981). I had obviously seen him in guest roles on numerous shows, because I watched The Rookies, M*A*S*H, Kung Fu, Emergency!, and Kojak (for examples) as a kid, but except for having seen his M*A*S*H episode in reruns recently, I don’t remember him from those shows. His role in Carrie did make an impression on me, and when Hero came on, I remembered exactly where I saw him and who he played. More than Hero, I am fond of him from his role in the wacky horror-comedy House (1986). I feel Katt never really broke as huge as he should have. He was a good actor with an appealing personality, who had some pretty sharp comic timing. I still like seeing the guy when he shows up here and there. (I think the most significant recent role I remember was The Man from Earth in 2007.)

Getting back to that dance, whatever else he does in the film, De Palma really serves up a masterpiece of timing, tension, and suspense-building in the prom sequence. (First question I have: with so many people pouring into the gymnasium for the dance, how do Tommy and Carrie get such a prime parking spot, two cars from the front door?) De Palma’s use of his entire toolbelt is astounding in this sequence. The quick cutting between the multiple characters involved in Carrie’s humiliation, or the attempt to thwart it is stunning and almost hypnotic, as De Palma and editor Paul Hirsch juggle slow motion clips of Sue Snell discovering the plan and then being expelled bodily from the dance with closeups of Chris’ eyes and the licking of her lips as she plots to drop the pig’s blood, along with shots of Carrie living (for her) an almost unrecognizable and surreal fairy tale dream come true as she is crowned Queen of the Prom.

When the blood rains down and douses Carrie on the stage, the film stops cold. Except for Soles’ character, Norma, who laughs openly (but in complete silence; thankfully, De Palma never grants her a wild braying moment) and a couple of others in the crowd, everyone else stands stunned by what has happened. Tommy reacts protectively, but is killed by the metal bucket falling from the catwalk. Through Carrie’s eyes, though, everyone is laughing maniacally at her as she remembers her mother’s words that “They’re all going to laugh at you!” Her vision is a kaleidoscopic view of the entire room with closeups of laughing faces, even Ms. Collins, who tried to intervene on her behalf. Carrie loses herself completely, or from another view, finally becomes her true self, and is overcome by her supernatural powers. She wills the doors closed and locked, we get the trademark De Palma split screen with a simultaneous closeup of Carrie’s wild staring eyes and dour countenance next to her upper torso, caked in blood and red light against the starred, blue backdrop of the stage. It is a thrilling image.

When she unleashes her powers and all hell breaks loose inside the gym, and scores of kids and teachers are killed, for me, there is both horror at what happens and also a feeling of retribution at those that truly deserved it. Most don’t realize it is Carrie performing these acts, but some clearly catch on, including Ms. Collins, whom Carrie murders without a flinch and for whom we truly feel sorry. It is the scene where Spacek leaves the stage where her casting becomes the wisest decision they made on the film. The angularity of her body, combined with the cold stare she is able to invoke, while covered in blood and gore as she wades through the bodies surrounded by fire is a moment worthy of the reveal of the Bride of Frankenstein in my mind. Hers is a haunting visage through his segment, which continues through her doing away with Chris and Billy out on the road by flipping and then exploding Billy’s hot rod.

It’s funny that, as many times as I have seen Carrie, the prom destruction seems to go on for about a half an hour in my memory even though it is really only a few, tight, well-constructed and conceived minutes. As you mentioned, Carrie goes on a rampage and destroys much of the town in the book, but De Palma is clearly more interested in making the big finale of this film a confrontation between her religion-crazed mother and the daughter whom she considers to be of the devil himself. I feel the mother-daughter confrontation is a wise decision, even if I don’t agree with how literally he chooses to send to Carrie and her mother to hell. Maybe this is just the monster-rampage lover in me – but I would have loved to see Carrie go after the entire town in the movie version.

I am sure you have a lot to say about the prom scene, but please carry on into that final clash and the Irving “jolt” epilogue if you would.

Aaron: I have the same reaction as you; in my memory, the prom scene is much longer than it actually appears on film. That’s a testament to how perfectly De Palma captured and distilled the essence of that scene, but it’s also a bit of a shock every time I rewatch this film. I hate to say this, because it sounds like I’m criticizing the film when I’m actually doing the opposite, but the prom scene is sometimes a letdown to me, because I remember it as being much more epic and, for lack of a better word, brutal. But as you say, the scene is really only a couple of minutes long, and a very tight couple of minutes at that. We may not get the widespread destruction of the novel, or the gory explosion of viscera I seem to hold in my mind sometimes, but we get a perfectly brief flurry of action and violence, exploding outward from Carrie once she reaches her breaking point, and then ending just as quickly when her rage is spent (though not entirely gone, as there are a couple more outbursts ahead).

That isn’t meant to downplay the effectiveness of the scene, however. If anything I feel like it speaks to how well De Palma built tension prior to this climax, and how effectively he provided a release. The prom, for Carrie, is a dream come true; everything is shiny and and bright, Tommy’s friends are all nice to her, and she has a romantic dance with the most popular boy in school. De Palma gives us only a couple of reminders that something horrible has been planned for this night, until Tommy and Carrie are voted prom King and Queen, at which point De Palma really begins to lay on the Hitchcockian suspense. I really enjoy the connections that are made here in the editing. Sue Snell has snuck into the prom to see how Carrie’s night is going, and she notices an oddly swinging rope which she traces back to a bucket of blood perched over Carrie’s head. Ms. Collins notices Sue as Sue follows the rope back to Chris’ hiding place and has her ejected from the prom. Tommy notices Sue being ejected from the prom and gives an odd laugh, presumably believing Sue is suffering a brief bout of jealousy.

This scene so far has been entirely in slow motion, but while the video slows the editing gets faster and faster, and the signifiers of who we’re cutting between become briefer. Sue and Ms. Collins arguing, a shot of a hand on a rope, a bucket of blood, Carrie smiling, a tongue darting out between Chris’ lips, Tommy smiling, an eyeball, a gym door closing, a rope being pulled. The activity builds to a manic pace, and then the blood falls, and everything stops. Applause dies down, the music cuts out, and all audio is removed apart from the creaking of the rope and bucket as everyone tries to process what has just happened. The reactions here are heartbreaking; the choked sob Ms. Collins gives, the pity visible on the faces of even those who had teased Carrie throughout the movie. P.J. Soles is the only one who begins laughing, to the clear disgust of everyone around her (also of possible note: Soles is the only one laughing, but also the only relevant character that Carrie does not focus on when she hallucinates everyone is mocking her). De Palma gives a minute of silence here, to document these reactions, and then the silence is broken by Margaret White’s warning that “they’re all gonna laugh at you!” which begins circling around in Carrie’s head. I haven’t seen this film nearly as many times as you have, but I’ve watched it frequently over the years, and I still feel a thrill when that first usage of split-screen occurs. I am not surprised De Palma worried over this scene for weeks in the editing room; the final product is as perfectly timed and orchestrated a slice of film as I’ve ever seen.

I mentioned in our discussion of the novel that I felt the proper end would be the confrontation between Carrie and Margaret, and that the scenes after that event felt a little oddly placed because of it. But, of course, I was allowing the De Palma film to influence my reaction to the book. In the book the carnage spreads out from the prom and overtakes almost the entire town, while in the film the carnage is confined to the high school, Billy and Chris, and Carrie’s mother. As much as I would have liked to see Carrie really go all out in exacting her revenge, I’m glad De Palma opted to not go there. Whether the decision was made from a conceptual level to narrow the focus of the story, or whether it would have been a logistical nightmare for them to try and shoot the scene, I believe it turns out to be the proper decision.


When Carrie returns home, seeking to apologize to her mother and seek comfort from her, she finds the house apparently empty. After bathing herself of the pig’s blood, Carrie dresses in a white nightgown and finds her mother, who at first seems to forgive her daughter, only to stab her in the back while they embrace. At this point Carrie uses her telekinetic powers to drive every nearby blade into her mother, killing her and effectively leaving her in the same pose the statue of Jesus being crucified that adorned the closet Carrie was locked into as punishment. This is quite different from how the scene plays out in the book, where Carrie returned home with the intention of killing her mother, and does so by using her powers to slowly stop Margaret’s heart (but not before being fatally stabbed). I find the confrontation in the book, and Margaret’s death, to be much creepier and more uncomfortable, while I think the added religious reference in the film elevates the movie to religious parable, in a way. It turns the film into one of those frightening bible passages, like Abraham being commanded to kill his son.

I don’t think I ever had a problem with how Carrie meets her end in the film. Since you’ve brought it up, I can see what you’re saying about the descent to hell being too literal, but I also don’t think I’d ever call De Palma an entirely subtle filmmaker. I think it fits with the outsized religion and hellfire we’ve been confronted with through the film, and I think Carrie’s implosion of grief makes a nice counterpoint to the explosion of rage we saw at the prom. The scene I did have a problem with, for many years, is the final shock of the film, as we catch up with the film’s lone survivor: Sue Snell.

Some undetermined point of time after the tragic events of the film, Sue Snell walks along a residential street and turns into an empty lot, a lot with a square of burnt ground in the middle and a ‘for sale’ sign sticking up out of it. This is the lot where Carrie’s house once stood, and if we didn’t understand that yet, it’s made clear by the message left there by some vandal. “Carrie White burns in hell,” someone has scrawled. (I always imagined it was a kid, maybe still in elementary school, possibly with an older brother who died at prom, sneaking onto the property and writing the message out of anger but also getting a thrill from the transgression. I have no idea why I ascribed such a detailed backstory to a person whose existence is only hinted at.) Sue Snell leans down to place flowers by the sign, and as she does, Carrie White’s hand shoots up out of the ground and grabs Sue by the wrist. But it was all a dream, and Sue wakes up screaming while her mother tends her, opining that she’ll never quite recover from the tragedy.

This scene never really worked for me the first handful of times I watched the film. I had always heard the scene referred to as one of the scariest, most infamous shock endings ever filmed, but I could never understand what people saw in it. It felt cheap and meaningless. The equivalent of one of those internet videos where you try and trick someone into finding some hidden puzzle in an image of an empty room, only to suddenly have a screaming skull pop onto the screen once they’ve pushed their noses to the monitor. I didn’t see the point of it; it was a dream sequence, and so not real, and therefore it didn’t matter at all. While reading the book I had this ending scene in my head, and when Sue was thinking she might be pregnant with Tommy’s child, I flashed forward and wondered if maybe the novel’s ending used a similar device to imply that Carrie had somehow imprinted herself on the unborn child. But then of course, Sue turns out to not be pregnant, so my outlandish notion was thrown out. As an adult viewer, I finally came around to the scene when I saw what it was doing. The fires have been put out, the funerals held, the site of Carrie’s death has been razed and cleaned up, and yet the sickness still remains. This event will never remain buried for Sue, who is going to be carrying these dreams with her for a lifetime.

This is a moment that actually feeds into our upcoming discussion of the sequel, but I’ll save any further explorations for that piece.

Rik: Since you have given us a pretty thorough recounting of the end of the film, I will just touch on a couple of points, and also my reactions to those moments.

First, I must jump in and say that the statue that is shown in close-up in Carrie’s closet is not Jesus on the cross but that of St. Sebastian, a martyr in early Christendom who was, in many depictions, tied to a tree and shot through with arrows. There are very clearly arrows in the figure in the statue, which was not a feature of any representation of the crucifixion of Christ, who was pierced in the side of his torso by a spear. (I thank Nick Cave for keeping knowledge of St. Sebastian and the arrows in my head.)

There is a moment, while Carrie is still out on her prom date, just after she and Tommy have been checked on a ballot as King and Queen, that Margaret White is seen nervously pacing around her kitchen table in a shot from above the ceiling light. In the last scene where we saw her, Carrie had used her power to force her mother to the bed helplessly, and as Carrie left, Margaret spit out scripture from Exodus 22:18, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch a live.” It was already clear at that point, and even at earlier points, that she felt her daughter was wicked and cursed by the devil, but in this scene, we see her leap to sheer madness as she actively makes the switch to committing to murder her own child. With the camera still looking down from the same vantage point, she selects a carrot from a collection of vegetables, most likely planned for a soup or stew originally, and places it on the cutting board. She picks up a large knife, and without holding the carrot in place for accurate cuts, she holds her arm up almost in robot-like fashion and brings it down on the carrot several times, each cut more wild than the last. One cut finally sends the remainder of the vegetable off the cutting board, and she makes a final series of hard chops at the cutting board, in which we clearly see that the object of her violence doesn’t matter. She just means to do damage, and she is most definitely focusing her mental attention only on stopping her daughter however she must. For me, this was a most frightening scene, that a parent can commit to turning on their child so suddenly and sharply (no pun intended).

Of course, when Carrie returns home, she is going to run to the arms of her mother, because no matter what has happened in her life to that point and no matter how much her mother has been the cause of much of it, mama has always been there to comfort her. Even though she and her mother left each other on bad terms before the prom, after what Carrie has been through (and who knows how much of it she really remembers), Mother is all she has left. I am only saying this in defense of years of having friends and other people say things like, “I wouldn’t go back to that bitch!” Assuredly, were I Carrie, I probably wouldn’t either, but I am not Carrie. We can only go with the person we have met in the film (not the book, because it is the film under discussion here), and that person goes back to her mother after all this. There is no way around it. She goes back, and her story ends the tragic way it has to end.

As for the jolt ending, I always rather dug it when I was younger, but I totally get what you are saying about equating to those cheap computer scares on YouTube. There is certainly a parallel here to the “jump scare” brand of horror that is far too popular these days. As I said, I really liked the Carrie jolt when I was younger, and so it probably points up that were I of a similar age today, I would actually enjoy “jump scare” horror. But I don’t like jump scares now; I find them as cheap and meaningless as you describe them. The weird thing, though, is that I still like the Carrie jolt. It may be because it was one of the purest, earliest versions of such a shock in a big budget film, not just the scare, but combined with a dream sequence ending. Regardless, I find it still works as well as De Palma intended, and even if I didn’t like it much, the film would feel much less without it. Carrie wouldn’t be the same.

Aaron: For years I’ve been of the opinion that in order to make a good movie out of a Stephen King book you have to be willing to drastically alter the text. King is one of my favorite authors, and I clearly have spent a lot of time in the company of his creations, but what works on the page has a habit of not working on the screen. This is why Stanley Kubrick made an all-time classic film out of The Shining by keeping the setting and character names while throwing everything else out the window. Mick Garris tackled the same material in 1997, but allowed King to write the slavishly faithful screenplay, ensuring no one would remember it. In that regard, Carrie is a bit of an odd duck.

Carrie is basically the exception that proves the rule; it’s one of the most faithful adaptations in terms of plot and tone, but it also knows when to stray from the text. Most noticeably, the film version of Carrie features none of King’s signature weird slang (to be fair, the book didn’t have that much of it either). But beyond just the dialogue, De Palma’s interpretation of Carrie (with the assistance of screenwriter Lawrence D. Cohen, who would basically make a career out of adapting Stephen King) makes only minor alterations to the story. Minor alterations that make a big difference.

The relationship between Chris and Billy is softened, and we see less of their interactions than we do in the book. Tommy and Sue’s relationship is given only a couple of scenes, while we get a new wacky scene of Tommy shopping with his friends. We lose a lot of minor scenes, like the one with Chris’ dad threatening to sue the school, and we even get a little less of Carrie. The film not only cuts back on Carrie’s rampage at the end, and cuts out any references to worldwide events after prom night, but it downplays Carrie’s telepathic abilities in general. Sure, she tests her powers with the mirror in her bedroom, and she goes to the library and discovers the word for what she’s been doing, but we don’t get any of the scenes of Carrie “exercising” in her room as she learns to control her powers. This effectively narrows the story’s focus and turns it into a story about the life of this tortured social misfit, with the telekinesis stuff as the powder keg the audience knows must eventually go off.

Carrie is a great lesson in how to adapt a book to the screen; you focus in on the heart of the matter, and disregard any of the small details that don’t speak to that heart. I think anyone reading this piece will immediately understand that Carrie is a film that means much more to you than it does to me, but I do think this is a great film, and one I will continue to return to in the future.

Rik: Since I am just getting back into reading Stephen King regularly, I am going to withhold judgment on how best to adapt a King book to the screen. I feel that you are more able to speak on that subject than I am. But having just read Carrie and then seen the movie version again a couple more times, I would have to agree that De Palma made most of the right decisions in both streamlining the main text for the screen, and in expanding or altering certain characters for the movie. Carrie the movie is remarkably economical in style and storytelling sense given how grandly horrific and bigger the film gets as it moves towards its conclusion. It is about as tightly edited a film as you will ever see in the genre, and I never get bored seeing it again and again over the years. It is always a pleasure.

[Well, that about does it for our discussion of Brian De Palma's Carrie adaptation. We hope you found it entertaining and enlightening. Please check back in a few days as we delve into The Rage: Carrie 2, the belated 1999 sequel to this film.]

Carrie (1976) [Pt. 1]

Rik Tod Johnson: Welcome once again to We Who Watch Behind the Rows. As part of our Countdown to Halloween celebration for October, Aaron Lowe and I are concentrating on Stephen King’s first published novel, Carrie (1974), and all four filmed adaptations of the book thus far.

In our last edition, we did indeed discuss the novel Carrie, but had some difficulties continuing any further with the talk as the 1976 film version of Brian De Palma looms very large over everything. It was decided at that point to cut bait, and just move on to the next part.

The Film: Carrie (1976)[1976, MGM; directed by Brian De Palma; screenplay by Lawrence D. Cohen]

Rik: The film version of Stephen King’s Carrie came out less than two years after the hardcover version of the novel was published. King’s hardcover was not a success, but the book was optioned to Hollywood (for only $2,500), and found its way into De Palma’s hands. Production began as the book was released as a paperback, and then suddenly sold over a million copies, giving King his first big hit. Despite the fact that the book was suddenly a bestseller, De Palma made several key changes to the plot, all of which we will undoubtedly go into moving forward because they are quite significant in most cases.

As we did with the first part of the Carrie discussion, a sort of shorthand was performed in describing the plot, since the story of Carrie White and the film that resulted from her story are so widely known today. Aaron even pointed out that if you are on this website, then you are probably already a King fan and know the story full well. So, I will make the shorthand even briefer: the wrong teenagers pick on the wrong girl with the right superpower at the wrong time. Sure, there are other details that may be important, like a wack-a-doodle fundamentalist mom, but otherwise, that is the story in a nutshell.

I mentioned last time that I watch Carrie quite frequently, guessing that I have seen it at least twenty times (if not more) in the past thirty years since I last read the book all the way through. It is part of my regular Halloween rotation, and I probably visit it at least every other year. My best estimate is that I have probably seen the film around fifty times, counting showings in the early days of home video. And now that I have read the book again, I have also watched it again (and probably will at least once more before this discussion is done).

But my first experience with Carrie goes back to its premiere showing on CBS in October 1978 after I had turned fourteen years old. At the time, I had no idea that anything was cut for television, apart from some language, but naturally they had removed the nudity in the shower scene and in the locker room, and the blowjob scene between John Travolta and Nancy Allen. For me, it was just a good, scary movie with some obvious dirty words taken out for television. I didn’t know what I was missing until I saw the VHS. And once I saw it, I watched it a lot.

Aaron, what was your first experience with De Palma’s version of Carrie like?

Aaron: Well, prepared to be underwhelmed, because I don’t actually remember my first viewing of Carrie. I can make a pretty educated guess about the circumstances surrounding my discovery of the film, of course. It was probably while I was in Jr. High, between 1990 and 1992, and I probably rented it from our neighborhood Video City. But even that may be incorrect, because I don’t know if my mom would have let me rent Carrie, an R-rated film, at the time. Perhaps, like you, I first caught the film on late night television in a much-edited form. I don’t know why I can’t recall the specifics of watching Carrie for the first time, when I can remember my initial viewings of many of the other films we’re going to cover, or have covered, even the ones of significantly lower personal importance. Carrie just seems to be a film that’s always been in my life. That isn’t to say that Carrie is a film I have a really personal connection to, as seems to be the case with you, it’s just that the specifics of the movie seem to have always existed in my memory. Certainly it was a part of my pop culture lexicon, and widely quoted, by my freshman year of high school.

And yet, even in those same high school years, when I was quoting this movie, and when the film should have at least spoken to my burgeoning misanthropy and occasional desire to see my own school burn to the ground, I never had more than a general appreciation for Carrie. I did like the movie, enough to see it multiple times, but I don’t recall ever feeling a great affinity for it. I have no solid explanation for this, but I suspect I might have come to the film a bit too early. I was a bit of a late bloomer, I guess, sheltered and naive about a lot of things, and I believe I saw Carrie before the concepts of sex and femininity and the biological functions of reproduction were anything more than something we might have discussed once or twice in health class. It was certainly before my own teen angst really blossomed. That might give some explanation for why the film didn’t make a really strong first impression, while also sticking with me over the years. However, unlike you, this film has never entered my annual (or even semi-annual) Halloween rotation. There is a film we’ll cover eventually that I believe fulfills the same function for me as Carrie does for you, but this has always been a film I just happen to pop in every couple of years or so.

I must say, I am shocked to hear that you saw this on network television in 1978! And on CBS, of all places! I guess CBS back in the seventies wasn’t quite the “grandparent’s network” that it is today, as that would have been within Norman Lear’s reign as king of socially conscious television, but I’m still having trouble imagining this in an edited form that excises not only the nudity and naughty language, but also, I presume, much of the film’s inciting incident. I’m also imagining what that locker room scene must have been like without any nudity in it, and I’m picturing a flurry of editing that pushes that scene into the realm of the abstract. No wonder catching up with the uncensored VHS deeper into your teen years was such a memorable discovery.

And that locker room scene. Seeing as how 

it’s the first scene in the movie, we might as well just dive right in. Even as a teenager, without much capacity for critical thought when it came to movies, I recognized the washed out, fuzzy, overly sentimental manner in which De Palma films teenagers cavorting around in their underwear, or fully nude in some cases. The locker room is filled with steam, the music is something soft and airy, the girls are running around in slow motion, and the lens seems to have been smeared with vaseline to make the scene look like a romantic closeup in a movie from the 50s. Watching it with modern eyes the scene has the look of something mocking trashy, “serious” European erotic films, but it all just forms the basis of what De Palma does in this picture. Of course, that serves to make the other parts of the film, especially the scenes between Carrie White and her mother, feel all the more dark and claustrophobic. But at times he overplays the sentimentality of the high school scenes so much that I imagine the film felt nostalgic even when it was new.

Rik, as someone who was conscious and aware at the time this movie was produced and released, what’s your take on the time capsule feel of the film? Am I off base in feeling like De Palma set this in a sort of timeless postcard version of middle America? Did you get the feeling, as a kid, that this was a movie set in a recognizable present day?
Rik: I will answer your question in a second, because it is a subject that I feel is important to the discussion. But first, I want to clarify that the showing of Carrie I saw was a prime time premiere of the film on CBS, not a late night viewing. It seems hard to believe in these days, but while cable TV was around at the time, it did not have even a smidgen of the reach it does today. Without the secondary market of VHS in full flourish yet either, feature films frequently jumped to network television, albeit in drastically edited form, pretty quickly. It is interesting to note that on the day after Carrie premiered on CBS, the very next night they premiered an R-rated film of a very different sort: Network, the one that prefigures much of the bullshit we are in today.

To get a glimpse into just how they handled the editing of the shower and locker room sequence in the television version, check out this video that I found on YouTube, that shows clips from the airing on its premiere night on October 3, 1978, including that sequence. 

Pretty ably handled – it is clear they had alternate takes planned for other types of viewings – though it is shocking to realize the tampon-throwing scene made it on television, but hell, that might have appeared on an ABC Afterschool Special in those days. They do, however, cut out every drop of blood from the scene, so you have to just kind of “know” what is going on with her (until the tampons are thrown, that is…) I do find it funny that CBS, as you noted, has a rep as a “grandparents’ channel” (I call it that as well) especially when it has the CSI shows on it, which can often be just as gory as many supposedly notorious horror films that I have seen. And right in prime time. Just as a side note, I recall when CBS premiered Caddyshack in prime time. When it got to Rodney Dangerfield’s big closing line in the film – “Hey, everybody, we’re all gonna get laid!” – the powers that be saw fit to alter it to “Hey, everybody, we’re all gonna take a shower!” Sure, I suppose after a sporting event, you might want to go home and wash off, but it still sounds to me like Rodney is insisting that everybody is going to hang together and do this as a group. Different strokes for different folks.

Here is what I get from that opening sequence. I don’t take it as trashing European erotic films so much as I take it as giving easily led male viewers (who would probably make up a bulk of the audience at the time for this film) a glimpse into what is for them a world of mystery and fantasy. Yes, the music is almost ethereal in its loveliness, the camera pans slowly across the lockers and the semi-nude and nude girls cavorting about snapping towels and teasing one another. What straight male in the 1970s and even ‘80s didn’t have the fantasy of girls flirting in the locker room somewhere on the list of erotic daydreams? Films after Carrie would play with variations on this fantasy, such as Porky’s, but De Palma’s goal is one of subversion. The camera, music, and steam set up the fantasy, and then we get the sight of Sissy Spacek in the shower. At first, her time under the water keeps the erotic fantasy mood bubbling along. The image of the water spraying in slow motion from the spout is entirely phallic in composition, Pino Donaggio’s music continues along in angelic fashion, Spacek is seen nude from behind and rubs her breasts and other areas while maintaining an almost orgasmic look upon her face, and eventually she drops the soap in her reverie as she rubs around her pelvic region. The fantasy seems complete.

And then, with a closeup on her thighs… 

the blood comes. The scene is slow to shift at first, as the 17-year-old Carrie doesn’t have an understanding of what has happened to her, sheltered as she is from information regarding her womanhood, but the scene is supposed to represent an awakening. It is a double awakening for Carrie, who will find she has grown up after all, despite her mother’s wishes, but it will also increase the pain of her existence as an outcast amongst her schoolmates. She will grow from this point more assured as her supernatural power, and thus her independence from her mother, both increase throughout the film. She will still be ruled by the doubts and fears that have shrouded her life to this point, but she will finally learn to fight back against them, ultimately, to tragic consequences for many, including herself.

And for the viewers, who entered into this film cloaked in an extreme fantasy dominated by male wish fulfillment, they are now awakened roughly and sneakily into the very personal horrors of feminine hygiene (a world in which most men, even the most mature ones, still find discomfort discussing), as blood gushes between Carrie’s legs and she screams in a panic, believing she is dying. The lovely high school girls of the locker room, whom we had ogled so graciously but gratuitously with our eyes minutes before, have now been turned into nothing but horrid, raving monsters, as they throw tampons at Carrie White and chant at her to “Plug it up! Plug it up!” as poor Carrie cries, not understanding what is happening to her at all.

So, my answer is “No,” I don’t find the shower scene nostalgic at all. I find it completely intentional in its effort to throw the viewer a curveball from the very beginning, and that its look is chiefly attributable to De Palma’s desire to perform such a misdirection. I don’t think he overplays it all. I think he is showing exactly the amount of deftness that he needs.

Now, having given that answer, I must now say, “Yes, sometimes I think the film does feel like it is in a time capsule” but for reasons other than the ones you quoted. There is a scene with Billy (played by John Travolta) and Chris (played by a quite gorgeous Nancy Allen – the future Mrs. De Palma) are riding around in Billy’s souped-up hot rod, drinking beers without getting caught by the cops, causing minor trouble, and doing what we used to call “cruising the Strip” back in Anchorage. There are almost no songs outside of original music used in the film (even the music at the prom is original material by a band performing in the film called Vance or Towers), but one song that is highly recognizable is Heat Wave by Martha and the Vandellas. Since the song was a #4 monster hit back in 1963, you may think that this is the reason that I might attribute a nostalgic feeling to the film. Nope. Hold on there, little buckaroo…

At the time that Carrie was being made, George Lucas’ American Graffiti had blown up all over the place, and with it came a huge wave of early 1960s nostalgia. “Where were you in ‘62?” was a catchphrase from the movie’s promotional campaign that caught on all over the place, even with a kid like me who was born in ‘64. I distinctly remember people saying it when I was a kid and seeing it on posters. Post-Graffiti, Happy Days (and its many spinoffs) took over television for a few years, and I listened to as much oldies radio as I did current Top 40 stuff (I wasn’t into rock quite yet). I finally saw American Graffiti when it was reissued earlier in 1978, before I saw Carrie on TV. I have no clue if De Palma meant for the street scene with Travolta in the hot rod while Heat Wave plays in the background to be an intentional nod to Graffiti or not, but what it does to me is trigger a connection. (For the record, Heat Wave is not a song that is used in Graffiti, being a year too late for the soundtrack.)

Apart from Piper Laurie as Carrie’s mom, the rest of the costuming and dress in Carrie is pretty much of the time of its filming. Even hoodlum Billy, listening to oldies radio, looks like guys I had to deal with in 1976 in style and attitude. Because ‘60 nostalgia was a thing when I was a kid, when this film was made, and because everyone’s look is so tied to how it was then, the film will never have a timeless feel to me. It is a film tied to the year of its making, making it a time capsule piece, and yet, because it gets a certain detail or two concerning nostalgia within that time frame (not of that time frame, mind you), that it does have an odd feeling about it.

Aaron: Watching that video you posted up above, I think it’s clear that an alternate opening was filmed for use on television. This is something I should have thought of, but I guess I was just using modern thinking, or at least the thinking of my own youth. I also find it interesting that the intro not only excises the blood and obscures what is happening to Carrie, the TV edit also seems squeamish about even showing the tampons. You get some “Plug it up!” shouts in there, but it’s much briefer than the theatrical version, and the camera never gives us a good look at what is actually being thrown. By this point it’s clear to the audience what is going on, but it’s interesting to think about the discussions that went into this scene. How much could they get away with cutting out while still keeping the scene coherent.

At this point I feel like I’m going to be defending my words even though we seem to be in pretty much complete agreement over all the points you made. I certainly didn’t find the shower scene nostalgic, but I just noticed a lot of retro-seeming touches to the film, and I couldn’t quite tell if all of them were period-specific or if De Palma was intentionally making the daylight high school scenes look a little old fashioned. It’s a product of my age, I suppose, as my entire knowledge of the seventies has come secondhand, through movies and family photos. I did not become consciously aware of the world until the ’80s, after all. You bring up American Graffiti, which is where my mind went as well, and that could possibly explain some of the connection my mind was making. I’m not quite sure if De Palma was aware of that scene’s similarities to the earlier George Lucas film, but it is quite possible, considering pre-production for Carrie shared some resources with Star Wars. (De Palma reportedly handled all or most of the casting interviews for Star Wars).

If anything, I agree that the male-fantasy style of direction provides for a nice reversal of expectations a few moments later. I think that’s what De Palma does throughout the film, and where I said “overplayed,” I really meant “heightened”. In a statement that could very well be used to describe most of his career, De Palma heightens every aspect of this film. The daylight scenes have a gauzy, ethereal brightness, like a soap commercial. The darkness is stained and pervasive, all the more imposing for the light that preceded it. In a way you could say every scene in the high school represents a fantasy vision.

That tendency to heighten the emotion in everything he does isn’t always successful for De Palma, but here it turns out to have been a canny decision, as this has the effect of making the truly outlandish elements, like the telekinesis or Margaret White, feel somewhat believable. Margaret White is still a monstrous character, horrific and grotesque, but the fact that everything in this film exists at such extremes means that she at least feels like a part of this world. The film goes from the erotic fantasy of the opening credits, to the body-horror of a girl’s first period (not that I think the menstrual cycle itself is horrific, just that it is presented as such in this scene) and the outlandishly cruel teasing, to the bumbling bureaucracy of the high school principal, and finally to the oppressive, yellowing decay and punishing religion of Carrie’s home life. That’s a wild range of tonal shifts that still feel connected and of a piece with each other.

In Carrie, the jocks are blonde and blue eyed, the nerds are awkward and bespectacled, the bad girls are bad and the bad boys are worse. De Palma almost turns these characters into flesh and blood cartoons, including the villains of the piece, Chris Hargensen and Billy Nolan. In this film version a lot of their relationship, which in the book is abusive and ugly, is played at times for laughs. Perhaps it’s just the fact that it’s hard to take John Travolta seriously at this point in his career, but Billy never seems threatening. Even when he slaps Chris a few times in the car, the slaps are half-hearted and don’t seem to cause her any pain, and we laugh at her repeatedly referring to him as “you shit.” But then, I’m able to take Travolta seriously in his other De Palma film from just a few years later, Blow Out, so I tend to think this was a conscious decision on Travolta or De Palma’s part. Almost like a slightly more sinister Vinny Barbarino. It’s odd, that in a movie of such extremes, the one thing that’s softened is this relationship.

Do you think I’m correct in my reading of the Chris/Billy relationship? Do you think it’s been softened for the movie, or is it just John Travolta’s goofiness in general?
Rik: Travolta as Billy Nolan was really hard to accept when I first watched the film. Physically, you go, “Of course, he is Billy!” But at the time, I was a Sweathog fan because I had watched every season of Welcome Back, Kotter (with and without him) and The Boy in the Plastic Bubble and Grease. I had not seen Saturday Night Fever yet when I first watched Carrie on television, so I did not know if he had any range, and Blow Out was still around the corner (and Pulp Fiction was eons distant). We (my friends, brothers, and I) kind of loved Travolta at the time like an errant cousin, so describing him as “doofy” is entirely apt, because frankly, that is exactly how we saw him at the time. We were still walking around imitating Vinnie Barbarino making fun of junkies going “Gimme drugs! Gimme drugs!” with grasping hands, and aping his “Wha-? Who? Where?” catchphrase bit from Kotter.

Travolta could play what looks on the surface like a hoodlum in a leather jacket in Grease, but that character is never menacing at all, and is all bark as far as toughness goes. So would Travolta of that period really have been able to embody the increasingly violent and ill-tempered Billy Nolan from the book of Carrie? Not really, but it is a bit unfair given this was only Travolta’s second film role (he did The Devil’s Rain with William Shatner previous to this). Still, people are cast because other people believe they can play the part. I agree the part must have been drastically rewritten, however, to make him less of a cad onscreen. Whether this was to match up with Travolta or not, I don’t know. Maybe they found they had the perfect guy physically for the part, but he was too much of a cupcake at the time. In the end, they toned Billy down, just as they toned down Carrie’s ultimate destructive rampage (though it is still pretty impressive in the film).

What they have done with the Chris and Billy relationship is to allow Billy to be blustery and almost casually violent in his reaction to his girlfriend, but of course, oral sex wins out in the end. Despite the fact that the weapon she holds is one of pure sex, Chris is the one who ultimately rules their relationship. She can turn him on a dime in most cases, and knows it fully. I think you are reading the way they are portrayed correctly. They are more cartoonish in their characterization, like most of the kids, but they are no less hateful for it. I think we see in the slaughterhouse scene where Billy has to take over the butchering of the pig for its blood that he can be a true monster when the moment presents itself. I do recall that was rather a shocking moment for me when I first saw it, thinking sweet but dopey Vinnie Barbarino was capable of such senseless harm upon an animal.

You brought up Carrie’s mother, Margaret White, and mentioned how she seems to be fully a part of this world that has been rendered to the extreme at all corners by De Palma’s vision. I am not going to argue that point, but Margaret still stands out completely apart from the other characters for the fact that she (as she is in the book) is still somewhat otherworldly in nature, look, and behavior due to the fact that she purposefully sets herself apart from it with her relentless spouting of biblical scripture and her hardcore sheltering of her own daughter in a quite misguided attempt to protect the girl. In seeing this film as a teenager, encountering Margaret White for the first time was an affirmation that I was on the right path, for this was the type of villain I had been battling since I was a child, a holier than thou, interfering parent with her own built-in god complex. Sadly, I at first thought that Piper Laurie, who was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for playing Margaret, was actually a horrible actor simply because I hated the character so much right out of the gate. It’s an effect that I had to learn to shake off as I got older, that the people who essayed truly despicable characters in films were often marvelous at their jobs, but I just could not get past how much I wanted to trample that character to death to enjoy the role or the actor within it.

I, of course, think Piper Laurie is more and more marvelous in the part every time that I see it, and I honestly think she is far better than eventual winner Beatrice Straight in Network. She also has heavier lifting to do in this role as well. So, it was surprising to learn in several resources that Ms. Laurie thought she was doing a comedy role from the start, albeit a very dark one, and so played it purposefully over the top to fit the part as she saw it. I can totally see this in watching her performance now, but I wonder how she must have felt in discovering that other actors, especially Ms. Spacek, and even her director, possibly didn’t approach the film in the same way.

While Carrie does not have any shortage of villains tormenting her, it is pretty apparent that her own mother is the true “Big Bad” villain of both the book and the film. Because most of Carrie’s problems stem directly from the alternating mistreatment/overprotection provided by her mother, she more than anyone is who Carrie is going to need to get past to either get freedom or release from her hell. In circling back to the Chris/Billy relationship, perhaps this is why those two characters were softened to an extent and at least made a little more silly and pathetic, so that Margaret would not get upstaged as the Big Bad in the end. What is your approach to the Margaret White character, Aaron?

Aaron: I do remember finding her comedic when I was younger, and not in a good way. I enjoyed the performance, but I always ascribed to it a “so bad it’s good” label, a label I’ve since come to loathe. But as I got older and my appreciation of the film deepened, I came to respect what Ms. Laurie was doing in the film. I never knew that she found her role a comedic one, but after reading that, I realize that’s absolutely correct. It’s easy to see, in her outsized accent and her continuous wailings. The performance is entirely over the top, and would have been ruined by deciding to play everything straight. I mean, how do you tell your daughter you can see her “dirty pillows” unless you think you’re in some sort of twisted comedy? Not only that, but it does give her that feeling of “otherness,” of not belonging with the rest of the people around her. I had said that she felt of a piece with the movie’s world, and I still believe that, but I believe she fits into the tonality of the film, even while standing apart from every other character.

Margaret gets one scene in this film that I think was intended entirely as comedy, and that’s when she attempts to sell a bible to Sue Snell’s mother. There’s a little bit of proto-cringe humor in this exchange, where Margaret silently stands outside the door until being invited in, and the other woman visibly tries to figure out how much time she has to spend in Margaret’s presence before it’s socially acceptable to kick her out. This scene is new to the movie, as Margaret in the book doesn’t seem to have the urge to evangelize; she’s happy to just publicly hold everyone around her in contempt. Strictly speaking I have a feeling this scene was included to give Margaret a chance to act with someone other than Sissy Spacek, and to make it clear that she lives within this world. The older characters are all familiar with Margaret and her, ahem, peculiar religious views.

That’s not the only purely comedic moment in the movie, and it’s not even the most obviously comedic moment. For me, the most purely comedic moment comes when Chris begins to give Billy a blowjob, and she keeps repeating his name while he reacts the way most movie teens react to oral sex: with wide-eyed confusion and immediate orgasmic intensity. After repeating his name a good half dozen times (not to get too graphic here, but the clarity in Nancy Allen’s clearly ADRed voice in this scene always bugged me a little), Chris finally goes all the way with the line “I hate Carrie White,” which elicits a moment of silence from Billy before he looks down at his lap and utters a confused, “Who?” before the scene quickly cuts away. So yes, in the film, Chris clearly has complete control over Billy, while that wasn’t quite the case in the book. Still, despite being easily swayed by promises of sex, Billy is a violent young man capable of great cruelty. That slaughterhouse scene was a shock to me as well, the first real sign that truly terrible things could, and would, happen. That may be why Travolta was given the job in the first place; we both consider him a bit of a goof at this point in his career, so when he finally, fatally swings that hammer down at the slaughterhouse, the shock hits home. Adorable little John Travolta just killed a pig for kicks... anything can happen!

Now that I’m consciously thinking of the comedy in the film, it puts a lot of Carrie’s wackier moments into a new context. Like the scene where Tommy Ross goes tuxedo shopping with his friends. Right in the middle of the scene, mid-conversation, De Palma begins fast-forwarding the film. Not for very long, but the conversation between the three friends is suddenly sped up to a half intelligible squeak for a few seconds before dropping back, in mid-sentence, into normal speed. As a kid I thought this was a defect in the VHS copy I had (shameful admission: I used to make copies of almost every VHS I rented), but of course it was a stylistic choice on De Palma’s part. I’ll admit I’m still a bit stumped on this one. Did he do it just because he sometimes loves to throw some stylistic wackiness into his films? Did he do it because he realized the scene was really boring, and it was a compromise between cutting it out entirely and keeping a scene that further humanizes Tommy Ross?

I have more to say about Tommy Ross in this film, and his relationship to both Carrie and Sue Snell, especially in comparison to the book. But for now I’ll throw it back to you. I think it’s clear so far that you’ve internalized this film to a far greater extent than I have, and I’m curious as to your opinions regarding some of the film’s comedic moments.

Rik: I do not want to get anywhere close to making someone who is not familiar with this film believe that they are sitting down to a comedy. Piper Laurie may have felt it was – and it may have been just how she needed to approach her admittedly out-there role to be able to embrace it – but I do not see Carrie as a comedy, dark or otherwise, nor do I believe that De Palma approached it in that manner. I think it is from all angles first a horror film – very much so – but that in handling its wide array of human characters, it has a few terrific comedic moments, just as there are a variety of other well-turned moments touching on the rest of the emotional spectrum.

I do agree with you for the most part on many of the scenes you mentioned as to their effectiveness in a comedic sense, especially in the oral sex scene. (The ADR does not bother me at all though.) The tuxedo scene, which ends up with a tux t-shirt, of course (whose popularity was just getting going in those days, and I remember a lot of my friends had them, though never me), is just one of De Palma’s stylistic flourishes, an attempt to mix things up a bit by being squirrelly with editing.

Another one of his common effects is the use of split screen to show simultaneous action in different areas or different characters. We get a taste of it in a couple of places (especially the murderous prom sequence), but I had read an interview with De Palma where he said that the entire destruction sequence was completely shot using split screens. He spent six weeks editing it together, but it just wasn’t working out the way he wanted and was running far too long. So he scrapped that plan and just used split screen shots here and there for added effectiveness and when they seem to work best in a timing sense.

[That's going to do it for today, join us Friday morning for Part 2 of our discussion of Brian De Palma's Carrie, where we'll be going deeper into the plot, that infamous finale, and our thoughts on Brian De Palma's filmography. See you soon.]

Carrie [The Novel] (1974)

1st edition hardback (1974)

Aaron: Welcome, friends, to a special super-sized edition of We Who Watch Behind the Rows: Stephen King Print Vs. Film. The days are getting shorter, the shadows are growing longer, and Halloween is almost upon us. Even here in our home base of California there is a pleasant chill on the breeze. Rik and I have chosen to celebrate this most wonderful time of the year by turning our attentions toward a novel for the first time in this project, and we’ve chosen, fittingly enough, Stephen King’s first published work. Today we’ll be discussing the novel Carrie, and in subsequent posts we’ll be exploring the various filmed entertainments derived from same. So please, sit with us for a while and join the fun conversations to follow.

Carrie: a novel of a girl with a frightening power (1974)

As a child, until well into my teens, I took part in a semi-regular routine that I imagine is still pretty common to American kids growing up in the suburbs: several weekends every summer I would go garage sale shopping with my grandmother. Not just the ones in our neighborhood, though; our range was wider than that. My grandmother would peruse the classified section of the newspaper and circle ads that looked promising, plotting out the houses and sales we would hit throughout the morning (as any serious garage sale hunter will tell you, the early bird gets the worm at these things). I’m not sure if many local papers still run ads for garage sales – I’m sure Craigslist has cornered that particular market, among other, less savory ones – but I do remember looking through the paper myself, circling ads that listed “books” as one of the types of item for sale.

This was how I acquainted myself with Stephen King: through regular excursions to dig through the stuff others had decided they had no need of. As an avid reader and budding horror maven, I eagerly dug through cardboard boxes full of paperbacks. With little experience and no real developed tastes, I snatched up whatever I could find that looked spooky or scary. John Saul and Dean Koontz were early names I looked out for, but as the summer progressed and the garage sale count grew, I learned to pay special attention to the name Stephen King. 

This is all a rather tangential way of explaining that my experience reading Stephen King was rather random. I followed no real roadmap, knew nothing of publication dates (and would not have cared if I did), cared not a bit about a book’s reputation or critical standing. If it was written by Stephen King, I put down my handful of quarters for the books (fifty cents was always the magic price when it came to paperbacks in the summers of my youth). I started with It, but might follow that up with Eyes of the Dragon, The Tommyknockers, one of the Dark Tower books, a short story collection. For a few years Stephen King books were reliable Christmas or birthday gifts. Needful Things, Insomnia, Nightmares & Dreamscapes. 

I let myself get off on another tangent, when all I’m really trying to say is that there are still gaps in my Stephen King knowledge, and pretty big ones at that. For years I had no idea Richard Bachman was another name I should have been looking for at garage sales (this was pre-internet, remember). There are some pretty famous, important works in King’s career that I still haven’t read, and until a few weeks ago Carrie was one of them. I’d seen the movie several times over the years, of course, but I’d never cracked the novel until picking up a copy for the express purpose of writing this series of posts. 

I must say, to rehash a sentiment I’ve had several times already in this project of ours, reading King’s first published novel, over a quarter century after I was first introduced to the man’s works, was an interesting experience, for reasons I’ll get into as we go along. For now, Rik, before we dive in headfirst, I’m curious to hear what place this book held in your own personal canon. I’m assuming you did not miss out on this one, as I did.

Rik: It’s pretty simple: Not fully, at first. But it took a while to finally read it all the way through. My mother regularly kept a book sitting on the bathroom counter in our house, and at a certain age, I figured out that some of those books had “dirty” parts in them. I was already quite the avid reader, and was on my own journey through literature in my turn from tween (we didn’t call it then) to teen, which mostly involved some amalgam of science-fiction, fantasy, and jungle adventure. I was just getting into horror through the movies, though I was fascinated by Poe since I was much younger (but for many reasons not necessarily or fully related to horror).

My mom read a lot of cop thrillers, mysteries, supernatural and horror novels, and the popular crap of the day (Jonathan Livingston Seagull, etc.)… basically whatever caught her eye at the checkout stand or bookstore, or that her friends were reading or recommending. In a reverse of such a trend, my friends and I had all, around the ages of eleven and twelve, become really adept at not just snooping out Playboys and Penthouses in our individual houses, but also at ensuring that when those magazines were tossed out in the trash, that they didn’t actually make it to the dump. By the same token, I was good at finding the dirty stuff in books and letting my friends know to watch out for certain novels their parents might be reading and exactly where the best stuff was to be found (chapter and verse, as it were).

At some point, I moved beyond just looking for the racy stuff and dirty words, and actually started reading anything that my mom was reading. I remember Peter Benchley (because this is how I first read Jaws and The Deep), Dean Koontz, James A. Michener (whom I found too dry), James Clavell, Joseph Wambaugh, Michael Crichton, Sidney Sheldon, Harold Robbins, Frederick Forsyth, Judith Krantz, Ken Follett, etc. But I didn’t know Stephen King from Erica Jong at this point, except that Erica Jong wrote a really, really dirty book (Fear of Flying) that my mom read. And thus, far before I could fully understand it (or what a "zipless fuck" was, I sneak read that book as well.

Tie-in cover for the 1976 movie;
possibly published in 1977 based on
the books mentioned on the cover..

If you want to know how I first got into Hunter S. Thompson, it’s because my mom had a copy of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in our car one day (I believe it was loaned to her by a friend) when my younger brothers had a really long doctor appointment. I elected to sit in the car (you could do such a thing relatively safely (I was fourteen at the time) in Alaska in those days, and thus, I read the entire thing straight through, with my mouth dropped to the floor in fascination and delight at the language and imagery. It simultaneously insured that my mind would forever be blown (the “doors of perception” were fully open from that moment onward) but it was nightmarish enough that I would never need duplicate what Thompson needed to reach the same state. Though I became an instant fan of his writing, even as a kid I realized that Thompson was pulling a bit of a con despite his “ gonzo journalistic” coating. I felt that even if I wanted to approach a similar style, attempting the same path of personal self-destruction as his (though he kept at it for a good, long while) was rather a cop-out, and so I never even tried… which possibly saved my life at several points. (It’s not like I didn’t have moments where I was intrigued but ultimately chose to walk away.)

And somewhere in there, probably after the movie came out since I remember the paperback had a picture from the film on it, I read Carrie. Well, I read parts of Carrie. I am pretty certain that The Dead Zone is the first of King’s novels that I read all the way through, and I know that I also read through the entire Night Shift short story collection at the same time that my mom was reading it. But I do remember picking up Carrie when I saw it, and thinking at first, “This looks like a “girl” book” but then checking it out anyway because there might be dirty stuff. Besides, the girl on the cover was covered in blood. How cool was that? And when I got right into that infamous first chapter in the girls’ locker room at the school… Uh… Ummm…. 

To be honest, at that age, despite my burgeoning interest in sexuality, was still a little unclear on the whole feminine hygiene issue, and so the scene rather confused me a bit. It kind of shocked me, but it didn’t stop me from coming back to the book. But I did not read it all the way through at that time. It would be several years later – sometime in the early ‘80s is my guess – after I had read many other King books and seen the De Palma film a number of times, before I finally read the full Carrie novel thoroughly.

Aaron: I feel the urge to outline the plot of Carrie a little bit, to bring some newcomers up to speed, but of course that’s ridiculous. Even if you’ve never read the novel, or seen any of the films derived from it, or seen the short-lived Broadway musical, there have still been over four decades of parodies, jokes, and references to this story. If you have consumed any pop culture within the last forty years, you’re likely familiar with the touchstones of this story. Also, the obvious question; why would anyone unfamiliar with Carrie be reading this site?

We all know the plot; social misfit with religious extremist mother is the victim of a cruel prank, leading to carnage and mass fatalities as her burgeoning telekinetic powers are unleashed on her classmates.  I bet, even to those who haven’t read the book or seen the movie, that a lot of the blanks in that description have already been filled in from memory. Like the fact that Carrie’s powers begin manifesting themselves during puberty, which arrives with unfortunate timing while Carrie is showering in the school locker room. Or the detail that Carrie’s final revenge on her classmates occurs at prom, where she’s just been crowned prom queen before being doused in pig’s blood. Or even the fact that she’s been asked to the prom by one of the most popular boys in school, who was prompted to ask Carrie by his girlfriend who feels guilty for her part in Carrie’s continual humiliations. How many lines can still be quoted by the uninitiated? “They’re all gonna laugh at you!” “I can see your dirty pillows.” The specifics of this 42-year-old story have been thoroughly absorbed into the pop culture consciousness.

That being said, as someone with a great familiarity with Stephen King’s works, and having seen the film several times, there were still a few surprises to be had. I’d never read this book, but I had read plenty of King’s other stories and novels from around the same period, and still I was a bit surprised with how rough this novel is. There’s something unpolished and brutal about the writing here, and while I pointed that out as a slight negative when discussing his short stories, I found it to be completely appropriate here. Stephen King was less than a decade out of high school when he wrote this story, putting him at maybe the perfect perspective to write a horror novel about teenagers in high school. He was old enough to view the dramas and concerns of teenagers with some mature hindsight (and more than a little contempt), and yet young enough to remember how it actually felt at the time, when so many hormones are rushing through your body that you feel everything more sharply than you will ever again.

Carrie is a bruised book, full of pain and sadness and some of the worst people imaginable. If the characters in this novel aren’t the ugliest King has ever written, he sure tops himself in terms of quantity, by having nearly everyone we meet come across as selfish, cruel, manipulative, and pathetic. To be sure, most of the adults we meet seem like decent enough people, but they remain blind to the horrible acts being committed by their children, and when they are made aware, as in the principle when he learns of Carrie being taunted for getting her period, they are laughably spineless and ineffectual. And as for the kids themselves, the best that can be said of most of them is that they simply don’t care about anybody else, and tease Carrie simply because other kids are doing it. It’s hard to hold that against them, though, because I think that’s the default setting for most people in their teens, when it can often feel like you’re the only one going through what everyone in the world has and will go through. I certainly have shameful memories of going along with some teasing of some random kid I didn’t really know. Nothing near the level of what happens in Carrie, but I think it’s a pretty universal part of growing up that your fear of being seen as the ‘other’ often causes you to go along with the tribe in their attacks on those unlucky enough to be chosen. 

These brief musings aside, reading this novel didn’t really bring anything to the surface. High school was not a pleasant time for me, and as a young man I was quick to move past it, and as a full-fledged adult I’ve mostly made my peace with any lingering resentments tied to that period. That said, I’m also a fairly nostalgic person, still reading authors I loved at that age (clearly, as evidenced by this entire series of writings), still watching movies from that period, still listening constantly to the music of my high school years. And yet, perhaps because I had never read this novel before, I found it stirred no memories nor brought about any maudlin remembrances. 

Rik, I know we’ve already gone over your experiences with this book, but I’m a bit curious. As someone who would have had a more adolescent connection to the book, and also someone with more awareness of the time period the novel takes place in, how did you react to reading the novel again? Were you able to identify at all with the characters, or did it bring up any memories of your own teenage years? Do you think the characters are unlikable, as I had said, or do you think that’s just my age and general annoyance with teenagers talking?

Rik: Well, apart from acquiring some lifelong friends my last couple of years, I liked very little of high school, and sadly, there is enough failure wrapped up in it for me that I will never be able to get past certain elements of it. And reading Carrie again did resurrect for me, however faintly, the ghosts of abusive or otherwise abrasive personalities with whom I also had to deal in attending middle and high school in the late ‘70s. I was certainly no Carrie White (but damn, if I only had access to her power, some assholes would pay with their lives; hell, I'd like that power today), but I had my run-ins with the occasional bully over the years. It always blew my mother’s mind that my smart mouth didn’t have me getting beat up constantly, but I never was, and part of that was being wise enough (most of the time) to either partner with the right-sized buddy at some moments or to show them just enough pure crazy at other moments.

When I finally read Carrie all the way through back then, I remember thoroughly despising each and every character who got in Carrie’s face, but I also remembered not having nearly as much empathy for Carrie in the book because of King’s descriptions of her as being overweight and his use of such adjectives as “bovine” in describing a look she gives. As a result, this makes me feel as implicit in their horrid behavior towards her as someone like Sue Snell, who does regret her actions and goes overboard in trying to correct them. On the opposite end, I had nothing but empathy for Sissy Spacek’s Carrie in the movie version, probably because I saw Badlands pretty young, and thus, always had a little crush on Spacek, however strange some others thought she might look. It speaks volumes for my own hypocrisy, since I am now as overweight now in my early fifties as I used to be underweight in my early twenties, but even more for the double standard of Hollywood, that they wouldn’t cast an actress that truly fit the character as written in the book. While she may have still fulfilled the “oddness” of Carrie White’s personality, and may also not have been conventionally “pretty” by Hollywood’s rigorous standards of the time, Spacek was nowhere near the Carrie White physically described in the book.

Reading Carrie again was a bit like watching Dazed and Confused for the first time on its release. I liked the film at the time a good bit less than many other friends who totally got into it right away. For me, it was because many of the characters were just a little too close to the surface at the time, especially Parker Posey’s Darla. I love Posey, but her character frightens the hell out of me. And I knew several girls just like that in school in the ‘70s. And Carrie, the book even more than the movie, is chock full of horrid, hazing Darlas. It took me a couple more showings to fully get into Dazed before I really started to love it for what it is.

To answer your question about the squadron of unlikeable people in the book, I believe there are people for whom to hang out a shingle of hope. Not every character is completely ugly, even if their original actions might be construed as such. I mentioned Sue Snell, of whom I do believe feels real remorse for her actions even if I believe she does go a little overboard in trying to get her boyfriend to ask Carrie to the prom. Couldn’t she have simply apologized and genuinely tried to befriend and understand Carrie instead? (If she had, I suppose we wouldn’t have the story as it is.) Miss Desjardin laughs at Carrie at first but then feels guilt for it and practically goes fire and brimstone on the girls who perpetrated the shower prank. The principal, too, while acting in protecting the school, still takes up battle against Chris’ lawyer father on behalf of Carrie. Sue’s boyfriend, Tommy Ross, too is shown to be a deeper character than perceived by most people, and without any motivation of his own in the humiliation of Carrie. I feel that while most of the characters we meet are motivated by the variety of sins you described earlier, and are indeed some of the ugliest people he has delineated in his writing, that much like real life itself, there are always good people (or at least the rudimentary elements of them) to be found when you scratch the surface.

I think it should be mentioned early on here that Carrie is a novel written in the epistolary form, that is as a collection of other writings outside of just the normal prose style. An epistolary is comprised of a tale through the use of documents, such as letters, sections of other (often imaginary) texts, poems, newspaper articles, quotes, and diary entries, for examples. Since we are in the Halloween season, it is most appropriate to point out that one of the most famous examples of an epistolary novel is Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Although I had read Carrie previously, I had quite forgotten that the book was written in this style, and it took me a little while to warm to its form, as it were. In actuality, the book is about half written in this style, as there are also long sections of the normal King prose at play, but it is still a drastic change, especially late in the book when it turns for a bit into court transcripts in the aftermath of the school tragedy. Aaron, did you enjoy this change of pace from King’s usual style? Did you like the epistolary form, or did you get confused in the switches in style as I did in a few places?

Aaron: The epistolary nature of Carrie was actually the one thing I knew about the book, aside, of course, from the plot elements that made it into the movie. In fact, I was under the impression that the entire novel was going to follow in that style, while in fact I think it was slightly less than half epistolary, with the rest being typical King prose. I had expected the novel to be comprised of diary entries from her classmates, letters, and new reports, and I had expected this assembled story to move more or less chronologically towards the fatal dance at the end. The prose portions do move in a strictly chronological fashion, but the epistolary aspects jump around slightly, as almost all of them were written years after the main events of the novel.

That was the most surprising aspect of the novel for me, actually. I’ve spoken before about King’s tendency to foreshadow coming disaster with quick throwaway lines announcing some imminent disaster or character death, and I’ve said this doesn’t always sit well with me. In Carrie, the prose sections are interrupted by memoirs, interviews, and academic research into Carrie White, many of which directly divulge the fates of most characters long before the book reaches that point. I felt it was a successful tactic here, and it added an overall sense of dread, because we kept seeing these articles, and multiple books, written about Carrie White, and while I expected local newspaper articles, I hadn’t expected the numerous sources that actually make up the epistolary aspects of this book. And then another thing; I looked at the date of publication. I knew Carrie had been published in 1974, so it immediately struck me as odd when I realized the book took place in 1979. Combined with the survivors memoirs, the academic history, and the national news coverage, it gave the idea that we may be watching a small high school drama, but whatever came of it was going to spiral out of control and affect the entire country, and quite possibly the world.

The tension is heightened eventually by the fact that, as you said earlier, we do meet some kind and good people in this book. I would say that, tellingly, most of the decency happens away from Carrie White. Carrie’s not present when Ms. Desjardin punished the students for teasing her, she never hears what the principle does to stand up for her, and Sue Snell never apologizes or tells her of her plan. In fact, when Carrie is present Ms. Desjardin slaps her, the principle is insensitive to her pain and keeps getting her name wrong, and Sue Snell takes part in the horrific lockerroom teasing. If we’re to see these characters through Carrie’s eyes, none of them come off as heroic. But then things do change, and there is some decency waiting just before the storm.

One of the most touching portions of the book comes when Carrie arrives at the prom. You were not wrong to find Carrie unsympathetic initially, as she’s written as a fairly unattractive person, not just physically but personality-wise as well. She’s described as "bovine," and has a habit of responding to everything with an animalistic "ohuh" noise. Once we get into her head a little, we start to see that she’s a normal, if incredibly stunted, young woman, bright and somehow hopeful, but in the early going it’s also not hard to see why she would be so ridiculed. Once the novel gets to the prom, we’re primed for a great disaster, and Carrie herself assumes this is all the lead-up to some new prank, but what happens is a surprise to Carrie, and the reader. Carrie is accepted.

A few kids are mocking, but for the most part everyone is more than happy to accept Carrie. She’s instantly made to feel welcome, to the point that, apparently, she was voted Prom Queen genuinely, and not as part of Chris Hargensen’s revenge plot. Because as it turns out, Carrie wasn’t the focus of everyone’s rage and ridicule. I found this to be a surprisingly realistic development, and I think it’s a viewpoint more kids should be made aware of. When my daughter (quickly approaching her teen years) comes home from a bad day, upset about something some kid has said or done, I often tell her that the other kid is probably at home having a similar conversation with their parents. In school, everyone is miserable, and everyone is dead certain that no one else is suffering. So that moment, when Carrie realizes that maybe not everyone is plotting against her, was truly moving, and it makes the tragedy to come that much more heartbreaking.

Of course, some people are plotting against Carrie, though only one person seems to really care. Chris Hargensen has taken her punishment for teasing Carrie especially hard, and while most of the girls are content to take their punishment and grumble about it, Chris fights back. First with her father, who threatens a lawsuit against the school if his daughter isn’t allowed to go to prom, and if Ms. Desjardin isn’t fired, and then by recruiting her bad-boy boyfriend to help exact revenge on Carrie herself.

This was the most troubling aspect of the book for me, the relationship between Chris and Billy Nolan. They are both just the worst human beings imaginable, and their relationship quickly descends from Chris’ childish affections for the bad boy, into actual domestic violence and sexual assault. Chris doesn’t quite realize how bad Billy actually is, and continues to think she’s the one in control. There’s also the somewhat icky, if not altogether unrealistic, intimation that Chris gets off on the violence and seediness. No doubt it’s a combination that exists in real life, and probably fairly commonly, but it was still unpleasant to read, and added to the general nastiness of the book.

Feel free to add your own thoughts, Rik, but also I have a question for you. I knew this book had been published in 1974, so I found it jarring when I realized the prose section of the novel takes place in 1979, while the epistolary sections come from at least the 1980s. I first had to double-check the book’s copyright to make sure I was correct. I’m curious as to your thoughts on this. When I realized what King was doing with the timeline, it gave the book a somewhat sci-fi tinge, and heightened the sense that something world-changing was about to happen. 

Rik: Yes, jarring is the correct term. I cannot properly say what my reaction was to this reading the book in the years within the (even projected) timeframe of the novel, but I can tell you that right now it is more than a little jarring. I am not one to agree that just because a film takes place in a future timeframe that it necessarily makes a “science fiction” story, because there should be other qualifiers that would make it that. You can tell a romantic story that takes place five years in the future, and without some other aspect – possibly technological or sociological, or even a time travel angle – to make it clearly the type of tale one would regard as a science fiction story, you would then just have a basic romance that happens to occur in the near future. That is not science fiction.

Carrie, however, does have the telekinesis gimmick, which as an unexplained and unverified phenomena of the mind (there are claims as to its reality, of course, but there are also a zillion claims of time travel and body transference) would, for lack of a separate distinct genre, grant it some admission into the science fiction category. The story as told, though, is clearly one of horror. I think if the story hinged more on Carrie being tested over her powers in a laboratory by a government research group or some such organization, then a greater claim to science fiction could be made. I know you only said that elements of the epistolary nature of the novel gave it a slight sci-fi tinge, but I felt it important that any possibly deciding to read the book after going through this discussion understand that such a novel will not be encountered. With its emphasis on the traumatizing effect of Carrie’s upbringing, and the carnage at the prom and afterwards, Carrie is squarely in the horror genre.

Here’s something that rereading the book truly brought to the fore for me: the invasion of my too deep memories of the film into my reading now. While I have not read the book in over thirty years, I have probably watched Carrie at least twenty times, if not more, in that span. It is my second favorite De Palma film – Blow Out (1981) being my favorite. When I was first reading my mom’s copy of the book in small sections, but not the whole thing, as a teenager, I had not seen the film, so everything was new. When I finally sat down to read the entire book in the ‘80s, I had indeed watched it numerous times by then, so that full reading was already intruded upon by the style and tone set by De Palma.

Chief among these was the presence of John Travolta in the Billy Nolan role. Perhaps it is because he went on to become a huge movie star and cultural icon, but it was hard for me to read the Billy parts without picturing Travolta on every page. Certainly I know the other characters by the actors who played their parts by look and name, but he is the only one who completely overrode the written version to remain rooted in my mind in the part. Sissy Spacek is so different from the Carrie in the book that I never imagined her once while reading, and this might because she is described and fleshed out as a character far more than Billy is in the text.

I do not want to get into a discussion at length of the first film version here, Aaron, for that is the topic of the next piece that we will post. But it does lead me to ask how easy it was for you to separate the quite famous film – which you have already said you have seen several times – when reading through the novel. You mentioned there were still several surprises to be had in the reading, but how did the film color your reception on the page of some of the most famous scenes, such as the school prom or Carrie’s ultimate confrontation with her mother?

Aaron: Before I go into your question, let me offer a quick defense of my “sci-fi” descriptor. I agree that the book is clearly horror, and any reading that resulted in it being classified as science fiction would be completely off base. However, the jumping ahead in time, and the intimations we get of how telekinesis has been treated by the scientific community, did give me some X-Files vibes. Or, as I actually thought while reading the book, it reminded me of The Shop, the shadowy government agency that shows up in a couple of Stephen King books and short stories, most notably in Firestarter. We get hints in some of the epistolary passages of Carrie that scientists have isolated the genetic mutation that leads to telekinetic power, and that mandatory testing of all children is a distinct possibility. This put me in mind of The Shop studying and training telekinetic kids for their own nefarious purposes, which is pretty close to what happens in Firestarter. In fact, given King’s occasional tendency to write novels covering similar ground, almost as if he’s playing “what if?” with a scenario he finds too rewarding to limit to one narrative path, I wouldn’t be surprised if the entire idea for Firestarter and The Shop came out of unused ideas for Carrie.

As for your question, put simply; it didn’t color my perception of the book all that much. Unlike you, I’ve probably only seen the movie a handful of times, and the last time was about two or three years back when I showed it to my wife, who had never seen it before. I don’t have quite the familiarity with the film to the point where it superseded my own interpretation of the characters, with only one major exception; Billy Nolan. The Carrie White in the book is so different from Sissy Spacek in the movie (though she is great in the movie) that I didn’t have any trouble mentally distancing the book from the film. For the rest of the characters, they’re described and portrayed pretty close to what they ended up casting in the film version, and so I have to admit that I did picture Piper Laurie as Carrie’s mother, or William Katt as Tommy.Ross. The only time this caused any disparity was with Billy Nolan, who, as played by John Travolta, is a bit of a no-good doofus, entirely wrapped around Chris’ fingers. In the movie Billy is clearly a bad kid, but, well, he’s also doofy young John Travolta, so he never feels dangerous. By contrast, Billy in the book is absolutely dangerous, more dangerous than any of the characters seem to realize, and I think his awfulness struck me harder because I kept picturing Travolta in that role.

The novel’s ending is a bit different than the one in the film, which we’ll cover in our next piece, but for the most part the difference is one of scale. The film’s big scene of carnage is the prom, while in the novel the prom is just the beginning. Carrie White almost completely destroys her town, setting fire to buildings and killing passersby as she walks home to her mother. Their reunion quickly turns fatal, as Margaret White finally follows through on her oft-repeated attempts at killing her daughter. Although Carrie is mortally wounded at this point, she still has enough energy to kill her mother and flee into the night, where she runs across Billy and Chris, killing them. Perhaps it’s my age and the fact that I’m two decades removed from high school, but I didn’t quite find this as triumphant as I think I would have in my teen years. What struck me more was the buildup to the carnage, how effectively King had taken us from unease with Carrie to outright sympathy, and how the final pages before the blood pours down from the ceiling carry a dread weight. We know what’s coming, we know it’s inevitable, we’ve even seen what the aftermath will be, but we still hope it won’t happen.

Through the book’s finale, as soon as Carrie starts unleashing her telekinetic abilities, we’re presented with the idea that Carrie is broadcasting her thoughts to the town at large. Everyone that sees her, even those who have never heard of her before, know her name and the pain she is in. Following this signal, Sue Snell finds Carrie, bleeding and dying, and they share a final moment. In fact, this is almost their first moment, as the two don’t interact at all throughout the novel, outside of the group teasing in the beginning. It’s a great moment, and though I think it’s a bit narratively lumpy (the truly appropriate place to end the story is clearly with the confrontation between mother and daughter), I have to give points for turning an emotional scene into a quietly horrifying one, as Carrie forgives Sue, just in time to die and force Sue to experience the pain of her death from Carrie’s point of view. I was disturbed by Sue’s attempts to mentally untangle herself from Carrie as she realized what was about to happen.

It’s easy to see why this book has been adapted so many times; at it’s core it’s a pretty simple revenge-of-the-underdog tale, and those speak to everyone on some level. I feel like we’ve already delved into the film a bit more than we might have wanted, but that’s OK; we’ll still have plenty to say about the films. I’m really looking forward to tackling them, especially the more recent films. There’s some interesting changes to the cultural landscape that happened between the novel’s publication and when the sequel and remakes were filmed, and it should be fascinating to see how those films address them, or ignore them as the case may be.

Rik: You didn’t need to defend your “sci-fi” descriptor, because I did still agree with it in certain ways, mostly from the telekinesis angle. But I am rather glad you did offer up a small defense, because in doing so, you brought up The Shop and Firestarter, which was a point I had planned to mention, as I had a similar feeling. I am actually rather glad he moved those concepts on to the later stories for the most part, because I feel it would have weakened the novel at hand by diffusing it from its primary purpose too much. (And whatever one may think of Firestarter the movie – which I find to have been dreadfully filmed – the book is far, far better.)

I was going to react to a couple of your other points right here, and then I noticed, four paragraphs later, that all of my points were in comparison to the De Palma film, because I just watched that fresh again a couple of days ago. Since I would rather not burn up all of my thoughts right here, I think that I am going to choose to “carry” those over to the next “Carrie” installment (sorry, I had to make the horrid pun at some point, so now it is out of my system), where we will tackle that film directly, and I am sure we will reference back to the book a zillion times in the process.

I must say, while we both had mentioned how horrid we found the characters we encountered, I really enjoyed digging back into Carrie the novel again. We had entered the Stephen King realm a tad slowly in discussing a few short stories – and the tentativeness was almost purely on my own suggestion – but now having gone through one of his novels, I am eager to hit another one in the near future.

Aaron: I’m in agreement. This was a lot of fun to catch up with (an odd descriptor, considering I called the novel “bruised” and “full of pain and sadness,” but it’s true. Stephen King is (and was, even this early in his career) incredibly skilled at writing in a clear style that encourages continued reading. I read a lot of books, and although I’m not the world’s fastest reader, I make up for it in time spent reading. And yet whenever I get a new Stephen King novel, I finish it within a day or two. Granted, Carrie is a far briefer story than most of King’s published novels, but I still burned through it in two not-that-long sittings.

I have a feeling we still have more we could discuss about Carrie, but like you, I’m ready to get into the films. I’m sure we’ll be doubling back this way to discuss the source novel in our upcoming pieces. So, I’ll finish up here by saying that, yes, I look forward to covering another novel in the near future. Although maybe we should build up to tackling The Stand.

[Stayed tuned in the very, very near future for our next discussion, on Brian De Palma’s 1976 Oscar-nominated version of Carrie, here on We Who Watch Behind the Rows.]