Carrie (1976) and Carrie (2013): Tragedy or Revenge Flick? I decide.

All pics and vids in this post of original 1976 Carrie

You’d be forgiven for thinking, if you read my Evil Dead original and remake post, that that was my favourite horror film.  Actually, I have about 10 favourite horrors and they cycle about depending on what mood I’m in at the time. 

Carrie (1976) is the one I might possibly come back to more than any other, for a horror film that has soul.  I could go as far as to say it’s the most emotionally intense horror someone like me could watch.  As in: every girl who grew up unpopular and lonely and wanted to hit back should watch this.  Its most famous scene will fill you with the utmost satisfaction.  But not for long.  Because Carrie is also just one of the saddest and most inevitably doomed characters ever to hit horror cinema.  The whole idea of the original is that she did have a small chance – just for a tiny while, due to a weird conflagration of circumstances; but due to malice it was taken away.  Even then, possibly a shining tiny speck of hope for her left, if she had been treated with love when she got home after prom.  But no.  Religious nuttery ends what teenage cruelty began.

The original never fails to instil in me a sense of empty head shaking loss.  It’s also a beautifully shot film, rich with pale soft focus colours, hazy blues, minty greens, palest pinks.  Whoever did the camera direction had a great sense of rhythm and pace; really complimenting the way Brian de Palma likes to literalize the telling of a story, to point up your exact visual focus.  And Pino Donaggio on the soundtrack…the film would not be what it is without that soundtrack.  I’ll come back to these points.

My first reaction at ‘they’re doing a remake of Carrie’ was, sigh, why?  I thought I might not watch it.  Then in one of those weird lightning moments my head has, I changed my mind and decided it might be really interesting – what on earth can they do with a film that in my mind has NO flaws?  (I can think of flaws, they just aren’t flaws to me e.g. all the final year schoolchildren don’t look 16-17, they all look at least 25!  When I first saw the film at 11, that made no difference to me whatsoever and it still doesn’t.)

The first thing to note about the remake is that it isn’t all bad.  I can see that some (insert word here that doesn’t mean unintelligent but also, you know, does) people might need a timeless classic updating to reflect modern mores and social constructs, to re-relevise it.  If that’s what they wanted, that’s what the remake has done.  Its very now – it has mobile phones, and YouTube and threats of litigation. 

Sadly, it also has a very blah soundtrack (except for one very nice little theme when Carrie is in the library looking up TK on the internet).  It’s not an offensively epic operatic soundtrack (thank heaven), it has its own character…but its still, not quite powerful enough to deal with the visceral themes the film handles: religious fundamentalism, mental instability of parents and its effect on children, gang mentality and what happens to the odd ones out.  It’s pleasant and appropriate – but I didn’t feel like it added anything much to the film.  So that’s one whole element of the film quietly standing off to the side, texting and not participating.  Not sure whose fault that might have been.

It also has some very blah choices for key characters.  Chris Hargensen (head of bitch pack) is still played as a slutty spoilt brat, but somehow with so much less presence, and weirdly, an awful lot more fake tan (why is she so very orange, I was puzzled).  Her infamous boyfriend Billy (of the pig killing scene) is not played as an ignorant, stupid and easily manipulated thug – but as someone who has the potential to become a really nasty criminal: a very interesting idea, were he actually given more than 3 minutes of screen development time, which he wasn’t.  Billy also bears a remarkable resemblance to Tommy Ross, Sue Snell’s pretty and goodnatured boyfriend, he of the Death By Bucket at the end.  In this version, Tommy looks almost just like Billy, only more blurry of feature.  But he’s just some jock.  Sue Snell, a pivotal moral character in the original (she’s the moral the story spins on), is a tall blonde girl with a bit of presence but not that much to do, despite her part being increased – there’s a whole extra section of her and Carrie interacting at the end, and a whole other plot strand.  Julianne Moore as Carrie’s insane fundamentalist mother, hmmm.  Julianne Moore gives her a damaged self harming intensity that is different to the serenity of Mad Certainty Piper Laurie gave the original.  Julianne Moore’s mother is sadder – she loves Carrie more.  But she is also strangely faded.  The only one who actually comes off well is Carrie mark 2 – this actress gives Carrie a lot more facial expression, she verbalises things you can imagine the first Carrie might have been thinking and wanted to say (mayyyybe).  She has a haunted doe thing going on that did make me worry for her.

But it was almost impossible to FEEL this remake the way I felt the first film.  The first film was vivid, melodramatic, and yet simple.  It had quirks that I really liked.  And that are going to be almost impossible to explain, except to someone who knows every dot and comma of the original as I do!  It was almost impossible to watch the remake, especially with its adoption in places, of an almost word for word dialogue lift for whole scenes, without the original playing on top, in my mind.  If you’re going to re-do it, do it a bit different. 

Obviously there were differences: after Carrie is sent to the office for the dismissal slip and the Principal repeatedly gets her name wrong, instead of the ash tray spinning off the table and smashing on the floor, a glass watercooler smashes instead.  Of course.  Because you can’t smoke in a school nowadays.  The boy weaving in and out of the trees saying ‘Crazy Carrie Crazy Carrie’ before she glares him off his bike is now a kid just randomly in front of the car she’s in who falls down.  He’s just an event, a very small one, instead of a whole beautifully shot incident, a motif the film carries (spinning, weaving).

This Carrie is less of a victim in some ways – she argues back convincingly and strongly when she gets home from school, and her mother starts to shriek at her for getting her period, the famous “first sin was intercourse” scene.  Carrie argues she did not sin – and not in the sad and lost tones of Sissy Spacek, but with eye contact and a strong voice.  Then the film loses some of the interest it gained there by making the horrible little Christ figure in the praying closet just a normal statue.  She hallucinates that it bleeds…but that’s no where near as scary as the glowing eyes of the malevolent original (just that little statue alone sums up for me, what fundamentalism does to religions, how it takes a symbol and warps it).

It had to happen: in this version, the getting your period ‘plug it up’ scene of the beginning, is filmed on Chris’s mobile, and put up on YouTube.  During the detention scene, the original PE teacher hits Chris for her rudeness – a step almost too far even in the early 70s, and you can see it on her face, she knows it – but it this version of course she can’t hit her!  Litigation!  Instead, she keeps the swearing of the original and is then caught up in the Principle’s office with Chris’s father threatening a lawsuit for ‘verbal abuse’.  The PE teacher counters, equally modern, that college applications and The Daily Show will *love* a video like this and the person who took it…she effectively gets Chris to back down, and loses her her prom ticket.  Prompting, back on track, the revenge that Chris decides to take on Carrie…

There’s also some interesting extra allusions in the remake – Chris suggests that Sue Snell isn’t the nice girl she appears in the first film, who has done a bad thing but repents and tries to make amends (getting her boyfriend to take Carrie to prom), but that Sue only goes this far in her amends because she really and truly doesn’t care about Carrie, that she cares about prom far more, that she’s been dreaming of it her whole teenage years – that’s why she puts up with the detention when Chris does not.  Chris comes off as more principled, here!  Sue, thus guilted, only gets Tommy to take Carrie to prom to prove Chris wrong.  It’s a power play, caused by Chris in this version; rather than someone trying to genuinely correct a mistake.  Is that, I wonder, a development of the character of either Chris or Sue?  To make Chris that clever and cynical, and Sue that easily manipulated?  Do we only believe in cynicism now, not in simple attempts at amends?  I don’t know, just asking.

Stanley walked past at this point and asked where the PJ Soles character Norma is (she’s on his Laminated Card after all).  She isn’t, is the big shocker.  There are no truly important secondary subsidiary girlfriend characters in this remake.  There are Chris’s other friends – but apart from some creepy identical twins, none stand out or have any memorable lines.  I wonder why they got rid of Chris’s best friend and lackey?  She was a good character, and everyone knows the bully usually has a right hander, was true in my school as in many others I’m sure – bullies do not usually roam alone, they have packs and they have pecking orders; and there’s always a second.  Not in this film.  Stanley wanders off, piqued, bored.

That’s the thing.  One of the major failures of the film is its lack of a feel of menacing gang mentality.  If you grew up a loser (like I did), you KNOW the jungle feel of the playground.  You know that even the usually disparate groups can transiently unite against you before flowing away (if you mess up at sports for example – in Carrie, this is what the remake and original start with, Carrie misses a shot in volleyball: “You eat shit” is what she gets hissed at her).

Also, some of the relationships in the remake are expanded, whereas others are woefully undeveloped.  Carrie and her mother have more of a feeling of tortured tenderness about their interactions here (in the original it was respect, fear and bonkerness).  Whereas Chris and Billy…in the original, there’s the whole funny scene in the car which tells you everything you need to know about the power structure and motivations behind their relationship (he wants sex and class, she wants power and a bit of rough); it also tells you about their great command of English, the major lines of dialogue being “You stupid shit” (her) and “You fuck!” (him).  It’s one of the many realistic yet comic scenes in the original, the ones that lighten the tone just enough, for just a second, so that the film isn’t wholly depressing.  In the remake, that scene is gone, and there’s nothing like it in its place.  Except maybe the pig killing scene where you can see the new Chris is drawn to the new Billy because both of them have quite a psychotic streak – in this version, the pig killing is his idea, and they do it together (he bangs, she bleeds).  It’s not funny.

There’s other humour in the original, for example, the scene where the boys go to get their tuxedos and the tall gangly guy Doesn’t Want Ruffles.  They speed up the speaking, have stupid music, fun music.  It ends with a cut to Carrie sewing her dress, her mother praying, rocking back and forth.  Fun to menace, the music changes, it’s full of wait and see, makes you lean forward.  This version has a silly dance scene when the boys try their clothes on…but it’s not funny and it doesn’t really provide a great contrast with anything after it. I don’t quite see why the film decided to be so similar to the original in so many ways, but without so much of what makes the original classy and different and original.  This remake kept some of what was good (notably most of the script) and jettisoned anything else that gave it character.  I am very puzzled by this decision.  Why make it a horror film like so many others?  We have All Those Others…?

Ok.  The Prom Scene.  The heart of the film.  About 3 minutes long, like the original. What can you do with it that’s different?  Well.  A thing with the bleachers, that’s ok.  A thing with blood rising off her arms, that’s interesting.  A thing where instead of mimicking that stock still held in place only head moving rigid with shock and rage pose that Sissy Spacek did – you do a strange sinuous snakey movement, as if unleashing your telekinetic abilities has made you reptilian…Reminded me of the way Aaliyah moved in Queen of the Damned (2002), lovely creepy movement.  It didn’t work for me, but it was memorable.  About the most theatrical image in the film (possibly barring Chris’s eventual death).  You could …NOT kill everyone. 

Very disappointing.  The whole point of the retributive nature of Carrie’s rage in the first film was that the innocent died along with the guilty, she Lost It, she became as mad as her mother in that moment, and she killed everyone in the room; everyone in the school.  It’s so saddening and shocking, because she was driven to such madness and she had the power to back it up.  You lessen the power and consequences of her rage and the tale it tells about our society if she starts releasing people [the PE teacher], and showing conscience in her moments of insanity [Sue is ejected from the house at the end, because she’s pregnant].  The thing is – this nice ing up of Carrie at this moment is unnecessary: we know from the way Sissy Spacek acted her in the original that she is a nice, under educated, bullied victimised girl who goes temporarily mad in a moment of incredible strain –you don’t need her at base goodness underlined.  The contrast to her goodness of her callous behaviour in the Prom Scene is what Makes The Message Of The Film…why couldn’t they see that??

Anyway.  So, remake Carrie flies out of the gym (yes, I did say that), and wanders away (while lots of people stumble about outside having survived).  She still does kill Chris and Billy in their car as they try to run her down – having been the one of the only people in the original who did escape the gym (Sue by being locked out by PE teacher at a vital moment, and Chris and Billy by hightailing it out the backway as soon as they dropped the bucket of blood).  Only in the remake, she plays with the car a little more and throws Chris through the windscreen by the face, so she gets stuck.  Whilst this is a nifty little piece of gore, it feels cold, unnecessary and why bother to give her a conscience to save the good people if you are also going to then give her an urge to torture her persecutors.  She hasn’t gone mad at all, in this version.  She simply got angry and got even.  It’s not sad, it’s just…an immature idea of justice.  It’s a whole different film, when you think about it.  It feels almost pathetic, pointless, her actions here.  She doesn’t look like it even makes her feel better.

So she goes home, to the scene that most people forget – where her mother tries to kill her for being a witch.  In the original, the music of Biblical inspired doom starts playing the moment she gets home, and there’s churchy candles in profusion everywhere.  Doom doom doom spells the atmosphere.  Oh no, you think.  In the remake, she goes in, no candles, she has the bath, she’s sad, no great music, just some music, and she has a hug with Julianne Moore who then stabs her and she falls down the stairs and then kills the mother with the many knives in a very slightly different but not that much way to the original film.  Did I just suck all the possible atmosphere out of it with the one sentence there?  That’s how it felt watching it. And then there’s the extra bit where Sue comes in and tries to talk to her and is pushed out of the house as its falling down.  Unnecessary, again, I felt.

The remake ends with Sue’s bad dream, except the hand from the grave is now a hand from her womb, as if Carrie has her baby (maybe pointing the way to a sequel, if anything).  Oh yes: subplot – Sue’s pregnant in the remake.  And then it just ends.  Cue some music.  It lacked all the intensity the original has.  It was a real missed opportunity.

Now the thing is, I didn’t mean this to be a very negative review of the remake – I liked it better than the remake of The Evil Dead, for a start.  Perhaps it’s the fact that Carrie (1976) has always been a film of atmosphere and soul for me.  And whilst the remake updated itself quite nicely, it seemed to lose quirks and atmosphere as it did so.  It seemed to lose that sense of inevitability ramping up – the hope of what could have been the beginning of Carrie feeling better about herself squaring up against what was awaiting her when she got home.  The first film is a tragedy.  The second is only a teenage revenge flick.  The first is timeless in the way it organises its themes; the second feels very now, which I think may cause it to date very quickly.

Ok, think of it like this: the Prom Scenes in the original, the whole thing. Tommy and Carrie never got to stop off at the Beehive for a couple of minutes after they left Prom.  The feeling I keep getting on rewatching it, is of what could have happened, but didn’t.  Pathos!  Stanley commented, when I was talking about this earlier, as he wandered past again, “I don’t think she would have gone out with Tommy Ross again, she would have understood it was help.  But that one night, it could have set up her self esteem for the rest of her life – she would have had that one night to contrast against everything else, she would have known things can go right sometimes…”, and he shook his head and wandered off again (probably because I was watching the original by that time but there was no PJ Soles in her cute hat in that scene).  

The bit where she dances with Tommy, to the song ‘Someone like Me’, a sweet and simple loving song.  Soft focus lights, he kisses her; the camera swirls round and round them (spinning is a bit of a recurrer in the original).  It’s as if Carrie’s head is spinning: with hope, and love and possibilities and overwhelm – “and tonight there’s only me” the girl sings, “I never dreamed someone like you could love someone like me”…So happy, for an instant, for a short while.   Here, see for yourself (and, incidentally, the person who is first in the comments beneath and makes a case for why Tommy should not have kissed Carrie is 100% on the button with his reasoning – this film gets people riled!):

That’s why it’s so sad.  This night, this experience could have changed her life, carried her forward.  But it was never going to; because she had a lunatic mother at home waiting to attempt to kill her…Carrie never stood a chance. 

The story is a tragedy from the start.  But it’s told softly, with occasional humour and some lush and beautiful photography (I wonder: is tragedy porn a genre?).  People often say Brian de Palma owes a massive inspiration debt to Hitchcock and its so: the whole business of Tommy and Carrie dancing, is switched to Chris’s hands tensely holding the rope that leads to the bucket so skilfully, back and forth – the music cues change too, the mood is constantly switched. 

Music carries the whole scene – the rope jerks under Sue’s hand at the side of the stage, the camera follows it under the stage to Chris and Billy fighting…Sue in slow mo now tries to see where the top bit of rope leads, edges out from the side of the stage…why am I telling you about this scene?  Watch it.  What you’re looking for is not only the skilful use of slow motion to heighten and delay, and the electric feel of mood change when Carrie shuts the doors and turns the lights red, the use of split screen rarely bettered in any film; but the way the sounds take over during the massacre scene.  Its soundtrack, but it’s not music – its pure nasty atmosphere.  You can buy the soundtrack and this scene’s mean synthy sound has been successfully used in documentaries – from Adam Curtis talking political paranoia, to Charlie Brooker talking our societies inanities – but they all use it to be the background to things which scare us, losses of control.  See:

The other thing is – that Prom Scene isn’t about gore – I always thought PJ Soles’s Norma deserved a much worse death than getting knocked out and getting a bit wet; but you forget that everyone burns to death.  Carrie is the only one to leave that scene, the doors close softly behind her – but with a sound like they aren’t opening again.  This is horror, but its horror of the enormity of what she’s done and why she did it.  You’re thinking, not just saying – ‘Wow! Cool death effect!’  

I wanted to link you to the mother’s death scene when Carrie gets home too – but I can’t find a YouTube video of that scene, except one with the dialogue removed and only music.  That would be useful for film students to study, of course, but not for the purposes of my showing you what a powerful scene it is – how the insane mother, after such an endless death – all those spinning shooting knives, all that wailing (undeniably sexual sounds in dying from that repressed woman who hated herself so) – falls into position looking so incredibly peaceful.  In the exact crucified position of the little nasty Christ figure in the praying closet.  Except the mother looks in death how the little Christ figure should have looked – loving, eternal, parental.

Despite the fact the biblical judgement/deluge music has started and the house is folding up around her, there is still one last strange comedic moment – the thwump sound as Carrie tries to pull her mother away from the wall where she has pinned her and the knife pulls out.  She pulls her mother into the prayer closet and the house falls down over them: Carrie’s terrible distress at killing her mother causes her powers to be completely uncontrollable – she is killed as the house disintegrates.  The last you see of the inside of the house is the nasty little Christ figure, with its glowing eyes: presiding over the death its faithful’s belief’s have caused.  Chilling.  And god, so sad.

Then it’s the famous last scene with Sue’s dream.  What none of the clips I found on YouTube showed, was the brilliant contrast between the lulling  music of Sue going up to the grave to place the flowers, the famous shock of Carrie’s hand coming up to grab her, Sue waking and screaming (she is SOOOO not going to be alright)  - but then the beautiful last cut to the music the film started with: its got the most peaceful feel.  The screaming and yelling and distress followed by that music is like closing the door on a wild storm: it gives you breathing space.  Your shoulders relax, ‘whoa’ you think…but if you remember where the music came from first, the shower scene, where the whole mess started, women running about in slow mo, Carrie showering, discovering her period for the very first time and her powers being activated by that, the late onset of puberty…it’s a false calm, an uneasy calm.  If you’ve only seen the film once you probably felt uneasy at the end and didn’t know why – it was the repetition of that music, which presaged trauma and the whole plot to begin with.  Clever. 

You rest, as the credits roll up – black screen, red letters, peaceful music…but are you peaceful?  I don’t think so. 

This is what the remake lacks – a violent sense of injustice and unease.  And an iconic set of camera work and musical score.[1]  And the feeling that you want to cry.  Powerful film making.

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[1] I’m a massive Brian de Palma fan.  If you liked original Carrie, you could do a lot worse than follow Amy Irving onto The Fury [1978] (where the telekinetic girl does NOT die – my god, it has a satisfying end, that one!), and Dressed to Kill [1980] (follow Nancy Allen who played Chris in the original Carrie – this one is weird, but well worth watching: again, beautifully designed).