Movies Of My Life # 33: Carrie
An occasional series here at Off The Tracks celebrating the movies that I love and have thought about most often throughout my life.
To be clear, from the outset, I mean Carrie — the 1976 Brian de Palma film; not the 2002 TV movie, the stage musical, nor the 2013 redundant reboot attempt.
And I love Carrie and consider it one of the movies of my life for many reasons. First of all, I’m a Stephen King fan, and the book was one of the first of his I read, and in that initial burst of fandom I was hoovering up the books and any corresponding film adaptations. But I’m also a fan of Brian de Palma movies, so I think I would have found my way to it anyway, as I did with Christine being a John Carpenter film, and The Shining being a Stanley Kubrick film. I also love it because I’m a horror junkie, in general. And Carrie is an excellent horror film. It’s part pyschological terror and torment, part slasher (kinda). I love it because it’s also a shining example of a “prom” film; it might have even helped shape that as a sub-genre idea. So it’s just a very good film — and I found it at the right time in my life, watching it a couple of times as a teen, revisiting it when it first made it to the DVD format, and then re-watching it a few times with my son, who is his own kind of Stephen King fan. And movie fan. And horror junkie…
I also considered it, I guess for all of these reasons, one of my favourite films of 1976.
And finally, I love it because I’m a soundtrack junkie, and I love Carrie’s score, and therefore love the film Carrie for its score…(too). And Pino Donaggio is one of my favourite film composers. So, yeah, there’s that too…less important, but still part of it. Part of it now, particularly.
Carrie has to do a lot of work. It has quite a difficult story to tell, King’s debut novel features a lot of clever narration via flash-forward and (fictional) news stories and the interior world of Carrie’s mind and her overbearing religious mother. And the film manages this in much the way that the film of The Shining managed, by the filmmaker imposing themselves so heavily, and telling the story they want to tell in the way they want to do it, whilst also completely keeping/getting to the essence of what King’s story is about.
Of course Carrie had to do all of this before there was ever a text of The Shining, let alone a film of it.
And Carrie is the reason — really — that we have over 80 Stephen King film and TV adaptations of his stories and novels. And, indirectly, but not so indirectly, the reason that King carried on being a writer. It was the success of the film that sold all of the paperback copies of the novel, secured his deal to publish further novels and created STEPHEN KING, Author. For that alone, it’s an important movie in my life. And in the lives of many.
But also, it’s a brilliant story where you never fall in deep for the person being bullied, but you absolutely hate the bullies. Still, when they get their comeuppance, and Carrie gets her revenge, it all rolls wildly out of control. So much so that we can’t ever quite sympathise with the victim, nor be thrilled that the bullies are dealt with, since it’s a form of vigilantism that goes so rogue that the right people dying is merely a fluke, all of them simply some sort of cosmic collateral damage.
That’s fucking wild, yo.
And I loved that idea at 13, and 16, and then again at 22 and 29 and now in my 40s.
Yes, de Palma is a perve. But filmmakers have peversions (#notallfilmmakers) and though that opening scene is full on, and handled in a rather creepy male-gaze kind of way (I thought it at the time, I still think that now) I also do feel it’s the filmmaker’s right. It’s also part of the weird, and unsettling charm of Donaggio’s music, and his music is a big part in the way we enter into that world.
Anyway, I spent my teen years — and many of them after, including now — watching slashers, boobs in the wild (summer camps, prom nights, pool parties) and it’s all creepy male gaze stuff, and you can watch it and not approve of it at the same time.
Carrie though. It’s a work of brilliance. Flawed. And magically so.
Oh, and did Carrie invent the modern-day jump-scare as a film-finale? I like to think so.
