Carrie On

This year on Halloween night, after the trick-or-treaters had packed it in, I decided to watch a horror movie that I'd never seen before. Inspired in part by the new remake of Carrie in theaters right now (which I also haven't seen), I decided to watch the original -- the first film adaptation of a Stephen King novel (and of his first novel, in fact).

While there are still parts of the film that work, the film now has to overcome its hopelessly dated trappings. The fashion, the hairstyles, the attitudes... this film is a time capsule of 1976, and a most cliche version of it at that. Also pulling you out of the fantasy is the parade of familiar faces, showing up here before they became more famous: besides star Sissy Spacek, there's John Travolta, Nancy Allen, William Katt, Edie McClurg, and more. Ultimately, I try not to hold those things against the film too much, and they actually do add some fun to watching it.

But it's harder to overlook some very odd choices in the storytelling. The film is barely more than an hour and a half long, and yet still manages to be too long in many ways. Paradoxically, it also manages to be too short at the same time. The problem really stems from what the film decides to focus on.

Carrie is the title character, and while the ending of the film ultimately judges her to be a villain, the movie really should be all about her. I thus find it problematic that some major pieces of her character development are absent in the film. She starts out unaware of her telekinetic powers, and even of the concept of telekinesis itself. Then she reads one sentence in a book, and instantly seems to have full control over her abilities. There's no development of her powers, little real buildup to her moment of defying her controlling mother, and insufficient context for her lashing out at the entire school at the climax of the film. Sure, students treat her like crap throughout the movie, but there's never any inkling that she harbors any revenge fantasies about any of it.

Meanwhile, fully half the film seems to be devoted to the other characters setting up the famous prank they play at the climax of the film. We see them slaughter the pigs to harvest the bucket of blood; we see them maneuver things to rig the prom queen ballot box; we see every step of the jealous young perpetrator recruiting people to her cause; we even see said perpetrator suffering through gym detention, apparently the inciting incident for her plot against Carrie. Frankly, this is all pretty meaningless stuff, laying a lot of track for little apparent reason other than preventing us from asking at the end of the film "why would they do that?" and "where did they get the blood from?" And those seem like trivial questions compared to "when did Carrie achieve mastery of her abilities?"

Director Brian De Palma works in his characteristic, showy style. He uses a number of conspicuous camera tricks (such as repeated use of split-focus diopter to hold two different depths of field in a single shot). And the famous prom climax is cut together with lots of split-screen shots that I found quite jarring. That said, he does manage to make a number of key scenes land with appropriate intensity, such as the final confrontation between Carrie and her mother, and the great "gotcha" scare of the final scene.

In the end, I think there are other classic horror films that hold up much better than Carrie. It wasn't a total loss, but it also wasn't something I'd really recommend. I give it a C-.