One of my favorite things is, you briefly mentioned that the movie kind of flips halfway through, and it’s like we get pulled into a different world. But there’s this one scene when he goes to Club X, when they’re doing that whole Relax song, where you see him and there’s that door labeled “Sluts,” and he’s standing there. The camera follows him, and we see the Holly character behind the swinging door. So the door is swinging, but we get glimpses of what she’s doing. The camera follows him in, but then everything goes neon, and you get the split-screen, where you’re watching her dance and you’re watching him watch her. And then when they close the door, she pulls him into her scene. And pulls him into her world. And everything turns upside down. And that’s probably my favorite part of the movie.

For today, Hugh has sent over a link to a review of The Enchanters, the new novel by James Ellroy. The review by Dan Piepenbring at Harper's Magazine includes mention of Blow Out:

As far as detectives go, Charlie Siringo walked so Freddy Otash could run, loot, and pop Dexedrine. He’s the Tinseltown private dick who narrates The Enchanters (Knopf, $30), James Ellroy’s lush, manic novelization of Marilyn Monroe’s death and all that was hushed up around it. The book contains more than a kernel of truth: Otash was a real fixer known for his A-list imbroglios and disreputable methods, including “cramming an unbelievable assortment of electronic gadgetry into an ordinary sound truck,” the Los Angeles Times wrote in 1971, describing what was then state-of-the-art surveillance. He met Ellroy a few times and bragged that he’d bugged Peter Lawford, JFK’s brother-in-law. He said he’d heard a tape of the president and Monroe having sex.

Ellroy called Otash a “bullshitter,” and The Enchanters runs on his bullshit—it embroiders an embroiderer. At the outset, Jimmy Hoffa hires Otash to spy on Monroe, mere months before her overdose, and generate a scandal sheet about her misdeeds with the Kennedy boys. Snooping around her Brentwood hacienda, he finds too many loose ends: forty grand in cash, a wardrobe belonging to a much larger woman, a list of her lovers alongside the main switchboard number for the sheriff’s office. There’s also a Jackie Kennedy voodoo doll rife with pins, and a secret compartment containing “fuckee-suckee pix” coated in semen. Underbellies don’t come any seamier than this. From there, the plot is off to the sordid races.

Ellroy’s last novel, Widespread Panic (which also starred Otash), has been described as “camp noir.” The Enchanters continues along the same lines and throws some erotic fan fiction into the mix. “We’re all fan-club fools run amok,” Otash says of himself and his fellow Monroe obsessives. Like Brian De Palma in Blow Out, Ellroy goes in for loving close-ups on the tools of the eavesdropper’s trade, the phone taps and hidden bugs. But they can’t compete with “scent and sensation,” Otash says: “I wanted to touch things that touched her. I wanted to be where she got lonely and cut loose.” When Otash has a porny nightmare about his tradecraft, Ellroy’s rat-a-tat sleaze is pitch-­perfect:

Wall wires, rug clamps, refitted phone jacks. They’re changing colors and starting to fray. They’re squirming. They’re untangling out in plain view.

They wiggle. Bore holes leak Spackle. Discolored Spackle—alive with a glow.?.?.?. Tap wires pop through handset perforations. Mike installations explode.?.?.?.

They’re moving. They’re pure combustion. They’re out to set me aflame.

 

The detective’s bag of tricks is all voyeurism, like Hollywood’s. The town that gave us the Western and the ­AR-15 was—is—overrun by profane megalomaniacs who had no business shaping the nation’s dream life, but did it anyway. Curious about the historical Otash, I dug up a fawning 1959 profile from the Los Angeles Mirror, which offered this choice detail: “The only item lacking to keep him from becoming a TV hero,” it reads, “is a gun strapped under his shoulder.” Riding high in his Cadillac Eldorado convertible, Otash had decided he didn’t need to carry one.

Ian Cooper, producer (“Nope”)

BLOW OUT (1981) — Working with Johnnie Burn on his epic and precise soundscape for NOPE (2022) had me recollecting on my introduction (and subsequent obsession) with movie sound design vis-a-vis De Palma’s foley-forward masterpiece. I watched this film on VHS in early high school and the boots-on-the-ground-artistry depiction of Travolta’s character concretized the marriage of pragmatism and creativity that is the bedrock of the BTS of filmmaking.

Blow Out/ Brazil – All systems rigged against the individual.

Blow-Out (1981)

A perfect marriage of cinematic sound and image. Has any other film bridged the audiovisual divide better than this one? Split diopter shots, for example, visualize the process of eavesdropping. An eerily spinning shot disorients us while the sound becomes dizzying in its monotony. One of the post-Jazz Singer dreams is finally and gloriously realized: a film that uses sound and visuals interchangeably as brushstrokes on its cinematic canvas.

Scarface — A cultural phenomenon as much as it was a film. I remember seeing it opening night and thinking Pacino’s accent was so over-the-top. But then, as the film progressed, he just owned the screen in a performance that is so one-of-a-kind, it’s still jaw-dropping. Plus, Oliver Stone and Brian DePalma together? Insane.

“This is the perfect New York story in that anything can happen,” Schnabel said. “That’s how it was growing up. You meet a complete stranger, you’re enamored or infatuated with them, and then two weeks later you realize they’re completely different.”

Schnabel co-write the script with [Jack] Irv and Galen Core. Dark and handheld, Schnabel said he wanted to reference to the grit of ‘80s or ‘90s films to compliment the escalating trouble his boys find themselves in. The director sent an early cut of the movie to Martin Scorsese and prayed he would give feedback, only to have the icon come on board as an executive producer.

“I watched his films, Brian De Palma’s films, Cassavetes’ films, I thought that the movie was very grounded in other New York stories. When I heard that he liked it, I thought, okay, I might as well ask him and see what he says and he kindly he kindly accepted my offer. I’m forever grateful to even be associated with him.”

I am very happy that Peet Gelderblom was able to piece together a version of Raising Cain that followed the supposedly even more non-linear structure of De Palma's original screenplay. However, I have always loved the film for which De Palma brought in Paul Hirsch to help edit into gonzo shape, and that was originally released in theaters in 1992. Bloody Disgusting's Daniel Kurland seems to prefer Gelderblom's recut:

Brian De Palma is an absolute master visual storyteller and his movies are always cinematically stunning even when they don’t fully work as films. For every Carrie and Blow Out there’s a Snake Eyes and The Black Dahlia, but Snake Eyes still kicks off with a twelve-and-a-half minute unbroken tracking shot and Black Dahlia turns the camera into an airborne omniscient spectator during its dynamic gangland shootout and simultaneous corpse discovery. 1992’s Raising Cain comes at an important period of transition for De Palma. Sandwiched between The Bonfire of the Vanities and Carlito’s Way–ostensibly the two extremes of De Palma’s career–it’s easy for Raising Cain to get lost in the shuffle despite its completely gonzo nature and scenery-chomping performance from John Lithgow.

Raising Cain is the story of Dr. Carter Nix (John Lithgow), a revered child psychologist who experiences a mental break and struggles to stay in control when other identities fight for authority. A hostage in his own body, Carter heads down a dark path that endangers his entire family while he relives his painful past. Raising Cain, for decades, was criticized for its confusing construction and was even viewed by some to be De Palma’s attempt at satire of his tried-and-true genre of choice. In reality, Raising Cain is an earnest–perhaps too earnest–movie that’s been misunderstood for a different reason altogether. Now, on its 31st anniversary, Raising Cain has become even more fascinating on a meta-narrative level. The film has turned into this bifurcated, jumbled experience that tries to messily reconcile many different ideas and tones at once through its two exceptionally distinct edits, like Carter’s own fractured psyche.

Seasoned De Palma fans will recognize how Raising Cain plays all of the director’s trademark hits, but those who aren’t already into De Palma’s style and aesthetic will have little to connect with in the heightened movie. It’s definitely a polarizing De Palma title, even for the hardcore fans, but Peet Gelderblom’s “director’s cut” edit does deliver a better version of this movie that creatively plays with non-linear storytelling. This might have been confusing in the early ‘90s, but audiences would learn to love this structural technique only a few years later with Pulp Fiction and Memento. It’s curious to consider how this avant-garde approach, if left undisturbed, might have come across as revolutionary rather than confusing, which was the fear. The theatrical cut attempts to bury, hide, and normalize these unique flairs–not unlike what’s done to Carter to smooth out his wrinkles so that he’s the most conventional, boring, mainstream version of himself. It’s another powerful, albeit unintentional meta element to Raising Cain that still rings true and makes the story behind the film and its two separate versions almost as interesting as the movie itself.

The divergent responses to the two cuts of Raising Cain emphasizes the “power of the edit.” The theatrical cut of Raising Cain, while chaotic, still led to a sect of audiences who believed that it’s meant to operate on dream logic and that it’s not supposed to make sense. The belief is that it’s ludicrous that De Palma has done so many better versions of this type of movie and that the audience knows that De Palma knows better. This dream logic rationale to Raising Cain’s theatrical cut may work, but it wasn’t De Palma’s original intention. Nevertheless, two complementary and contrasting movies can be born out of the same story, all depending on how it’s told and its dominant perspective. It would have been better if De Palma’s original vision could have made its way into theaters, but if any of his movies needs to suffer an identity crisis through its edit then it’s at least appropriate that it’s Raising Cain.

Raising Cain is dense with De Palma’s typical themes of dishonest women, overbearing fathers, and unhealthy familial relations between the three. It’s hard not to think of De Palma’s own frayed relationship with his doctor dad when Carter gets abused and mocked by his father, even if De Palma hasn’t acknowledged the connection between the two himself.

Raising Cain is hardly the first of De Palma’s movies to relitigate the same layered questions of identity that Alfred Hitchcock first unpacked in Psycho. Both Sisters and Dressed to Kill are De Palma’s previous attempts at dissociative identity disorder in one way or another, all of which are quite tone-deaf and ignorant on the material even if there seem to be good intentions. It’s important to understand that Raising Cain is very outdated when it comes to understanding Carter’s diagnosis. Raising Cain shouldn’t be viewed as an accurate, or even sensitive, portrayal of this condition. It’s a heightened boogeyman that operates in plain sight. Accordingly, there are shades of Dressed to Kill, Sisters, and Psycho in Raising Cain. The exceptional final shot also riffs on one of the scariest moments from Dario Argento’s Tenebre. However, more than anything, Raising Cain comes across as the synthesis between Body Double’s lurid thrills and Femme Fatale’s labyrinthine dream logic. Raising Cain is the messy stepping-stone between both of these more fully-formed movies that all riff on comparable themes.

"But the sex and the silly serendipity are inextricable. De Palma turns visual pleasure—the luxurious vision of water pouring out of the bathtub; split screen shots showing the same scene from multiple angles so it becomes a cubist abstraction; the camera swooping up to look down into an interrogation room; the extreme close up of Laure’s eyes; multiple explicit sex scenes—into isolated fragments of anti-plot, which direct your gaze to a here that goes both everywhere and nowhere. Instead of trying to master visual pleasure with narrative, Femme Fatale revels in the way the femme fatale releases the film from sequence, logic, and ultimately even from misogyny. De Palma, that most faithful of Hitchcock disciples, tosses away narrative mastery, and with it the master's paranoia. What he's left with is a pleasure that, despite all the sex, feels so innocent you almost have to call it joy."

Here's a portion from the beginning of Berlatsky's essay:

Brian De Palma's Femme Fatale (2002) is a kind of inverse body double of his earlier film Body Double (1984). Both movies are obsessed with undermining, or castrating, the male gaze. Where Body Double frames the male viewer as impotent and frozen outside the narrative, though, Femme Fatale instead constructs a female viewer whose usurpation of the male position causes the film narrative to fragment into an eroticized stasis of fantasy and dream.

The movie is ostensibly a noir in the tradition of Double Indemnity, which our seductress Laure (Rebecca Romijn) is watching (nude, her image superimposed on the screen within a screen) in the first scene. Laure is point person for a heist in which she is supposed to steal diamonds worn (or mostly not worn) by model Veronica (Rie Rasmussen) at a Cannes premiere. However, Laure double crosses her partners. Then things get odd.

Femme fatales in Hollywood cinema traditionally challenge the male dominance of look and plot. In her classic essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," Laura Mulvey argues that Hollywood films link male viewer and male protagonist as masterful gazers, whose look drives and orders the story arc. Women, in contrast, connote "to-be-looked-at-ness" they are "displayed as sexual object" and "erotic spectacle." The gaze possesses woman, which allows the (male) gazer in the theater the illusion of mastery. At the same time, though the spectacle of woman tends "to freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation." Woman is thus the prize of narrative mastery and a sensuous ice pick (or prick) in the eye of that same mastery. She is the prize that empowers narrative thrust and the twinkling treasure that leads the gaze (and other bits) off course.

Classic Hollywood films like Double Indemnity use the femme fatale to take advantage of this doubled gaze to heighten both impotence and empowerment. The erotic spectacle of Phyllis (Barbara Stanwyck) hijacks the male gaze and the male driven plot so that good guy Walter (Fred MacMurray) is diverted from the straight and narrow. Instead of his gaze driving the plot, her gazed-at-ness takes the wheel, steering him towards perversion, iniquity, and ultimately death. The film becomes a battle between the erotic distraction of the femme fatale and the righteous vision of the male. When Walter shakes off the glamour and does the right thing (by killing Phyllis) he reasserts his potency—though at the cost of his own life. That's the price of getting bogged down in the venus of spectacle.

Femme Fatale sort of reiterates this narrative tension, sort of parodies it, and sort of blows it up. Laure is an erotic spectacle which seizes control of the plot in numerous ways—first of all by literally seducing Veronica and ravishing her in the bathroom, pulling off her diamonds so her accomplice can slip substitutes under the stall. It's a flamboyantly queer literalization of the way that the femme fatale queers cinematic narratives.

Politicized by the counterculture movement and Vietnam, working within the studio system, yet largely freed of producer control, directors like Arthur Penn, Francis Ford Coppola, Sidney Lumet, Michael Cimino, Brian De Palma and William Friedkin expressed a brutality and energy not seen on screen before. It is no coincidence that many classics of the American New Wave were crafted with the sensibility and skill of Greenberg.

Greenberg himself might defer any such attribution to Dede Allen, ACE, the legendary editor who arguably broke the mold when creating the era’s seminal movie, Bonnie and Clyde (1967). Greenberg, then 31, had known Allen for five years since being invited to be her apprentice cutting Elia Kazan’s America America.

“By ‘67 Dede and I had become close friends,” relates Greenberg. “Because of some time constraints on the finishing of [Bonnie and Clyde] and the political entanglements that wracked Arthur Penn and Warren Beatty (star and producer) I was given the task of editing a couple of the shootout scenes, including the last ‘dancing’ shootout. I worked closely with Penn on them, and he re-edited them with Dede.”

The final ambush in which the duo are gunned down, lasts less than a minute and contains more than 50 cuts. Greenberg employed slow motion at some points and faster speed at others, creating a tense and violent conclusion.

“Dede knew how to cut faster than anyone I know – and make it work. In the days of the Moviola you could sense not only what was going on in that other person’s mind, but how their fingers work, how their body works; you got it all.”

Greenberg’s career began in his native New York in 1960 in an industry that consisted mostly of TV production, commercials and small 16mm-documentary companies.

“The music edited and supplied to these companies came from contractors who leased music libraries from various publishers,” he recalls. “They were willing to take a chance on hiring someone who had no formal music training, or industry experience.”

Greenberg learned how to edit music (physically, splicing ¼-inch tape, and 35mm striped sound film), but as importantly, the function (and dysfunction) of background music, its grammar and importance in motion pictures. He also learned to use the gear for editing; the Moviola, splicers, synchronizers and recorders.

“I was hooked. I confided this desire to a good friend, who was a sound effects editor, and he told me he was going to be working on a feature being edited by Dede, (America America) and would I be interested in being her apprentice? As corny as it sounds, my life had begun.”

A year after the massive success of Bonnie and Clyde, Greenberg cut his first feature as solo editor, the caper, Bye Bye Braverman, for Sidney Lumet and in 1971 won the Academy® Award and BAFTA® for editing highly influential, cops-and-narcotics thriller The French Connection.

“This was the perfect storm of passive collaboration,” describes Greenberg. “The passion and energy of Billy Friedkin, the patience and understanding grace of [producer] Phil D’Antoni, the courage and reflexes of Owen Roizman, ASC, and the obsessive command of Gene Hackman. A lifetime of those dailies is the ultimate definition of happiness.”

The breathtaking car chase featuring Hackman’s pugnacious detective racing to catch a hit man aboard a Brooklyn D-train has been dissected at film schools ever since. Shot, like the rest of the film, documentary-style on location using handheld cameras and one strapped to the Pontiac’s bumper, the action is intercut with extraordinary verve.

“In a visual picture editors have a greater responsibility to carry it off than in a dialog-driven film,” says Greenberg. “We used imagery to illuminate the obsessions of the characters by studying how their faces react to a situation. Billy allowed it to develop with the actors in the shooting and later in the cutting room. It has compactness to it.”

Both Roizman and Greenberg went on to work with director Joseph Sargent on another gritty crime classic, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974), structured entirely around the tense standoff between a hijacked running metro train and the NYPD.

Arthur Penn recalled Greenberg for The Missouri Breaks (1976) which paired acting titans Jack Nicholson and Marlon Brando in a western tale of cattle rustlers and land owners.

“When an actor can no longer remember lines, or want to, and requires cue cards to fill their eyelines just because they are revered as one of the best actors on earth, it should give editors (and producers and directors) fits,” recalls Greenberg. “That said, it may not be enough to make Brando less then the best actor on earth. It was not a good picture, but the acting was the least of the reasons for that.”

Greenberg would work on another Brando performance two years later as one of four credited editors on Apocalypse Now.

Coppola’s antiwar epic had been largely assembled on location in the Philippines by Evan Lottman (credited as additional editor on the film’s release). It was Lottman who asked Greenberg, then residing in San Franscico, to assist him on the project, with three other editors (Richard Marks, ACE; Walter Murch, ACE; Lisa Fruchtman) also taking over segments of the film.

The project was Greenberg’s life for 18 months from early 1978. “I’d seen the rest of the film assembled and I thought, even then, it was a phenomenal document. It was a very happy experience for me but politically it was not easy. Francis did not know me and had never met me although he knew me by reputation.”

Among the scenes Greenberg cut was the high-octane aerial battle for a Vietnamese village, a sequence which appears perfectly timed to Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries which the Air Cavalry plays over loudspeakers to frighten the enemy.

“I enjoy blending music with images but I’m wary of any editing timed purely to music,” he says. “To me, that’s denigrating the art of editing to a cartoon. It’s Mickey Mouse editing. That was never the case here. The music was actually used as a weapon to intimdate the enemy and was always intended to be used in this scene so to that extent the scene is truthful. If there was any Mickey Mouse timing it was not intentional.”

Greenberg was also responsible for editing the French plantation scene, restored to print by Walter Murch for the extended Redux version in 2001.

“It was a scene that intentionally took your mind away from all the calamity – that you could have something as serene going on amid all the horror. But I was the first to suggest that it should be removed from the original.”

After the intensity of Apocalypse Now, Greenberg’s next project couldn’t have been more different. The urban drama of a middle-brow Manhattan couple battling for custody of their son swept the board at the 1980 Academy Awards ® winning Best Picture and garnering Greenberg a second editing nomination.

“How did I switch from something which has very broad political implications to doing this very intimate, sentimental story? I think that the ability to transition in this way should be in the toolbox of every editor. You may enjoy working on one end of the spectrum but studios and directors are buying your ability to understand all situations. They are buying your mind.”

Perhaps surprisingly Greenberg says he’s always enjoyed movies with a sentimental and sweet aspect. However, there is a fine line between sweet and saccharine which Greenberg confronted on Kramer vs. Kramer.

“I abhor treacly sentimentality,” he says. “That’s a red flag for me. When I’m working on a film like Kramer, which has a ton of sentiment, I want to impart that but I’m not going to spoon feed it to you.”

While he enjoyed every minute on Kramer, he wasn’t entirely comfortable either. “There was a lot of tension that happened around the cameras that crept over into the cutting room. Since [director Robert Benton] worked very hard on the editing he would sometimes share with me the problems he was having between [producer] Stanley Jaffe and [actor Dustin Hoffman, who was encouraged to direct the performance of child actor Justin Henry]. To be fair to Bob he did as much as he could to keep it out.

“Most films don’t allow the audience to make up their minds about characters and instead manipulate people to feel a certain way. Most producers go for that because that’s what they think a sentimental movie should do. I think you have to deny an audience that easy route. The way Kramer was shot it could have been edited to be a lot more sugary – and keeping it dry was a wonderful problem to have.”

Greenberg doesn’t use ‘manipulation’ pejoratively. Movies are, after all, constructed to reveal only what the filmmakers want us to see of a particular story. The past master of this was Alfred Hitchcock. Among the director’s latter day apostles is Brian De Palma with whom Greenberg has had a defining relationship.

“My aim was never to belong to somebody else. I didn’t want to think of myself as some director’s artist. I took the jobs because the scripts sounded like they needed a good editor. In other words, an editor to take that mass of ideas and make it critical. I found that instinct immediately with Brian De Palma.”

Greenberg had had a strong early association with William Friedkin, not only for The French Connection but in editing The Boys in theBand (1970). “I was supposed to do the next one for him too (The Exorcist) but there was some delay and I needed the work. I had a family to support and I took another job in the interim. That was a slap in the face to Billy. We had an argument over that and we never worked together again. So here was a case where a director thought an editor’s loyalty was worth more than anything else in that editor’s life. I never felt I did the wrong thing.

By 1979 De Palma had made several movies including Hi, Mom! and Obsession with Paul Hirsch, ACE. When Hirsch found himself unable to commit to De Palma’s next project, Dressed to Kill, he recommended Greenberg.

“I liked Brian but I didn’t particularly like his movies,” admits Greenberg. “I liked his comedies more than, say Carrie, because I found them too strident, sort of pretentious and openly derivative.”

Although De Palma kept sending script rewrites, Greenberg kept turning him down. De Palma was persistent. “This was the first time in my life someone had not taken no for an answer.” Greenberg eventually agreed to meet in De Palma’s office on Fifth Avenue which the editor recalls as a small dining room with 3” x 5” file cards filled with stick drawings and stuck by Scotch Tape to the mirrored walls.

“While we’re talking I’m looking at the walls and these crude storyboards of planned shots and it excited me. It convinced me to do the movie because I could see in this mosaic of cards the essence of the film and what he wanted to achieve. Brian was a visualist and this excited me more than anything.”

In short order they made Dressed to Kill, Body Double, Scarface, Wise Guys, The Untouchables, each containing some of the most memorable sequences ever put on screen. The homage to Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, reset to 1920s Chicago on the steps of Union Station in The Untouchables is one of them.

“This was not about doing a line-for-line copy of Potemkin but a Brian De Palma expression of thank you to Eisenstein for giving us the language of montage,” he says. “I wanted to get on screen what he himself wanted before he even drew those stick drawings. Brian was the consummate filmmaker and I was becoming part of his thinking. Usually in the editing process the first look by a director is a most auspicious moment. On Scarface, Brian came in to see the first cut which I’d done by about the last day of shooting. He looked at it and just said, ‘Ship it.’ I don’t want to analyze it too much but he trusted me and we got along very well.”

Greenberg adds: “Editing is one of the most beautiful crafts in the visual arts. It has this ability to move you out of your neighborhood theater and into an opera house and De Palma was quite brilliant at being able to do that.”

In high school, once I had read Carrie, I had to see the movie. I watched it with my best friend Kristen at, of course, a sleepover, and the split-screen moments in the prom scene were my first real “cinema!” moments, when the combination of image, sound, and rhythm grabs you with visceral, recognizable power. Prior to this, what I loved about movies like Scream and Clueless was the writing; I was somewhat unconscious to the ways they moved and looked and felt. But Brian De Palma will never let the audience forget for a second that the most important way a movie speaks is through the image, and its construction in time and space.

I became obsessed with Carrie. Obsessed with the line readings, especially anything that came out of Piper Laurie’s mouth – and especially the line, “I can see your dirty pillows” (my friend Gena embroidered a pillow with the phrase for one of my late 20s birthdays). I was obsessed with the ‘70s gym shorts and high socks, and P.J. Soles’ hat and the way Miss Collins wallops Chris across the face. Obsessed with the hazy cinematography and editing, the split screen and split diopter shots, the camera whirling around and around Tommy and Carrie as they dance at the prom. The extreme closeups of Nancy Allen’s mouth with her crowded front teeth as she licks her lips, tugging on the rope attached to the bucket of blood; the long, long, long slow-motion shot as Sue discovers the rope. I was obsessed with the way Carrie, covered in blood, whipped around in a crouch, her hands locked in stiff claws, and the camera rapidly jump-cutting in on her pupil as she sends the car flipping over and over itself. I was obsessed with recognizing a visual parallel in Margaret White’s crucifixion and the creepy Jesus figurine.

My senior year of high school, I decided to go as Carrie for Halloween. I found a cheap pink satin gown at a thrift shop and wore it all day at school, carrying a bouquet, wearing a tiara. That night, at a Halloween party, I made everyone gather in the driveway for my ceremonial blood drenching. I handed my friend Joanna a sauce jar filled with corn syrup and red food coloring as I had heard the Carrie blood was made of, and instructed her to pour it over my head. All I remember is that the drenching felt neverending. Not a shocking splash but a steady stream as she slowly poured it over me. I changed into gym shorts and a t-shirt, but the red corn syrup remained on my skin. My friend Andrew, who I’d known my whole life, licked my arm and was surprised it was sweet. A week later, he died in a drunk driving accident. That night was the last time I saw him.

If this all seems extra personal, it feels important to talk about why I connected with Carrie so much as a teenager, and its influence. What King and Brian De Palma understand and convey so beautifully is that high school is hard. It’s filled with blood, and sex, and death, all while fumbling through the figuring out of yourself and others, and yourself in opposition to others, including your parents. Plus, everyone hates gym class. All of that is amplified in King’s book, written just a few years out of high school himself, and working as a teacher. It’s a story about a bullied, abused girl with supernatural powers that’s grounded in a recognizable and terrifying reality, because King knows how terrifying high school can be. De Palma, on screen, makes it erotic, operatic, funny, scary, and tragic, every emotion deeply felt and deeply real. The movie is camp, but sincere.

I’ve seen Carrie dozens of times on VHS and DVD, my copy traveling with me during the ten or so times I’ve moved around the country since college, but the first time I saw it on the big screen was last year, at the American Cinematheque, in a screening series of Argento/DePalma double features put on by Cinematic Void. Even though I knew I would love it, it had been several years since I’d watched it in earnest. I was hoping I wouldn’t see something that I’d recognize now as problematic or exploitative.

This time around, nearly 20 years removed from being a teenage girl, I found it profoundly moving. Margaret White isn’t just a crazy, homicidal religious nut, she’s a deeply traumatized woman who has turned to fanaticism as a coping mechanism to deal with her repressed sexual trauma. Chris is trapped in a psychosexual abusive relationship with Billy and lashing out at those around her. Miss Collins is an imperfect ally because she doesn’t trust anyone, and Carrie, well Carrie shows what happens when pathological shame, abuse, and psychological torture combust, but in small moments, she owns her own power, her own sexuality. “It’s me, mama,” she pleads with her mother, who declares her remarkable gift the work of Satan. Even the infamous line I giggled at in high school took on a new tenor. “Breasts, mama,” she says, “they’re called breasts, every woman has them,” gently asserting her right to her own sexuality. The locker room slo-mo shot isn’t just a brazen display of the male gaze, it’s a comment on the male gaze, a sly bait-and-switch from sensual to savage.

The tragedy of Carrie, which both King and De Palma treat with the gravity that it deserves, is the idea that in high school, the worst thing to happen to someone is shame, embarrassment and rejection. It taps into our most primal desire to be loved and accepted by the tribe, which translates into safety and nourishment. Carrie is denied that, again and again. She never receives the comfort that she’s craving, except in small doses, and conditionally, from Miss Collins, her gym teacher (played by the great Betty Buckley). In the opening shower sequence, she reaches out, vulnerable, for help. Blood is coming out of her body, she doesn’t know why, and she’s scared for her own safety. The girls turn to savagery in response to her off-putting plea, pelting her with sanitary napkins. When she pleads with her mother, “Why didn’t you tell me?” looking for some comfort, she’s hit with a book and lectured that her body is sinful. After the massacre at the prom, when Carrie returns home and seeks solace in the arms of her abusive mother, she says, “they laughed at me.” The trauma she experienced is not the blood or violence or fire she inflicted, but that they laughed at her, that they rejected her. Carrie is a heartbreaking and tragic victim who turns into a monster as her self-preservation instincts morph into total annihilation.

Watching the film now, I can see that what moved me when I was in high school, whether I knew it then or not (I didn’t), was that this was a film about the inner lives of women, who are allowed to be everything in this instance: the villains and the victims, the empowered and the disempowered, complex characters, with whom you can simultaneously empathize and condemn. Grappling with the film 20 years later, I realize that what Carrie articulated for me is that, yes, teenage girls, sometimes we are monsters–but we usually have a damn good reason to be.

The scene of the kidnapping of the two cops very quickly turns into a car chase and you don't feel very comfortable filming it.

Because I hate that. We've seen hundreds of them and it's very boring to watch. The best chase ever filmed is in William Friedkin's French Connection. If you don't have a better idea, it really isn't worth bothering to film a new one. I'm not like James Cameron, I don't enjoy filming endless chases with trucks, on bridges, it's not my style. It was my first time filming a car chase in The Fury. I took it as a challenge but quickly hated it. So I placed it in the fog to stylize it as much as possible. Because filming in a car, there is nothing more boring. What are you going to show? A guy moving the steering wheel, reflections on the windshield. There aren't many solutions to make it interesting.