Brian De Palma’s Carrie is considered one of the greats of the horror film genre. However, for Salem Horror Fest director Kay Lynch, catching it on late TV one night it was more than great, it was life-changing. “It was one of the first films I can remember ever feeling validated by,” she recalls. “The body horror in the shower, the insecurity, and rage. I felt so connected to her... I’ll never forget the palpitation in my chest. It was an emotional catharsis. That’s when I realized that horror could be a healthy way to face my darkness.” And for Lynch, the film festival, which is celebrating its fifth year this October, offers audiences an opportunity for that same kind of emotional outlet.

The festival, which screens a mix of repertory and independent premieres, first began as a response to the 2016 election. “I was angry, hurt, and scared. Knowing that there were millions of others who felt the same way, I wanted to devote myself to something that would foster community, creativity, and critical thinking,” Lynch, who saw it as an opportunity to fulfill the need for a specific kind of catharsis, said.. “[It’s] for anyone who reads the news and needs to scream bloody murder in a safe environment.”

At once a searing supernatural shocker and a sensitive portrait of high-school loneliness, Brian De Palma’s Carrie shows that for a film to be truly terrifying, it helps if we actually care about its characters. And it’s impossible not to connect emotionally to burgeoning telekinetic Carrie White (a brilliantly affecting Sissy Spacek), a shy, repressed girl bullied by her classmates at school and abused by her religious-fanatic mother (Piper Laurie) at home. Faithfully adapted from Stephen King’s novel, the film focuses less on Carrie’s emerging supernatural powers than on her painfully awkward desire to fit in. Less visually extravagant than many De Palma films, Carrie is still stylish without being obtrusive. When the film finally explodes in climactic violence, the effect is both cathartic and horrifying, a teenage tragedy worthy of Greek myth.

In a repost from their "Female Monsters" series, The Final Girls podcast last week posted an episode in which host Anna Bogutskaya and film critic Kelli Weston go "for a deep, deep dive on the inimitable classic of horror cinema, Brian De Palma's Carrie (1976). We talk about the monstrous feminine, otherness, Sissy Spacek, period horror, who's the real villain in the film and so much more."

Five years ago, Bogutskaya and her Final Girls co-founder Olivia Howe hosted a screening of Carrie:

Flashback

Sunday, September 25, 2016

PANEL DISCUSSES 'CARRIE' IN LONDON
FINAL GIRLS U.K. EVENT AT SCALARAMA
The Final Girls (Anna Bogutskaya and Olivia Howe) hosted a screening last night of Brian De Palma's Carrie at the ICA in London. The screening, which was part of Scalarama film month, was followed by a panel discussion made up of Michael Blyth (BFI Festivals Programmer), Catherine Bray (Film4 Editorial Director and Producer) and Dr. Alison Pierse (Lecturer at York University). The discussion is summarized by Smoke Screen's Owen Van Spall:

Brian de Palma's films and his own statements have been controversial to say the least, something the Carrie panel tackled right from the start of their conversation. This is a film that begins with a tracking shot that has become somewhat notorious; the camera journeys through a steamy changing room as Carrie’s high school gym class are seen in various stages of nudity. This is far from the last time in the movie de Palma’s camera will linger on female flesh either: with female cheerleaders on the pitch and high school bad girl Chris’s bra-less torso getting plenty of screen time. This is also one of many de Palma films that put their female characters through the wringer, to put it politely.

Thus the panel agreed that at some point they had all been driven to ask themselves: “Is it cool to like Carrie [and de Palma]?” But the consensus was that, after repeat viewings and after taking a few steps back to reconsider de Palma’s career as a whole, rejecting Carrie entirely as mysoginistic felt too much like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Alison Pierce for example praised the way the film - largely through Sissy Spacek’s intense performance - effectively transmitted the desperate sadness of the plight of this hapless but incredibly powerful young woman. You empathise with Carrie as almost a Frankenstein-like figure, a victim created by monstrosity. The panel also noted how both De Palma and King explored her victimhood in interesting ways - with the narrative and characterisation of Carrie seeming at times to provoke the viewer to almost want this pathetic figure to get tormented. De Palma arguably manipulates viewers to effectively swing between delighting in seeing Carrie suffer, and yearning to see her inflict terrible vengeance on her tormentors turn. The bucket of blood sequence, with its long, almost gleeful build up in slow motion, was much discussed as an example of this. Viewers might want to ask themselves; do you maybe sneakily want that rope to be pulled, and the bucket to fall, knowing both what the immediate humiliating result will be, and what will happen next?

Author Stephen King and de Palma also have an interesting kingship, as Catherine Bray noted: they are good at “serious fun” - taking a ludicrous concept and imbuing it with genuine terror and emotional weight. Of course, Carrie can simply be enjoyed as campy, shlockly fun, with Michael Blyth half-joking if you could convert this film easily into a musical given its tone and setting. Regardless, the panel noted that the film remains very striking from a cinematographic perspective, with a visual approach that teeters on the deliciously overblown at times. De Palma throws in a tonne of tricks that he would become well known for, including diopter lens shots, and the use of montage which really works well in the prom terror sequence, as Carrie starts to come apart, her attention and powers jumping to various points as she singles out her enemies for destruction. The Smoke Screen in particular was struck by the deliriously bold lighting throughout the film too. Much of the film’s early sequences seem drenched in a warm, apple pie glow, but in the prom night sequence sees de Palma start us off with a dreamy kaleidoscopic mix of purples and yellows that highlight how carried away Carrie is by her one moment of bliss, only to drench the entire affair in an insanely deep red shade once the psychic assault starts.

The final days of summer are here, and with spooky season just around the corner, Fathom Events is getting ready to celebrate the season with Fright Fest 2021. Lasting from September through November, the eight-week event will bring some of the most iconic horror movies of the past back to theaters nationwide for a limited time just in time for those Halloween film binges.

This year's Fright Fest will kick off on Sunday Sept. 26 with a night celebrating the 45th anniversary of Carrie, the 1976 Brian De Palma-directed horror film that is based on Stephen King's novel of the same name. The film has become a cult classic in the decades since its release and is notably a must-watch spooky season movie. Fright Fest will continue with more nights celebrating the anniversaries of other favorite horror flicks, including The Evil Dead, Scream, and The Silence of the Lambs. There will also be several nights dedicated to Studio Ghibli Fest 2021, as well as several other popular titles returning to theaters, before Fright Fest 2021 wraps on Tuesday, Nov. 16 with Paranorman, a family-friendly viewing option.

“For two weeks, we worked at [De Palma’s] apartment in Hollywood. I remember [Travolta, Allen, Irving, Spacek, and myself] would all go there and work. At the time, we were using a reel-to-reel tape-recorder because video had not yet come about,” said Katt.

“Brian’s entire apartment was filled with these 3-by-5 cards with all the scenes on them. He would get up periodically and move cards around for his shot list and what not. It was a fun experience. He really sculpted those scenes to fit the actors he was working with. By the time we’d got to the set… he was really all about the camera and the components of filmmaking. I just thought he was a terrific director.”

After that George Lucas/Brian De Palma casting session, we had three more casting sessions that pretty much everyone who ended up in the movie went to. It was three weekends in a row at Brian’s apartment. We all sat around the coffee table; we all took turns reading the script from beginning to end, and his dining room had storyboards of practically every scene of the movie. I thought, Wow. He was so invested in this film. And Sissy was never there. I think Amy Irving was up for the role of Carrie [at that point]. She was the one who got Sue. And I think Nancy was up for Sue but then she got Chris Hargensen and I was up for Chris but I got Norma. So it was very interesting.

Here's more from Pond's review:

The film’s star, Wendy Chinchilla, is also making her feature-film debut; she’s a Costa Rican dancer with no experience in film but a powerful presence that speaks volumes through stillness.

Chinchilla plays Clara, a 40-year-old woman with a spinal condition that keeps her in pain. She spends her life, it seems, communing with her horse, Yuca, and bowing to the demands of her mother, who tells the townspeople that Clara is a healer who has seen the Virgin Mary and has cured cancer. She trots Clara out for healing rituals in their small home, but otherwise keeps her daughter under her thumb, going so far as to refuse a local doctor’s advice that Clara get an operation to fix her spine.

“God gave her to me like this,” her mother says. “She stays like this.”

Clara, for her part, submits to the restrictions that have been placed on her; she’s too meek to challenge her mother, or too beaten down to resist anymore. She has no agency in her own life, a fact that is presented simply, with relentless understatement.

When Clara rebels, she almost seems to do it unconsciously, with small signals that she may be experiencing a very belated sexual awakening. She absently touches herself as she watches TV, until her mother freaks out, grabs Clara and rubs her fingers in hot chiles; Clara complies, passive and still.

At first, the movie connects with that stillness; it sits back and quietly observes, with little or no music for long stretches. When the music does come in, it’s usually spare: plucked strings and little else. The look and feel of the film is grounded in earth and mud and bugs and rain, but there’s also a gentle mysticism at work that’s familiar to lovers of South and Central American cinema.

Clara’s mother demands that her daughter never change, that she live in plainness and in pain and care only about healing others, or at least convincing others that she can heal them. But slowly, we see Clara’s rebellion begin to manifest: At first she simply declares that she wants a blue dress, a prospect that shocks her mother – but it’s clear that what she really wants is to be touched, to embrace the physical in a way she’s never before done.

As Clara’s passion begins to awaken, so does “Clara Sola.” When she sees her young niece having sex with her boyfriend, she masturbates in the woods and is immediately surrounded by fireflies. At a certain point, it does seem that she has powers – but do those powers come from the religious shrine in the living room, or from emergingn sexuality?

You won’t necessarily find the answer in Álvarez Mesén’s film, but you will find a movie that itself becomes more aggressive along with its heroine. And when things comes to a head at her niece’s 15th birthday party, it’s hard not to think of the climactic prom scene in Brian DePalma’s “Carrie” – not in the sense of buckets of blood or anything like that, but in the way both films suggest that repressing female desires via religion or anything else can end very, very badly.

That sequence, and the enormously evocative but ambiguous one that follows to end the movie, are nothing like what you might expect during the opening stretches of “Clara Sola.” Álvarez Mesén may be a first-time feature director, but she has enough control to take an austere, unsettling drama with a touch of magical realism and turn it into a wild ride, all without losing its complicated heart.

David Crow, Den Of Geek

As with Fear Street Part 1 before it, 1978 wears its influences on its sleeves. The previous film was set in 1994 and opened with the biggest star in the cast, Stranger Things’ Maya Hawke, getting viciously slaughtered, a la Drew Barrymore in Scream. By contrast, Fear Street Part Two pulls from slower burning horror movies.

When we properly begin the film in its ’78 setting, we meet Sadie Sink’s Ziggy Berman, who is being tortured at the hanging tree by her summer camp’s resident mean girls. This plays like it’s straight out of Carrie, both the Stephen King novel published in 1974 and Brian De Palma’s zeitgeist-shattering adaptation from 1976.

Fear Street eventually admits its Carrie White fixation, even having Ziggy reverse engineer the famed “pig blood” sequence from that movie to get back at her Queen Bee tormenter. The new movie also references a few of the tracking shots from the actual slasher movie landmark of 1978, Halloween. But when everything’s said and done, Fear Street Part Two is about the Friday the 13th of it all.

In keeping with the spirit of ‘Friday the 13th’ and its like-minded genre films, Janiak doesn’t forget to throw in some obligatory sex/nude scenes in between. And while ‘Fear Street Part Two: 1978’ may have primarily devoted to the aforementioned summer-camp slasher subgenre, there’s a scene directly referenced from the iconic scene of Brian De Palma’s ‘Carrie’.

‘Carrie’

In the 1978 installment, the bloody prom prank from Stephen King’s novel (and subsequent Brian De Palma film) factors into the plot with the ridiculed-but-resilient Ziggy Berman (Sadie Sink), who seeks revenge on those who have wronged her. But in “Fear Street,” pig’s blood is replaced with a much more squirm-inducing alternative. Nonetheless, Ziggy harbors Carrie qualities, as an outsider who frequently faces the derision of other campers and constructs ways to fight back. She doesn’t have to turn up the revenge quite to Carrie levels, though. The killer on the rampage can do that.

The long, long list of unsatisfying King adaptations—of which Lisey’s Story is certainly among the better entries—may tell us something about King as a writer, and the shape of his remarkable career. Stephen King has been writing hugely popular and influential fiction for almost half a century, but for much of the early part of his career he was often dismissed as a mass-market genre writer. As this brief 1979 New York Times profile notes, King’s early books were paperback phenoms that barely registered on the hardcover bestseller lists. In the 1970s the popular genre fiction market was thoroughly entwined with the Hollywood development machine, and many of the biggest blockbusters of that decade—Love Story, The Exorcist, The Godfather—were based on what might today be called airport paperbacks. In 1974, the same year that King made his debut with Carrie, a first-time novelist named Peter Benchley published a salacious beach-read called Jaws, which was adapted into a movie the following summer. (The film did well.)

From the start, King was seen as the kind of writer who writes books to get turned into movies, because that was the widespread conception of the publishing market to which he’d been consigned. King has always had a surfeit of ideas, and many of his horror novels have the sort of one-sentence synopses that seem like they’d make for killer movie material: a bullied teenaged outcast develops telekinetic powers; a writer battling alcoholism and writers’ block moves his family into a sinister old hotel; a malevolent force in the shape of a homicidal clown stalks a town from generation to generation. But unlike some of the writers he was lumped in with, King’s books never read like movie treatments, and many of the devices he frequently deployed—fragmentary narration and shifting perspectives, non-linear chronologies, a keen interest in his characters’ interiority—aren’t mainstays of conventional horror filmmaking.

The most successful adaptations of King’s horror work have found ways to get around this. To stay with the three examples above, in adapting Carrie in 1976, Brian De Palma and screenwriter Lawrence D. Cohen straightened out the narrative and dispensed with the novel’s patchwork form, a mix of conventional third-person narration interposed with excerpts from newspapers, academic volumes, and other fictional sources. Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining jettisoned much of the book’s focus on Jack Torrance’s struggles with alcoholism and his gradual descent into madness in favor of a haunted hotel story. (King famously hates Kubrick’s version of The Shining, complaining—and not wrongly—that Kubrick made Torrance into a standard horror-movie psychopath.) The first “Chapter” of Muschietti’s It was remarkably well-done and truly scary, but it also relegated the book’s “adult” sections—which in the novel are intertwined with the childhood sections—to a sequel, It: Chapter Two, which was ham-fisted and bloated, stumbling into many of the pitfalls the first chapter managed to avoid.

Most of the best King adaptations are drawn from material that is horror-adjacent, at most: The Dead Zone, “The Body,” “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption,” Dolores Claiborne. Lisey’s Story isn’t strictly horror, but it doesn’t neatly reduce to a logline; it’s a great idea, but hardly a straightforward one. It’s one of those books that when someone asks you what it’s about, all you can tell them is to go read it. It’s also a moving rumination on stories and inspiration, and the places fiction writers get their ideas, a subject that King—one of the most absurdly prolific popular artists in history—has probably been asked about more than almost anyone on earth. It’s not an easy book to make a television series about, which is to its writer’s credit. Lisey’s Story’s failings aren’t an indictment of King the screenwriter, they’re a tribute to King the novelist.

"What I remember about it is, it was fun to be on that set," Travolta says in the video, in regards to Brian De Palma's Carrie. "I didn't realize how significant that movie was going to be. Because not only, it got two Oscar nominations, and became a contender in history for maybe one of the better horror pictures ever made. It launched me, but it satisfied a lot of film history. This was a movie where, not unlike Grease, it was just a bunch of young, new actors, that were joining some thoroughbreds, and having at it. You know, and De Palma at the helm, and all for, all about fun. So, I think Carrie was an important movie on many levels, for sure. And the movie was a far more well-made movie than I had anticipated it would be. You know, it became an instant classic."

Meanwhile, the Star Tribune's Chris Hewitt includes Margaret White in his list of "7 best movie moms"...

In an homage to another scary movie mother, "Psycho," teenage Carrie (Sissy Spacek) attends Bates High School. She's bullied there but things are worse at home, where her zealot mother (Piper Laurie) terrorizes her. Laurie is brilliant in Brian De Palma's thriller because it's clear this unstable mom believes she's doing her job — protecting her daughter.

Eric Eisenberg at Cinema Blend
Adapting Stephen King's Carrie: Is The 1976 Horror Movie Still Queen Of The Prom?

As any Stephen King fan can attest, it’s a pretty magical thing to see the Master of Horror’s work properly realized on the big screen, and Brian De Palma’s Carrie, even more than 40 years after its original release, is not just still excellent, but reigns as one of the all-time great King adaptations. It locks into the disturbing heart of the seminal novel, making you feel every ounce of its protagonist’s pain, and burns images into your brain with its legendary third act – from the site of Carrie on stage drenched in pig’s blood, to the slamming doors, to people being burned, electrocuted, and crushed. No CGI required; just simple, practical effects, and it leaves an everlasting impression.

While it was made with a nothing budget, the film is visually spectacular, with cinematography that is both smart and stunning, and editing that is striking (the use of split-screen in the climax is a brilliant stroke, as you only feel more enveloped in the chaos as your eyes dart back and forth across the screen). The movie is most famous for its chaos, such as the brilliant hand-held camerawork as Carrie emerges from the gym showers desperate for help from any of her peers, but aesthetically it’s also gorgeous and poetic, with striking moments including Carrie being relegated to the background in an early classroom scene, her literally thunderous confrontation with her mother, and Margaret’s dead body holding the same position as the St. Sebastian statue in the prayer closet.

Not exactly being an epic (of which Stephen King has written many), the real power of the material comes from its characters, and the performances delivered by Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie are still flooring. Laurie’s Margaret remains one of cinema’s great psychologically terrifying villains, driven to pure madness by her zealotry, and Spacek both breaks your heart and sends chills down your spine when she reaches her breaking point. The movie doesn’t have the capacity to give the audience the full access to the Whites that the book does – for example, deeper insight into Margaret’s religion-driven psychosis, the story of how Carrie was conceived, and incidents from the girl’s childhood – but thanks to the actors’ genius turns you can perfectly read and understand their damage and pain as though it were psychically communicated.

It may not be traditionally frightening, and probably won’t induce nightmares in modern audiences, but Carrie remains haunting and affecting. Combined with its incredible significance in the history of Stephen King adaptations, it’s notably impossible not to put it on a pedestal, but that’s also exactly where it deserves to be. It’s a deeply dark and disturbing story as the author originally wrote it, and while the film presents a very different experience, it’s a masterclass in cinematic horror.