Where horror movies are
concerned, what goes around certainly comes around. Witness the success of the
updated Halloween at this week’s box
office. And Dario Argento’s 1977 balletic creepfest, Suspiria, has just returned, now helmed by Luca Guadagnino of Call Me By Your Name fame. I haven’t
seen these yet, but I did recently catch up with the 2013 remake of a horror
classic, Brian De Palma’s 1976 screen adaptation of Carrie.
Carrie, of
course, was the first Stephen King novel to make it to the screen, and it
remains one of the few adaptations of his writing to win his praise. a wonderful little anthology called Double Features: Big Ideas in Film,
published last year by the Great Books Foundation, reprints King’s seminal 1981
essay, “Why We Crave Horror Movies.” King’s essay, which covers flicks ranging
from Roger Corman’s The Pit and the
Pendulum to Tobe Hooper’s The Texas
Chainsaw Massacre, speaks admiringly about how De Palma’s approach to the
story of Carrie’s frightful coming of age “is lighter and more deft than my
own—and a great deal more artistic.” What’s key for King is that “when the
horror movies wear their various sociopolitical hats—the B picture as tabloid
editorial—they often serve as an extraordinarily accurate barometer of those
things that trouble the night thoughts of a whole society.” When he wrote Carrie back in 1973, he was musing not
only about a lonely young girl but also about
“how women find their own channels of power and what men fear about
women and women’s sexuality.” His lurid tale of Carrie coming into her own was
“in its more adult implications, an uneasy masculine shrinking from a future of
female equality.” To King, this subtle undercurrent in his own work was brought
dramatically forward in De Palma’s screen version, which captured (at a time
when the Women’s Movement was picking up steam) a culture’s need to grapple
with changing gender dynamics.
I’m not sure whether, when I
first saw Sissy Spacek take bloody revenge on her high school world in Carrie, I picked up on the underlying
layer of meaning that King describes. I do know, though, that this is one flick
that can chill to the marrow anyone who’s ever felt out of place at a high
school dance. Or comes from a wacky family background or otherwise doesn’t
belong among the cool kids but would love to be welcomed in. The film version
of Carrie (anchored by the riveting
performances of Spacek and Piper Laurie as her religious-crackpot mother) is so
indelible that I can’t imagine why anyone would feel the need to remake it. So
of course they did.
The 2013 reboot of Carrie is directed by Kimberley Peirce, who
had made a notable debut with the gender-bending Boys Don’t Cry in 1999. It’s well cast, with the talented young
Chloë Grace Moretz in the title role and Julianne Moore playing her mother from
Hell. There are a few stabs at modernizing the story, with Carrie’s traumatic
locker-room humiliation videotaped on her classmates’ cellphones and spread
through the teen world via social media. Otherwise, I don’t see many
significant changes from the De Palma version. I can’t help feeling that Sissy
Spacek seemed eerier, more genuinely possessed, than Moretz, whose more
conventional prettiness also makes her less physically distinctive than her
predecessor in the role. And nothing can rival the perversity of the original
ending, with Mrs. White’s almost orgiastic acceptance of her suffering, some bizarrely
inverted near-Christian iconography, and yes! that final scare. Yikes!
And of course Happy Haunting
this Halloween!
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