The Glamorous and the Grotesque is, in effect, a list of my favorite movies. The included films run the gamut of quality, but I have an affinity for all of them. They all have their share of both goodness and badness, beauty and trash, humanity and perversity.
The Road to Hell is Paved With Prom Invitations
[CARRIE]
Trust me, Carrie. You can trust me.
The sun shines down on a group of teenage girls in gym uniforms lobbing a volleyball ball back and forth. Laughing, shouting, goading.
The gym teacher calls out “Game point!”
The mood changes. As the group becomes more intense, we hone in on Carrie White (Sissy Spacek), a thin and freckle-faced girl who looks terrified. Hers is a terror familiar to those of us athletically challenged people for whom gym class was a consistent arena for humiliation.
Inevitably, Carrie loses the game for her team. She casts her big eyes downward as the other girls retreat to the locker room. One of her teammates offers words of encouragement: “You eat shit.”
Whether it’s a suggestion or an accusation is unclear.
Right away, Carrie White is a girl who is out of step. She is unadaptable. When the sea changes, she is adrift as her peers fall in like soldiers, trained by the fear of being singled out because, as the judge and jury of social prescription, they know how vicious life can be for the outcast. Their defense is uniformity. Carrie doesn’t have the rhythm down. She is vulnerable.
When Carrie panics at the sight of her own menstrual blood, the girls show no mercy. They sniff out her fear like predator birds. They pelt her with tampons and sanitary napkins and chant in as gross and senseless a scene of mob violence as you’d find in any Universal horror movie. Not even Carrie’s tearful cowering stops them. It is only when Miss Collins (Betty Buckley), the tough-as-nails gym teacher breaks up the commotion that the girls even seem to realize what has happened. The fog lifts. The girls are left with themselves. We begin to notice them as individuals for the first time. Notably, it is Sue Snell (Amy Irving), who feels most guilty about her role in the incident. She is overcome with paralyzing contrition. She can hardly speak afterward. Norma (PJ Soles) chuckles and smacks a piece of gum between her jaws, appearing almost dumbly ignorant of what they’ve done. Chris Hargensen (Nancy Allen), the girl who told her to “eat shit” in the previous scene, is not at all apologetic. Chris laughs even after all the girls disperse, having seen how scarred Carrie is by the experience.
None of this changes their minds about the girl. If anything, the resulting punishment only further galvanizes them against her.
Carrie White’s problems extend beyond her uncaring schoolmates. At school, her conservative attire and timid demeanor have made her the class punching bag, but her mother Margaret’s (Piper Laurie) religious fanaticism is another matter altogether. Carrie’s menstruation, Margaret believes, is not a biological function but the inevitable afterbirth of her daughter’s sinful ways. She locks the girl in a closet with a tortured-looking effigy of Christ and forces her to pray for hours.
MARGARET: And the Lord visited Eve with the curse, and the curse was the curse of the Christ's blood!
CARRIE: You should have told me, momma, You should've told me.
MARGARET: [kneels down and grabs Carrie's hands] Oh, Lord, help this sinning woman see the sin of her days and ways, show her that if she had remained sinless, this curse of the Christ's blood would never have come down on her!
What no one knows, though, is that through some metaphysical quirk, upon receiving her first period (a traumatic event in itself for her), Carrie finds she is able to move and control objects with her mind. She practices her newfound telekinesis and her mother becomes convinced she is a witch. Not that she needs much convincing.
In a fit of remorseful determination, Sue Snell convinces her own boyfriend, the popular but sweet Tommy Ross (William Katt), to take Carrie to the upcoming prom in Sue’s stead. Though skeptical, Carrie accepts the invitation after some goading. The promise of being a normal teenage girl, if only for a night, is too tempting to refuse.
Meanwhile, an unrepentant Chris Hargensen is suspended from school and barred from the prom. She enlists her abusive, beer-swilling boyfriend Billy (John Travolta) in a revenge plot that involves election tampering and a bucket of pig’s blood.
The result is violent, horrifying, tragic, and unforgettable.
I saw Carrie when I was seven years old. Questions of age-appropriate viewing aside, even then, I felt an acute connection to Carrie White. I was taken with her shyness and saw myself in the way she covered herself with her books and arms. Even in her conservative and formless clothing she feels too visible to the world. I was a fat kid, and it reminded me of the way I would pull my shirts away from my body. When I was old enough and my parents trusted me to dress myself, I opted for thick, baggy clothes that swallowed me up in their bigness. Still, I felt too visible, too present, too scrutable.
I responded to the way Carrie flinched and avoided people when they tried to talk to her. Once you’ve been tricked that many times, you learn that every interaction carries with it the possibility of victimhood.
I watched the movie many more times after that initial viewing. I read Stephen King’s original novel in middle school. King’s—uncharacteristically short—book is one of the few I’ve gone back and reread multiple times. It is brutal but romantic and palpable. It’s not so much horror that lingers over his writing, but guilt, shame, and paranoia, all the things my young self was struggling with.
Without the supernatural element, a reworked version of Carrie could read as a high school romcom. The lonely girl is plucked out of the sub-basement of the high school social hierarchy and triumphs over all the haters who doubted her. The prom would be her “Big mistake. Huge.” moment.
But Carrie is a story not just about a girl with a deadly power. It is about the way she interacts with her world and how her world interacts with her. It is about the harm we do without even realizing it. It is about how even our best intentions can lead to destruction.
Carrie is replete with complex, shifting relationships. The way people behave is inconsistent from scene to scene in ways that feel uncomfortably human. Allegiances and friendships are mutable. No wonder Carrie can’t make heads or tails of them.
For these characters, intentions are murky and unknowable, even their own. Is Sue’s charity toward Carrie about the lonely girl’s wellbeing or is it more about assuaging her own guilt in the shower incident? When, if ever, do Tommy Ross’ feelings toward Carrie change? Is this all a favor to his girlfriend or is he falling for this girl as they slow-dance together? Even Tommy doesn’t seem to know.
And I suppose, after prom night, no one ever will know for sure.
The adults in Carrie’s world are as fickle as the teenagers. They are ineffectual at best, complicit at worst. An English teacher openly mocks Carrie’s earnest appreciation for Tommy’s poem—perhaps because he, too, lives in fear of his students’ judgment. The principal who can’t even bother to get Carrie’s name right (“We’re all sorry, Cassie.”) is as ill-equipped to deal with his student’s menstrual mishap as he is with the hostile social climate at his school.
Miss Collins, the gym teacher who comes to Carrie’s aid in the shower, acts as a sort of reluctant fairy godmother to the girl throughout. She takes it upon herself to punish the bullies responsible for Carrie’s humiliation with a particularly taxing week of exercise-heavy detention. She also tries to stop Tommy from taking Carrie to the prom, rightfully fearing that there is a nefarious plot against the girl, but ultimately missing the real threat.
But even this championing of the school’s outcast isn’t the product of pure empathy. While Collins wishes the girl didn’t have such a hard time with her peers, she admits early on in the film that watching the girl panic over her period “made me want to take her and shake her, too.”
There is a sense that whatever social instinct Miss Collins is responding to is not something that ends with high school.
Carrie comes by her social ostracizing naturally. Margaret has been written off by the town as a religious nut. It’s not untrue, but it is unhelpful. Any child she had would probably be looked on with suspicion. I can almost hear the other parents, Margaret’s contemporaries, remarking to their children on the first day of kindergarten that they remember Carrie’s mother. She was the weird girl who clutched the Bible to her chest like a life preserver.
Carrie’s fate might have been decided before she even had a chance to change course.
CARRIE: Please see that I’m not like you, Mama! I’m funny. I mean, all the kids think I’m funny. I don’t want to be. I want to be normal. I want to start to try and be a whole person before it’s too late for me.
In the end, this social process makes monsters of both women. Carrie is twisted in so many different directions by so many different people that she can’t tell who is her friend and who is her enemy. When it comes time to make them pay, she’s so broken that she doesn’t seem to care who deserves the punishment. Not that anyone ever thought to give her the same grace.
Carrie is too sensitive to be made weary and tough by her abuse. She is a walking wound in the world.
What undoes her is her mistrust—even if earned. It makes the wires between people who mean her harm and the people who want to help and understand her get all fouled up. She has no choice but to respond like an injured animal, lashing out when the pain is too much to take.
What is particularly cruel about Carrie’s story is how restorative her experience at the prom is before the bloodshed begins. The chance she took by even showing up there has paid off tenfold before she wins the (rigged) prom queen title. Pino Donaggio’s brilliant and touching string-heavy score elevates her experience to something akin to a fairy tale. And perhaps, for her, it is. The burden of being the butt of every joke is lifted.
She is lulled into trusting the people she once feared, only to have one act of cruelty destroy her precarious sanity. It broke me. And I think it broke me in a way that I’ve never really recovered from.
De Palma’s most dependable camera flourishes—namely the 360-degree pan and split-screen—were never better served by a story than this one. As we watch Carrie dole out the punishment on her fellow prom-goers, we are treated to two separate screens. They are also two different realities: one is Carrie’s tortured reality—covered in drying pig’s blood, immovable and entranced, eyes wide open—uncaring and unmoved by the pleading cries of her classmates and teachers as she rains fire down on them like an Old Testament fable. The other screen shows us what we might consider objective reality. The horrific, gruesome ends of the characters who populated Carrie’s world are heartbreaking in their randomness, their unfairness. No matter their intentions or understandings of Carrie, they are all the same to her in this moment. All that exists on her side of the screen is her own blinding pain. She’s broken beyond repair. Her social compass is forever demagnetized, spinning wildly. Even her mother, whose arms she seeks comfort in and whose abuse may have affected her more than anything her peers could do, will betray her at story’s end and she doesn’t see it coming until it’s too late.
Reactions to the prom scene label it as a sort of catharsis of revenge, and I understand that impulse. We want to see these assholes pay. Yet I can’t help but feel the sadness of it first and foremost. Not just for Carrie, but for all the good intentions, the messy human stuff, that led us to this disastrous moment.
De Palma and screenwriter Lawrence D. Cohen do not end the film with the death of Carrie and her mother. The final, lasting image of Carrie is of Sue Snell. We see her writhing in pain and panic as she wakes from a dream where the dead Carrie reaches out of the charred remains of her home and grabs her arm. It’s a shocking moment, for sure. I also admit that it does cheapen Carrie’s tragedy a little—like those striking but exploitative posters that declare: “If you’ve got a taste for terror… take Carrie to the prom!”
Sue is the enigma at the center of Carrie. She is the girl who began throwing the sanitary napkins at Carrie in the first place. She began the “plug it up” chant. She is also the one who sets Carrie up with her own boyfriend as a prom date in what she considered to be a selfless and proper peace offering. It may seem a frivolous gift in hindsight, but prom is the center of these girls’ lives in the sliver of time the story offers. Chris is so burned by not attending she enacts her revenge because of it. Sue gives up her chance at a prom memory for Carrie’s sake. This is a profound gesture for Sue. As she watches, smiling, while Carrie takes the stage as prom queen, and sees the good her selflessness has wrought, it’s possibly the closest she’s ever felt to friendship with the girl.
However, her helping hand comes too late. So much of the damage has already been done.
Sue’s meddling only disturbs the agreed-upon social order. Her interference speeds Carrie’s ruination along. It speaks to Sue’s willful naïveté that she thought her plan wouldn’t create catastrophic fireworks.
Then again, who’s to say that if it hadn’t been for the bucket of pig’s blood, which, on top of being disgusting and cruel, just seems to serve as a reminder to her peers how much she doesn’t belong, that Carrie could have had her moment in the sun? When could Sue’s interference have made a difference? When did it all become inevitable?
The novel, the 2013 remake, and the 2002 television adaptation posit endings—albeit very different endings—in which Carrie and Sue make a certain amount of peace with one another. In De Palma’s version, the two girls never even speak.
Whether it is shame about how she had treated Carrie, or fear to be seen talking to her, Sue never thinks to go up and apologize to the girl. She chooses instead to pull the strings from afar. Maybe they could have had a coffee and talked about it after graduating, away from prying eyes.
To me, this is the beating heartache at the center of Brian De Palma’s rendering of Carrie, and ultimately what makes it the most heartbreaking adaptation of the story. In the end, no one is any closer to understanding one another. Sue survives the massacre, but her friends are dead. She is alone in her grief. Even if she can make peace with what has happened, she must live with her complicity in Carrie White’s destruction.
CARRIE 1976
Directed by Brian De Palma. Produced by Paul Monash. Written by Lawrence D. Cohen. Based on the novel by Stephen King. Cinematography by Mario Tosi. Editing by Paul Hirsch. Musical score by Pino Donaggio. Starring Sissy Spacek, Piper Laurie, Nancy Allen, Amy Irving, Betty Buckley, William Katt, John Travolta, P.J. Soles. Produced by Red Bank Films and distributed by United Artists. Color.