There Will Be Blood

Rating: 9/10 (13 April 2017)

For a film so nominally fixated on the clash between religious fundamentalism and the ungodly notion of supernatural forces, it's little wonder that Brian de Palma's 'Carrie' has provided these past five decades with such rich pickings. From adolescent rites of passage to the horrors of high- school life, 'Carrie' works both as satisfying revenge drama and carefully unwound thriller, cranking up the tension in suitably Hitchcockian style as the used, abused and ultimately natural force of Carrie White (a surname befitting one so pale, ordinary and forgettable that even her own Headmaster is incapable of remembering her Christian name despite being frequently reminded of it). 'Carrie' also carries with it the resonance of the all-too frequent occurrence of unhappy and murderously charged teenagers taking out their fantasy retribution in any of a hundred or so high- school massacres across the gun-loving states of America. It chimes so strongly with a modern, frequently adolescent audience because it depicts so well the pain of not fitting in at a time when being accepted as part of a crowd is never more important. Carrie speaks to the awkward, shy and desperately lonely loner in all of us. If reaching adulthood is itself an achievement against a backdrop of teenage trauma and suicide, then Carrie's own journey is a tribute to the forgotten faces that are lost along the way.
The 1970s in Hollywood were richly mined, not least in the horror genre, by a number of tropes that continue to resonate today. The likes of 'The Exorcist', 'The Omen' trilogy and of course 'Carrie' itself all take as their starting points the metaphorical transition from child to adult as a breeding ground for evil. While Regan McNeill's puberty erupts into demonic possession and Damien comes to understand his own demonic status as the embodiment of the Devil of earth, Carrie White instead is baptised into womanhood by the visceral letting of her first menstruation. Here the very mechanics of a young girl's sexuality is itself a watershed for other, deadlier forces. Already able to manipulate objects by sheer thought alone, Carrie's buried and bruised personality is caught between the extremes of peer rejection and ostracisation, and a domestic life with a religious zealot mother whose own trauma is now turned back onto a daughter taught only that sex is sin, piety is the only salvation and (ultimately) death the punishment for living. Whether one can read more into Mrs White's own sexual baptism - rape trauma? parental abuse? - is not entirely clear, but the zeal with which she condemns herself and her only child to a life devoid of pleasures both of the flesh and not is evidence enough that religion and sex are never an easy mixture.
The Prom - which is laced throughout 'Carrie's narrative with all the subtlety of showing a loaded gun in scene one - of course provides the ultimate stage for Carrie's second baptism, this one into demonhood. Director Brian de Palma cleverly draws visual parallels between the blood-caked Carrie of menstruation with the blood-soaked Carrie that is humiliated at the crowning of her perfect, fairy-tale evening. And the irony of Carrie's own persecutors themselves providing the transitional enzyme for her final ascension fits with the film's overall wrathful fulfilment. While the notion that 'no good deed goes unpunished' remains as true when considering the 'innocent' victims of Carrie's conflagration, be they the gym teacher who provides a motherly support sorely lacking at home, or the well-intentioned teenagers that concoct for Carrie a prom date, only to be either killed or so heavily traumatised that one suspects the horrors of Carrie's retribution will be felt long past that summer night.
De Palma's rich fairy-tale is nothing of course without a wicked witch, and 'Carrie' arguably has two - bitchy alpha-female Chris, whose myopic hatred of Carrie is as fundamental as any religious zealotry, and ultimately Carrie herself: denied the fairy-tale crowning of her unhappy life by a cruel and malicious stunt that has her bring down her own short-sighted vengeance upon those both deserving and not. Carrie's retribution of course cannot come without a fatal personal price, and when she returns post-massacre to her domestic nest, hoping for the soothing reassurance of a mother misguidedly proved correct in her assertion "they'll all laugh at you", she instead is slain. Surviving only long enough to exact her own suitably symbolic execution, pinning her mother to the walls with kitchen implements that visually mimic the crucifixion.
Robbed of a desired for score by Bernard Hermann - whose same year 'Taxi Driver' soundtrack proved to be his final work - De Palma instead calls on the services of regular collaborator Pino Donaggio, who in a suitably honorific style even mimics Hermann's iconic 'Psycho' score to provide the psychic stabs of Carrie's powers (well, if it ain't broke don't fix it). The performances de Palma elicits are second to none, with especial plaudits for both Spacek (embodying the ugly duckling/beautiful swan journey Carrie takes, before terrifying us all with her final act flourish) and Piper Laurie as her deranged mother. Both actresses were Oscar nominated if ultimately unrewarded in a category notably shy of even acknowledging the horror genre, but to be fair the entire cast of newbies and oldies (John Travolta marks his first on-screen appearance here) are equally assured given a script that clearly gave enough (bloody?) meat to even its most secondary of characters.
Remade in 2013,and with a woman director calling the shots, Carrie 2.0 promised much but delivered little. Only Julianne Moore's channelling of Piper Laurie's cruel and obsessive mother even begins to draw favourable comparison. While Chloe Grace Moretz is far too pretty and pleasing to capture the transformation that Spacek managed with lesser bone structure. As a result the film falls into the forgotten cauldron of recent remakes such as 'Evil Dead' and 'Blair Witch': bloody, but ultimately bloodless.