The master of suspense (or is it exploitation?)

Rating: 10/10 (7 August 2009)

Despite coming from an era where special effects and slick technology weren't handy resources for creating exciting or interesting horror movies, Carrie must remain one of film's finest examples of raw, sophisticated and devastating tension, created under a modest but virtuosic budget and with a rare capacity (even today) to play with the audience's emotions in a blunt, visceral manner. It is done with Hitchcock in mind, although merely in technique and in tone, never in the themes or the subject of horror or suspense. Most of the film's core one must thank to Brian De Palma's exploitative and lurid manner of maintaining suspense and revering classic horror architecture: stock characters, Gothic camp, and an obtuse, over-the-top view of cruelty and madness into a film that remains a perverse yet instantly accessible and strangely easygoing classic.
For me, De Palma has been not only Hitchcock's most faultless copycat, but still in all his elegant pastiche, manages to be a rougher-around-the-edges and more disturbing version of his mentor. ''Carrie'' is based on Stephen King's novel, but his movie version almost seems like a revision, not an adaptation. De Palma's Carrie pays up more visually and technically to any other work in his oeuvre, than to Stephen King psychologically intense and bleak novel. After all it's the same De Palma of always: slightly humorous, greedily destructive, still managing again to ludicrously inject in typically pulpy, sensual fashion heaps of veiled erotic undertones, harsh melodrama and wrenching violence. Case in point is the almost soft-porn locker room scene, steam pouring all over the place and a dreamy, kitsch score by Pio Donaggio leading us to the porcelain-skinned figure of our heroine, as she showers in slow motion. Suddenly while soaping her virginal body, she realizes that period blood has poured almost imperceptibly through her thigh. This macabre detail abruptly halts this ethereal introduction and instead introduces us to Carrie's steamless reality and the vile snake pit of tormentors that plague it. The image of those luminous teenagers roaring from laughter and darting Carrie's flaccid, awkward, moist body with tampons is a perfect example of DePalma's exhilarating sensationalism. The shock factor is later replayed for us in magnified close-up when we see the brainless principal of the school subtly notice Carrie's period blood in the shorts of Miss Collins, her onlyprotecting teacher. DePalma is a master.
He also wants us to feel tension, not just empathy and sadness for the protagonist, and he builds it like a pressure cooker, dread piling up as we learn about Carrie's eerie supernatural power and the treacherous plans her classmates have for her. We also witness plenty of domestic horror between Carrie and her mother, a psychotic religious wacko who is held responsible for most of Carrie's delayed, repressed sexuality and social immaturity. What's fascinating is that the White household is played tongue-in-cheekly Gothic: all dark, candlelit, rusty, creaking woodevery time Miss White enters the scene, Hermannesque orchestral music plays as if the Count of Dracula had just arrived at his castle while the guests were waiting. When Carrie arrives home at the end, organ pipe at full volume guides the girl through corridors filled with thousands of candles, almost as from the Exorcist. DePalma is a sucker for stylistic excess, culminating in the voodoo-like Christ Carrie is supposed to pray at when Momma locks her up. Even in the flip-side, the lively, colorful high school scenes Carrie will always observe with retirement are played up against a backdrop of cheesy 70's funk.
DePalma plays with point of view, lightning (there is even a flash Frankenstein-type lightning striking at an outwards shot of Carrie's house), music and actors in a way that makes Carrie what Psycho was to the 50s, a bag of shock tactics and muddled, yet humane psychology to guide the audience to a point of inevitable, larger-than-life catharsis. The prom scene reminds me of what tragedy was for the ancient Greeks, sporting a conclusion so intense the audience feels a harrowing sort of purge. DePalma's camera pirouettes around the overblown, glitter-ball romanticism of the prom set-up, one-hit wonders from the 70's looming from the speakers, to perfectly capture Carrie's new position, one of enchantment and almost ecstasy yet led by obvious mistrust and terror. It slickly leads up to that infamous slow-motion, silent and almost palpably sick scene of humiliation and violation. All the mayhem that comes after, shot in deep red, is an almost orgiastic example of DePalma's baroque virtuosity.
As in post-data, I would like to comment that the only time that curiously, DePalma is subtle is in monitoring the high school scenes. The school Adonis has a blonde afro, the antagonist is blond, dressed in pink, and eye-rolls and swears more than actually talking, and her friend, dressed even to prom with a cap, only grins and giggles throughout the whole picture. Yet nothing else in this respect is one-dimensional, DePalma is a master of technique and he uses nothing more than again angles, actors and dialog to perfectly capture the complicity, familial sense and high exclusiveness of junior high, through silences, looks and hurried conversations. There is no sketch-artist portrayal of the high school jungle; it all remains quietly realistic. It wouldn't hurt to point out that one of the popular girls is fat and has glasses, not your pretty girl prototype, and I'm glad DePalma did create a hairspray-stinking but thoroughly human high school.
Yet again Carrie is not a film you will remember for speaking against or preaching a bit on the hell that high school is for some. Or a haunting tale about what religion extremism does on some. You will plainly remember it as the exploit-y story about that girl that got teased cruelly and killed the whole school in response. Yeah it's that kind of story, and with pride.