Tropic Sprockets / Carrie (1976)

By Ian Brockway

From the legendary Brian De Palma (Dressed to Kill), here is the original revenge classic “Carrie.” Few films capture the female adolescent experience so well in any film, let alone one in the horror genre. [Showtimes and trailer at Tropiccnema.com.] It illustrates such economy in style (with no shot seeming superfluous or unnecessary) and such empathy for victims of bullying that the film is simply a masterpiece forty-six years later.

Carrie (Sissy Spacek) is red haired and pale with sleepy eyes. She is teased without mercy by her high school peers. The near opening scene of Carrie in the gym shower has the slow nerve grinding suspense of Hitchcock’s “Psycho.” Here the fear is not due to a strange man with mother issues, but the horror of blood in the developing female body.

Spacek is wondrous throughout the film. Her performance perfectly embodies the anxiety of puberty, the process of growing up and needing to be liked and wanted. She is fidgety, anxious, spastic and naively giving by turns, and her performance is spellbinding to see.

The bullying just doesn’t stop for Carrie when she retreats to her room. Things don’t go much better. Mom (Piper Laurie) is a very scary religious zealot (usually all in black) who smacks her daughter with a Bible, thinking Carrie is sinful, when in reality, she is a very kind considerate person.

Most of the time.

Mom bears down hard on her daughter to say the least, but Carrie is buoyed somewhat due to a blonde cutie named Tommy (William Katt) who asks her to the senior prom. Carrie is shocked speechless and there are more shocks to come.

While Spacek’s performance is almost without comparison, Piper Laurie is absolutely terrifying as the crazed mother, having so much religious frenzy that she seems to actually levitate. It is Carrie’s mother Margaret with her paper white skin and features twisting into a rictus of medieval mania that is the real horror of the film.

Nancy Allen costars as villain debutante number one. Blame her for starting the trouble and John Travolta appears as her violent, selfish, and not all that smart accomplice. The slaughter of a pig is the least of his problems.

Here, De Palma turns revenge and blood spilling into a Warholian Pop Art piece by using a dazzling split screen which is now the director’s trademark.

While events soon de-evolve into mayhem (and how could they not), the scenes of Carrie looking into the mirror and realizing that she is pretty and not freakish, will honestly induce tears and is sincerely poignant.

With sweeping visualizations of saturated color, a Bernard Hermann like “freak out” score that sounds like the first approach of Norman Bates and an attention to color theory (the sight of light blue streamers falling in red hair) “Carrie” has a jolt of a surprise ending that first time watchers won’t see coming.

Revenge might well be a zero sum game with no winners, but “Carrie” is a triumph. It is arguably, the best adaptation from a novel by Stephen King period.

And Sissy Spacek in illustrating the wartime that can be adolescence, has never been more awesome, affecting or pained.

Write Ian at [email protected]

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