Flasz On Film

Stephen King’s debut novel Carrie turns 50 today, the novel which kickstarted King’s eponymous literary career… despite having almost ending up in the bin. After all, famously now – partly because King retells this story on many occasions himself and because it is the perfect little bit of trivia you’d keep locked, loaded and ready to fire from the hip the minute someone mentions this book at a dinner party – King started writing what he thought was a short story about teenage bullying and decided it was a bad idea. So he binned it. His wife Tabitha fished it out. Christ only knows what drove her to forensically go through the trash, or maybe she had an inkling her young husband was prone to discard potentially banging unfinished manuscripts, but she nonetheless did. She read it. Loved what she read and told her husband to keep going despite his reservations at not being able to get the female teenage experience right, which is where I am told she offered her own lived experience as expert opinion.  

The rest is history. The book got accepted by Doubleday and Kings’ lives changed overnight. They had money. And when the paperback rights got sold, they got rich enough that money was no longer an issue. Carrie became an overnight success as it flew off the shelves, captivated critics and frightened young adult audiences whose lives it was bringing unspeakable terror into. After all, following William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist and Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby, Stephen King’s Carrie became one of the seminal texts in the wave of genre stories bringing the supernatural into a reality people recognized. Levin brought the Antichrist into the apartment next door. Blatty suggested that your own child might get possessed by the devil. And King posited that the bullied girl in the back of the class could turn the town upside down when she was brought to the brink.  

I suppose these three books did a whole lot more, as they all surfaced to coincide with and perhaps reflect upon the sexual revolution which shook the Western world in the 60s and 70s… and they all used female biology as their terror-inducing engines. There’s no debate (and I’m pretty sure other more qualified writers have done so already, but I am too lazy to check) that Rosemary’s Baby reflects the anxiety of pregnancy and the utter horror of incomplete (or downright inexistent) bodily autonomy which comes with the politically mandated inability to decide what happens to your body. Similarly, The Exorcist equates the process of female puberty to a demonic possession in an effort to upset its readership, while Carrie extends this conversation further and brings physiology into the conversation.  

Regan’s transition into adulthood got blown out of proportion and transmorphed into a horrific tale of possession as a result of looking at the mysterious – and still poorly understood, mind you – processes taking place inside the human mind. Carrie White’s horror is born in menstrual blood, which is already more than enough to send a good chunk of the book’s male readership up the wall. After all, it is a statement of fact that menstruation – the most fundamental process in human biology and a pillar of our existence as a species – is a frightening ritual of blood and gore that somehow touches an ancestral male nerve, regardless of how evolved and intellectual you are. It’s just a fact of life that men fear menstrual blood. And Carrie White was born in blood. Twice. 

But that’s only a part of it. The gruesome horror of female biology brought right up to our noses in the story forms merely a part of the reason why Carrie resonated so profoundly at the time of its release and why it has become a genre icon over the years. It’s the biology combined with King’s incisive social commentary on teenage politics. It’s his unapologetic dismay at high school cruelty. It’s his fervent critique of the conservative mores of the time, which insisted on equating female biology with sin. It’s the fact Margaret White referred to Carrie’s budding breasts as dirtypillows. It’s the fact Carrie’s peers treated Carrie as a punching bag, a butt of jokes, a target to throw sanitary napkins at.  

All these things – the social ostracism, the domestic abuse, the inner frustration growing in Carrie herself and eventually boiling over in a feat of rage – resonated with the world because they reflected a reality people recognized. Carrie White became a figure with immense memetic power. An icon. You didn’t have to mention anything more than just her name and people knew. Their brains conjured images of an ostracized teenager. Of a bullied girl. Of a born-in-blood demon laying waste to those who trespassed against her and those who found themselves in her field of vision by accident. Carrie represented a pent-up teenage anger, resentment towards abusive parents and bullies. And it all looked incredibly real owing to the simple fact King chose to recount Carrie’s story in a quasi-epistolary form; which is a literary precursor to what cinema would later adopt as a found footage aesthetic. Carrie was written as part-prose and part-faux journalism, which imbued the narrative with incredible verisimilitude. It became a cultural touchstone.  

It was a no-brainer that Carrie would be immediately brought to the big screen. After all, King’s writing lends itself to cinematic treatment like no other, likely owing to the simple fact that Stephen King was one of the first successful authors who grew up watching movies on TV, going to drive-ins and reading comic books. His prose is incredibly visual. His editing and scene creation are cinematic. Therefore, anyone reading Carrie in 1974 could easily imagine it turned into a movie. Which happened just two years later when Brian De Palma brought his adaptation to the screen and put his own post-Hitchcockian spin on King’s narrative, thus crafting an eponymous masterpiece capable of standing on its own two feet, even if still hinging on King’s storytelling genius.  

Now, I can never be sure whether King liked De Palma’s vision and you’re free to go on YouTube to draw your own conclusions after listening to King himself talk about this movie whenever he is asked about it. I honestly can’t tell, partly because King is famously self-aware and he’s a bit of a troll (which is one of his quirks I always adored) and because his opinion may have fluctuated over the years. However, I think it goes without saying that the man is allowed to have an ego and that any attempt at messing with his authorial vision was likely to elicit a defensive response. Therefore, I’m never surprised when I hear King speak about how he loathes some of the movie adaptations of his work, or how it took him years to come to terms with how others adapted his writing, left what he saw as crucial story aspects on the cutting room floor or re-engineered parts of his prose wholesale. Sometimes he likes the end result of such meddling, one of which is the famous ending of Frank Darabont’s The Mist he admitted surpassed the original, but that’s neither here nor there.  

De Palma captured the essence of Carrie and kept what I think was the core of the narrative intact. He turned the locker room bullying into an homage to Psycho, retained the domestic horror of the White residence, and reinforced the final act of the story – already underpinned by an atmosphere of impending calamity – by giving it a dreamlike feel and then by unleashing Carrie’s rage with his signature set piece-driven razzmatazz; replete with split screens, Herrmann-esque notes blaring through the speakers and the iconic visage of Carrie herself caked in pig blood against the backdrop of hellfire, which was set to forever imprint on the world.  

Interestingly, Carrie never spawned a sequel despite the fact Hollywood was at the time embracing the idea of sticking numbers on things and cashing in on its biggest successes. Instead, the cinematic legacy of Carrie includes other remakes and re-adaptations. 

Sit down. I can see your “well, actually” from here.  

Yes, there is a movie called The Rage: Carrie 2 and it was released in 1999, over two decades after De Palma’s movie and coincidentally marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of the original publication. It functions as a sequel, because it narratively connects the protagonist, another troubled teenage outcast, to Carrie White, as it suggests the two girls shared the same father. However, this connection is artificial because the movie was retro-fitted into the King-verse as an afterthought. The movie originated as a standalone idea inspired by a story concerning a group of high school jocks who kept a leaderboard of sexual conquests, a live display of objectification of their female peers. It was called The Curse. Then, it was called The Rage. An apt King fan will note it harks back to King’s early novel Rage which has since been out of print and which concerns a school shooting.  

And then, someone looked at the script and thought “gee, doesn’t this movie look like a remake of Carrie?” Yes. Yes, it does. It is a de facto remake of Carrie, and the question is why. Sure, the cynical answer is that the brand name alone carries (pun intended) clout and may put enough butts in seats to give everyone a return on their investment. But I see it as a natural course of things because what Stephen King’s Carrie became was an archetype. It personified something teenagers the world over can identify with – the angst, the frustration, the isolation, the desire to fit in, the bullying – and became a genre icon, much like Bram Stoker’s vampiric count, Mary Shelley’s reanimated corpse, the dark half of Dr Jekyll’s, or the wolfman, Carrie White became a symbol and her story thus became a modern parable.  

When you think Dracula, you immediately imagine scenes and ideas. You conjure an image of a coffin, Dracula’s silhouette, a scene of staking a vampire. The works. Consequently, you can’t easily slap a number onto it and make Dracula 2. It’s not that easy. Sure, it was possible to expand on the lore of Frankenstein with The Bride of Frankenstein, and you can always get Abbott and Costello to meet any and all classic monster archetypes, but it’s not a given. In fact, these classic stories are rarely messed with. And when they are messed with, usually the audiences react to such shenanigans the way a cat reacts to an onion. Retch. Cough. Sneeze in disgust. Hiss. Run away. 

Carrie White is such an archetype not to be meddled with. She’s the modern-day Dracula, the teenage Frankenstein, the adolescent wolfman. Her story can hence only be retold, and it is only a matter of time (in fact it does happen on occasion here and there already) when other films and novels that deal with similar themes (bullying, disenfranchisement, harassment, vengeful retribution) are referred to as descendants of Carrie. Stephen King’s Carrie is a part of the American cultural mythos, a contemporary parable and a fundamental piece of storytelling fit to be carried on the mouths of prospective generations like a perennial campfire story.  

This explains why we don’t live in a world where we have Carrie 7: The Fire Within or something like that slated for release as counterprogramming to whatever-Marvel-is-coming-up-with-next. We only have the 1976 adaptation by De Palma, the 1999 stealth remake by symmetry (The Rage: Carrie 2), the 2002 made-for-TV re-adaptation of the book and the 2013 remake that seems more at home remaking the De Palma movie as opposed to the book itself. There is also a Broadway musical. And they all hit the same notes. They all religiously (I am using this word with a sense of purpose, by the way) recreate the iconic moments defining the narrative. Carrie must “come online” as a result of a traumatic experience. She must be born in blood. She must face adversity at home. She must be humiliated and brought to the brink. And she must exact vengeance in a climactic crescendo of violence and cathartic retribution.  

Some of these movies do it better than others. Some are downright uninspired (the 2002 TV adaptation, I am looking at you here) while some others truly show in those key moments where their creators’ focus was. The Rage: Carrie 2 comes together in the orgy of gore that aims to give De Palma’s climax a late-90s sheen and maybe even a run for its money. The 2013 remake opens up the world a bit further and delves into what De Palma could not afford to show with its post-prom destruction. But the point is that all these movies seem to instinctively know which elements must be retained and religiously (here’s that word again) re-enacted to earn the brand of a Carrie adaptation.  

When putting on any of the four films whose creation Stephen King’s novel incited, you know exactly what to expect. You know the arc. You understand the archetype, just as you do when you put on any Dracula movie. You know the drill. What’s fascinating to me is that – while they all zealously recreate the carnage, abuse, hazing and alienation – none of the Carrie movies recreate its original ending. In King’s book, Carrie just dies. She bleeds out in the parking lot crying for her mother, after having a brief conversation (which I believe to be telepathic) with Sue who finds her there. That’s it. Life just goes on thereafter. Sure, the world is no longer the same, as inferred in various excerpts from fake research papers and committee reports King peppered the novel with, but the point is that Carrie’s life and death do not matter. Her insignificance is crucial to her archetype and none of the movies adapting the novel get it right.  

Granted, Stephen King is probably the world’s most well-known “pantser” writer who never outlines or plots; he flies by the seat of his pants. He invents characters and lets them tell their own stories, which means that oftentimes his endings are either underwhelming to general audiences or too wacky for their own good. Not Carrie, though. Carrie’s epilogue, as written by King, was iconic in its own understated way. Because it added to what the reader already felt. It reinforced the sense of alienation that personally connects you, who may have suffered bouts of bullying and maybe sometimes fantasized about blowing your school to smithereens and exacting bloody revenge on your tormentors, to this young girl. Because she didn’t matter just as you may have thought yourself that you didn’t matter either.  

And I think this ending – powerful and immensely depressing as it is – was too much for Hollywood to handle. De Palma opted for a shocker twist with Carrie’s hand shooting up from her grave in a symbolic admission that she had in fact made a mark on Sue Snell, whose nightmares she would continue to haunt for ever. This notion is again re-imagined in the 2013 version, whose blueprint is primarily within the scope of the De Palma movie rather than the book itself. The 1999 remake/sequel attempts to redeem its Carrie-esque protagonist who saves her boyfriend, after learning he did after all had feelings for her, before succumbing to the flames of the fire she had started. She then lives on in the boyfriend’s nightmares, too. Finally, even the 2002 made-for-TV movie diverges from the text in the final minutes, despite the fact it is the one movie out of all of them to try to adapt King verbatim. In it, Carrie White fakes her own death and survives.  

Such is the potency of King’s prose that the film adaptation of any kind finds it too powerful, too dreadful, too depressing, too understated and too ambiguous. Instead they all opt to soften the blow with a suitable cinematic device and send the audience home with a clear picture of what happened, where Carrie ended up and what we should think about it all. Imagine if the gospels all ended with Jesus dying on the cross. After recounting all those miracles, prophecies and teachings… it all ends with a torture execution at the hands of his Roman captors in agreement with the local Jewish governance who all saw him as a dangerous radical. That’s it. Roll credits. He didn’t matter. He wasn’t special. He wasn’t God’s only son. He was just a man. The ultimate downer ending – some would say, the humanist ending.

We know where the Gospels go, though. In the archetypal narrative twist, he comes back from the dead having waited three days. But what if he came back… for revenge? 

In a way, the modifications all these adaptations attempt achieve something, even if at the cost of incurring the author’s ire. They finish the job of elevating Carrie White beyond a mere genre archetype into an almost biblical status. Granted, some do it way better than others and I personally prefer De Palma’s vision over any other cinematic treatment. Even though I absolutely adore the way King ends his story and how it leaves me stirring internally every time I read it, I think De Palma comes closest to turning the story of Carrie White into a modern-day parable fit to be carved into the stone tablets of the ever-growing Western mythology.

Somewhere between the original text and the 1976 adaptation with Sissy Spacek, Nancy Allen and John Travolta lies the ballad of Carrie White – nay, the Gospel of Carrie White – an archetypal parable of humiliation, retribution and alienation that touched a nerve 50 years ago and compelled consecutive generations of storytellers to refer to Stephen King’s work, thus searing the image of a born-in-blood telekinetic demon, who instead of dying for our teenage sins, came down from her cross and sowed destruction. And we all felt her catharsis. In fact, we feel it today, fifty years on.