Steven King's novels have been adapted by the likes of Stanley Kubrick with The Shinning (1980), but one only need glance at his information on the Internet Movie Database to see how popular his work is. One of the things I notice about the films made from King's work is that “evil”, or at least cruelty, is a common everyday occurrence, then enter a magical element.
William Goldman, in his book Which Lie Did I Tell?, says that King has often hated the adaptations of his work and was reluctant to adapt Misery (1990), although personally I doubt he hates the money.
Behavioral psychologists have often suggested that problem gamblers start with a big win which forms the base expectation and Carrie (1976) is where his Hollywood gamble begins. The Internet Movie Database scores this film 7.2 out of 10 stars, Rotten Tomatoes gives it 88%, and the domestic gross was $33.8M according to Box Office Mojo.
Brian De Palma's televisionesque style is all over Carlito's Way (1993), The Untouchables (1987) ,and Carrie; with very few sets, concise setup-payoff plotting, pedestrian characters with only their attitudes to distinguish them, and a reliance on iconography as the hints to said characters. According to David Cook's A History of Narrative Film, De Palma admits to equating film making to building machines and proceeds from a rather scientific vantage.
The film opens clinically, with a volleyball match that Carrie messes up. After a quick round, we see a very rehearsed sequence where the girls all blame her for losing the match. We cut to a sequence involving a girls' locker room (perhaps a rarity in film) and Carrie is having a shower. The sequence is not erotic, though she clearly is enjoying the shower. We wait for her to discover her menstrual blood.
Carrie soon becomes empowered by her telekinetic mind and uses it to break free of her oppressive mother. But as she moves further out of her shell, we are made aware of the plan to humiliate her at the height of it. Knowing that this will end badly for Carrie is what makes each and every sequence creepy, although Alfred Hitchcock once said that people are more afraid of what they don't see than what they do see.
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Article comments
1 - Steven Hart
In King's book Danse Macabre he has good things to say about De Palma's adaptation -- he particularly liked the way De Palma turned the high school into a hidden matriarchy, with the girls pulling the strings from behind the scenes.
He also credits the success of the movie with kick-starting his career: "The movie made the book, and the book made me."
While Carrie is one of the best King film adaptations, for my money the champ is still The Dead Zone. It's where David Cronenberg got to show a more emotional side, one that would come out most fully in The Fly and later movies, and Christopher Walken is superb.
2 - Al Barger
I second Brother Hart regarding The Dead Zone. That was exceptional work. Among other things, that was WAY the best work Martin Sheen ever did. The vision of him as president launching a nuclear strike was just beautiful. The missles are flying. Hallelujah!
Of course, it'd be hard to take anything over Carrie. That was sweet. Did you ever want to do it with Piper Laurie?
3 - Steven Hart
I did have a thing for Sissy Spacek for a while. Then I saw "Badlands." Wuuuuhh -- chill me down, why don't you. What an underrated, underused actress.
4 - Rodney Welch
The opening scenes of Carrie are absolutely masterful. You have the great overhead shot of the volleyball game, with all the girls suited out in their gym clothes, and then we cut to Carrie's fumble -- after which the girls all walk by her with some nasty comment. It immediately establishes this sense of regimented cliqueishness, and the costs of being an untouchable in this particular kind of caste system.
The shower scenes take this even further; it begins as a hazy erotic fantasy -- a steamed up gym full of ripe, naked female flesh, jiggling by with slo-mo exhibitionism -- and then, with Carrie's period, this dream turns into a nightmarish mob scene. The fetching young women are suddenly a mob of animals -- hungry for blood, you might say, ready to isolate and destroy the outcast. It's the perfect set-up for a story of what might almost be called Biblical vengeance.