Running this movie blog for the past decade has rotted my brain to the point where I can’t even vacation without planning my day around cinematic artifacts.  Thankfully, I recently found plenty cinema history to visit in Washington D.C.: a superb selection of used film-criticism texts for sale at Second Story Books, a few gorgeous art objects on display at the Smithsonian Museum of American History (including a foam face-hugger egg from Aliens) and, of course, the infamous Exorcist Steps at Georgetown.  That part was easy.  What was a little more difficult to pin down was a local screening of a D.C.-specific film to commemorate the trip, like when I caught the Bay Area Blaxploitation relic Solomon King at The Roxie in San Francisco.  Visiting D.C. during an election year, I expected there to be some local rep series of 70s-political-paranoia classics screening somewhere, but what I mostly found was the usual suspects that clog up most corporate cinema calendars: Harry Potter, Hitchcock, the rest.  Weirdly, though, I did discover a D.C.-specific tidbit when The Angelika Pop-up at Union Market listed a couple screenings of the classic 1976 adaptation of the Stephen King novel Carrie.  Although King’s work is generally associated with Maine, the movie version of Carrie neither premiered there nor in more traditional first-run cities like Los Angeles or New York.  For its first couple weeks in theaters, Carrie played exclusively in the D.C. and Baltimore distribution markets before expanding nationwide, for no other reason that I could identify besides giving this humble movie blogger something regionally specific to do on a Monday afternoon while vacationing there a half-decade later, where I comprised exactly 50% of the attending audience.

Even without knowing its bizarre distribution history, Carrie has always been a kind of orphaned anomaly to me.  The problem is that it’s almost too perfect as a literary adaptation, vividly capturing everything I remember about King’s most powerful, most succinct work.  It’s so vivid, in fact, that I had remembered looking up the definition of the word “telekinesis” in my high school library while reading it for the first time, only to rediscover on this viewing that my supposed research was actually just a scene from the novel & film.  Given that narrative loyalty to its source text and given its looming stature in the larger canon of All-Timer Horror, it’s easy to forget that Carrie is also a great Brian De Palma film, maybe even one of the director’s personal best.  While not as wildly chaotic as a Sisters or a Body Double, Carrie does not find De Palma tempering his stylistic flourishes for wide-audience appeal.  The man never met a lens he didn’t want to split or a Hitchcock trope he didn’t want to reinterpret, and those personality ticks are present all over Carrie if you’re looking for them.  Every time he doubles the frame or imports notes from Psycho score the film’s placement in his personal canon becomes just as clear as its placement in the larger Horror canon.  Carrie is just so self-evidently great on its own terms that I never think of it as a De Palma film first and foremost.  Maybe it’s just not sleazy or ludicrous enough to register among his more idiosyncratic titles like Dressed to Kill or Femme Fatale.  Either way, I can’t name another time when a De Palma film has made me cry in public, whether those tears were earned by the director or by his lead actor, Sissy Spacek.

Spacek stars as the titular Carrie White, a cowering teenage recluse whose abusive homelife (at the hands of her religious zealot mother, played by Piper Laurie) makes her an easy target for high school bullies (including improbable castings of Nancy Allen, John Travolta, and P.J. Soles as cackling teenage demons).  What Carrie’s wicked parents & peers don’t know is that she has a powerful mind that can violently lash out if provoked, like a goth Matilda.  Because this is a high school movie, this all comes to a head at prom, when Carrie is taken on a pity date by one of her former bullies and then grotesquely pranked by the rest of the knuckleheads, who pour days-old pig’s blood on her homemade gown so that everyone can point and laugh at the freak.  In an act of moody teen-outsider wish-fulfillment, she snaps and effectively burns the entire town to the ground with her immense, supernatural intellect, taking revenge on world that was cruel to her for no other reason than the fact that she was born Different.  Carrie is bookended by bloodshed, but not in the way you’d expect a classic horror movie to be.  It ends with the pig-blood prank and begins with Carrie getting her first period in a high school locker room, having had no previous sex-ed training to prepare her for the shocking experience, much to her peers’ cruel delight.  That inciting menstruation is exactly what makes it one of the core texts of the Puberty as Monstrous Transformation canon, with especially thunderous echoes in later horror titles like Ginger Snaps, Teeth, and Raw.  It’s a perfect, self-contained text in that way, when the other heights of De Palma’s filmography tend to be defined by ecstatic messiness and directorial indulgence.

This theatrical revisit of Carrie is the first viewing that both made me cry (when Carrie finally enjoys herself for ten minutes of her otherwise miserable life at prom) and made me jump out of my seat (when Carrie’s undead hand reaches out from the rubble of her home, post-revenge).  Those strong emotional reactions directly resulted from De Palma’s deliberately Hitchcockian use of tension.  His filmmaking hero famously demonstrated how to build cinematic suspense through the “Bomb Under the Table” analogy, explaining that the best way to keep the audience on edge is to show us the bomb minutes before it goes off rather than to surprise us with it at the moment of detonation.  Ever dutifully faithful to the Master of Suspense, De Palma literally translates the Bomb Under the Table tension of that analogy to the Bucket in the Rafters totem of King’s novel.  He allows us to be swept up in the momentary fantasy of Carrie White’s prom night romance, but not without repeatedly cutting to the bucket of pig’s blood that hovers over her, waiting to tip over at the most painful moment possible.  The way he draws out that tension can be knowingly absurd at times, especially when the camera trails up & down the string that controls it in long, unbroken tracking shots that tease its precarious position above our poor, murderous heroine’s head.  It’s incredibly effective, though, and its obvious adherence to Hitchcock tradition is just as much a De Palma calling card as the countless shots framed with a dual-focus split-diopter lens (as well as the leering girls’ locker room opening that crams in as many naked actresses as the script would possibly allow, the pervert).

I don’t know that I discovered anything new about Carrie by watching it in the unlikely city where it premiered in its initial theatrical run, but I did rediscover a lot of what made it feel so powerful when I first saw it in my own moody, poorly socialized high school years.  Back then, I would’ve watched the movie alone in my bedroom on a rented VHS tape.  Now, I watched it alone with an afternoon beer in a city where I didn’t know anyone and didn’t have anything especially urgent to do.  Its story of religious resentments and teenage revenge felt empowering when I was still a Catholic school grump, but this time I didn’t feel invigorated by it the same way I did revisiting The Craft at The Prytania last year.  I mostly just felt sad, unnerved, and coldly alienated from the rest of humanity by the time the end credits rolled – all reassuring signs that it’s an all-timer of a horror movie.

-Brandon Ledet