CARRIE

The original 'Carrie' is the movie that made me want to be a critic:

 

The release of Kimberly Peirce’s faithful, solid, efficient, and therefore essentially pointless remake of 'Carrie' gives me the opportunity to look back at the 1976 original, which is still one of my favorite films — and, in fact, one of the most important movies of my life. It’s one of the two films, the other being Robert Altman’s Nashville, that made me want to be a critic. And that’s because Carrie did more than thrill, frighten, and captivate me; it sent a volt charge through my system that rewired my imagination, showing me everything that movies could be. I’ll never forget the first time I saw Carrie, at my local mall the day after Thanksgiving. I was a teenage geek who was fast on his way to becoming a movie freak (in this culture, we all need a role, and that would be mine). But I was still finding my way in cinema world, so even though the film had been out for close to a month, I knew nothing about it. I hadn’t read any reviews; I had never heard of the director, Brian De Palma, or Stephen King, whose 1974 novel the movie was based on, or any of the actors.

The opening moments were like a hallucination — all those teenage girls horsing around in slow motion in a high school locker room, and then pale, freckled Carrie (Sissy Spacek), lost in a private reverie in the shower, caressing her skin and dropping the soap and getting her period for the first time, which makes her think that she’s dying. It’s a completely shocking, horrific sequence, yet it was set up with lushly tender and swelling orchestral music (by Pino Donaggio) that sounded like it came out of the most sentimental Hollywood love story ever made. It was as if Carrie was trying to freak you out and, at the same time, make you swoon over how freaked out you were getting. The whole movie was like that. It was the strangest, most exhilarating thing: a googly-eyed romantic teen-dream-turned-nightmare. Watching Carrie, I felt like I was being lured right into the action on screen, and that feeling never let go. As memorable as the whole experience was, though, if I want to be totally true to that first viewing, I can hardly overstate the importance of the film’s great shocker of a trick ending. I didn’t just jump, I stood up in my seat with terror and felt a tremor go through my soul.

Emerging from the theater, I knew how powerfully Carrie had affected me, but I had no real idea why. Even the ending carried a tingle of mystery: I’d been scared by other big shock moments in horror films — why did the fear factor of this one cut so deeply? From that first viewing, the movie possessed me, and somehow, I had to understand what it was about Carrie that had gotten into my system. And so I thought about the movie. All the time. And went back to see it. Again and again. And even tried to write about it (badly). I was trying to figure out why the movie possessed me, and in doing so, without knowing it, I was becoming a critic.

Today, something that strikes me about Carrie is that the movie has carved out a place in film history without ever really getting full credit for being the pop masterpiece it is. For many people, it’s a beloved film, yet when you read about it, Carrie gets described with words like “cult classic” or “creepy horror movie” that somehow reduce it. And I don’t think I’m just speaking out of my own personal nostalgia for what a seismic movie it was for me. The singularity of Carrie, and the reason that film history has never completely known how to classify or to judge it, is that the film is so many different things at once. It is — yes — a brazen high school horror movie, and also a comedy with roots in the teensploitation junk of the early ’70s. It’s also a rapturously lyrical Cinderella-goes-to-the-prom fairy tale that holds its sincerity up to the light, mercilessly mocks it, and still, somehow, believes in it. It’s also a tale of telekinesis — the ingenious special-effects-driven saga of a loser secretly empowered to move objects by her own repressed rage.

Despite Carrie's story being written almost 40 years ago, Moore, who developed a strong bond with Moretz during filming, said the film and its messages would still resonate with modern-day audiences.
"The movie is about something that is timeless, the effects of social isolation and what that really does to people. You see Margaret and her self-imposed isolation and what that's done to her mental health, and then you see what people in this community do to this child," she said.
But don't expect Moretz not to channel some attitude into the painfully shy Carrie.
"She's a brilliant girl, she's filled with so much wonder and she wants to know so many things, but she's emotionally stunted. I really wanted her not to be stupid," Moretz said.
Unlike Spacek, who was in her mid-20s when making the 1976 film, Moretz, who was 15 at the film of filming, had the advantage of being in the same adolescent age group as Carrie.
"I remember when I first got my period, I remember that first kiss, I remember when I first really liked a guy," she said. "Everything was fresher than someone who is 24 or 25.