#18: Carrie (1976)

"They're All Going To Laugh At You!"

Meet Carrie White (Sissy Spacek), a shy teenager who everyone picks on. She's harassed at school by her classmates, overlooked or belittled by her teachers, and mentally abused by her extremely religious mother (a role played with much gusto by Piper Laurie.) Even when the popular Tommy Ross (William Katt in his most memorable film role) asks her out to the prom she can't help but think that it has to be part of a cruel trick of some kind . . . and, in a sense, it is. What no one suspects, however, is that Carrie is beginning to manfest telekinesis: the ability to move things with one's mind. This is one girl who's about to be pushed too far.

This whole movie is pretty much like waiting for a bomb to go off. Its chills come more from the anticipation of the moment that Carrie is finally going to let loose with her powers, and director Brian De Palma does a great job of making us hope that everything will turn out for the best before it doesn't. I imagine that if this film came out today it probably would be seen as an allegory for the many tragic school shootings that have occurred over the past decade or so, and I suppose it could be argued that Stephen King had something of that in mind when he wrote the novel on which Carrie was based- King was also to write a fictionalized version of the 1966 University of Texas massacre perpetrated by Charles Whitman. But the real tragedy of Carrie, as I see it, is that she wasn't born a monster- she only became one after years and years of abuse.

I'd have to say that my favorite thing about Carrie is how incredibly seventies the whole film is (perhaps not surprising given that the film came out in 1976.) The clothes, the hair, the soundtrack by Pino Donaggio . . . it's even got John Travolta the year before he was in Saturday Night Fever. How much more seventies can you get?

By the way, this film and 1977's Star Wars were cast at the the same time, during a joint audition process held by Brian De Palma and George Lucas, and Sissy Spacek and William Katt were seriously considered for the roles of Princess Leia and Luke Skywalker respectively. Besides imagining Spacek and Katt in Star Wars, you have to wonder what it would have been like to have Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher in Carrie.

Check back tomorrow for #17!