Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [80]
The production put the audience in the round surrounding the actors, who then moved into the crowd. To capture the important role the spectators played in the show for his documentary, De Palma employed a split screen for the first time. It would become a trademark that he insisted on using in many of his greatest suspense scenes, even though his longtime editor Paul Hirsch didn’t love the device. “It distances you from the people in the film,” Hirsch said. De Palma enjoyed this kind of theatrical alienation. By showing two scenes side-by-side, he better captured the spirit of environmental theater. Not only could you reveal twice as much information, and juxtapose one scene with another, but this technique forced the passive viewer to make a choice.
The unpredictability of mixing actors and audience members carried a possibility of danger. It has the vibe of a party that could go very wrong, and sometimes did. Actors were harassed, and once even abducted, putting a stop to the show. On a night De Palma attended, a fight broke out in the audience that had a major influence on his career. An audience member who perhaps didn’t approve of nude women gyrating in ecstasy loudly protested and began to walk out. A man at the opposite end of the theater saw this, and in a gesture that was meant to suggest “Good riddance,” tossed some coins across the stage. De Palma became distracted by this drama unfolding and turned his attention away from the play. The coins didn’t reach their target, instead hitting an actress, who interpreted it as a grave insult. “She thought he was calling her a whore or something, so the actress charged the person in the audience,” De Palma recalls. “She went after her. I watched the whole thing unfold. It was intense.” De Palma credits this offstage scuffle as the inspiration for the most revealing moment of the most famous scene he ever directed: the operatic prom massacre in Carrie.
BY THE TIME Carrie was released in 1976, De Palma had made three features about directors of sex films (Murder à la Mod, Greetings, Hi Mom!), one about a nervous groom (The Wedding Party), and others about a disillusioned businessman (Get to Know Your Rabbit), a murderous Siamese twin (Sisters), a rich man guilt-ridden over the death of his wife (Obsession), and a disfigured musician who sells his soul (Phantom of the Paradise). His interests were decidedly bohemian, urban, and adult. Carrie, however, was about your average American high school angst. It turned the prom, the quintessential rite of passage of normal teenagers throughout America, into a perverse horror show. This was not De Palma’s idea. The credit goes to a novice author whose three previous books had gone unpublished.
When he wrote Carrie, Stephen King was a married teacher and father of two living in a trailer in Hermon, Maine. His interest in the dark side began from a discovery in a dark attic with creaky floorboards above his uncle’s garage. Rifling through a box of his father’s belongings—his father, Donald, left home when his son was two years old, never to return, adding to the list of absent fathers of horror artists—he found a book called The Lurking Fear and Other Stories by H. P. Lovecraft. What struck him first was the cover—a creepy picture of red eyes peering out from beneath a tombstone. The mystery of those eyes fascinated him. He took the book downstairs carefully, knowing that his aunt would not approve, and started reading. What he discovered was that horror was not silly kids’ stuff. “[Lovecraft] wasn’t simply kidding around or trying to pick up a few extra bucks,” King wrote in his excellent