Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [82]
De Palma hoped that Carrie would be his Jaws: turning the traditional stuff of lowbrow horror into a middlebrow blockbuster. After the first screening of the complete movie, budgeted at nearly $2 million, De Palma huddled with Spielberg to talk business. “Spielberg wanted to talk about box office,” says Lawrence Cohen, who cowrote the script.
But while the book was located in ordinary suburban America, the movie envisioned a much less mundane world. King, who has a moralistic streak, imagines Carrie as something of a sympathetic monster in the tradition of Frankenstein and Leatherface. De Palma never cared about vampires or werewolves or monsters. He also knew that audiences didn’t want to see an ugly duckling, so he transformed Carrie from a chubby outsider into a beautiful outcast. King had admitted that he never really liked Carrie. De Palma made you love her, but also lust after her.
CARRIE OPENS with a high crane shot of a volleyball game where the bird’s-eye view aggressively plunges downward, heading directly toward the paralyzed, trembling Carrie. When she misses the ball, her classmates mock her cruelly. The camera then swoops into the locker room as we enter a male sexual fantasy. In languorous slow motion, nude girls snap towels and cackle unself-consciously. The Dionysian revel has moved to high school. Even the actors in the scene, who were shown the dailies by De Palma, didn’t expect it to be this explicit. “Brian told us it would be a beautiful dream, so we’re thinking it’s ethereal and very smoky,” says Nancy Allen, who played the nastiest girl, Chris Hargensen. “So when we saw the dailies, it was a surprise. It was beautiful. And you saw pretty much everything.”
When Carrie gets her first period, screaming in surprise at the blood racing down her leg, Chris leads the girls in mocking her. The camera zooms in again on Carrie as she folds up her naked body, hiding from the cruel world. Sissy Spacek played Carrie as an odd and confused victim, but she was also a sex object: awkward to the point of paralysis, uncomfortable in her own skin, and yet still the kind of girl men wanted to stare at. Her chief defender was Miss Collins, the gym teacher played by the Broadway star Betty Buckley, who had briefly dated De Palma after doing some voice work for him in Phantom of the Paradise. She even once recorded a scream in a studio for a movie, just as Nancy Allen’s character would eventually do in a crucial scene in the 1981 De Palma movie Blow Out.
After Miss Collins punishes the girls who were cruel to Carrie with detention, warning them that failure to attend would mean they would miss the prom, Chris challenges her teacher, loudly protesting. In response, Miss Collins slaps her in the face, hard. This shocking moment lets the audience know that this was a strange kind of high school even before students started dying. Buckley was a brassy theater star from Texas. “I had a brash attitude. He thought that was interesting,” she says, adding that De Palma would use her fierceness to evoke emotions in the rest of the cast, especially when he needed the girls to loathe Miss Collins. Amy Irving for one was annoyed when De Palma asked Buckley to get a response out of her off camera to prepare for an emotional moment. The director did the same thing with Allen.
Her character needed to strike Allen, but the way the