Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [84]
In the book, King lets Miss Collins survive the bloodbath, and since she is one of the few compassionate figures in the book, this helps the reader enjoy the spectacular revenge. In a departure that is often ignored but is perhaps the best clue to the essence of the director’s vision, De Palma strays from the script. Carrie, through the force of her psychic powers, sends a basketball backboard flying to the floor, chopping Miss Collins in the torso. Carrie doesn’t just kill the one adult who tries to help her. It’s probably the most viscerally brutal death in the movie. Miss Collins is sliced in half, the division right around her crotch. Before filming her reaction to getting sliced, De Palma’s note to Buckley was simple and to the point: “Squirm like a bug on a pin.”
Horror movies often give audiences license to indulge their sinful desires. That’s what King intended. De Palma, however, imagines a much more ambiguous, troubling moral universe than a vigilante fantasy, one where the sympathetic outsider kills the one person who most tried to help. Miss Collins wanted to be a voyeur-hero, but came up short. So she was destroyed. After inviting the audience to identify with Carrie, De Palma confronts them with their own bloodlust. In this regard, Carrie is like The Last House on the Left. It also assaults the audience. And in so doing, De Palma reveals his own conflicted feelings about the voyeur. Even when you succeed, you fail—and get punished.
How the decision to make this key plot switch was settled on is something of a mystery. De Palma says he doesn’t recall. Nor does Cohen. What everyone agrees is which of the lead characters would die was an open question for most of the shoot. Amy Irving recalls learning during filming that only one major character would live and it would be either hers, Sue Snell, or Buckley’s Miss Collins. Buckley, a forceful personality, actively lobbied De Palma for her character to live. Toward the end of the shoot, De Palma, Spielberg, Buckley, and Irving were having dinner at Trader Vic’s at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. Irving, who would eventually marry Spielberg, remembers the conversations between Spielberg and De Palma as funny before becoming quite technical. “They were wisecrackers,” she said. “But I also remember being terribly bored.”
That evening, Buckley was pressing her case to live more forcefully than usual. “I told him, just teasing, that she lives in the book,” Buckley says. “He got real annoyed.” Irving says that Buckley’s argument was actually at her expense. “She said that she should live because she was a more expressive actor than me,” Irving recalls. Buckley denies she made that particular argument. Adding to the tension was the fact that both actresses wanted a part in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, to be directed by Spielberg, which would begin shooting in 1976. Buckley’s debating tactic clearly didn’t work, since De Palma responded by walking out of the restaurant, leaving a very awkward moment behind. Spielberg diplomatically tried to smooth things over, telling Buckley that it takes a lot to make a movie. Buckley jokes: “[De Palma] killed me probably because I annoyed him so much.”
The book aimed for a kind of gothic realism, including diary entries, newspaper articles, and commission reports to give the story an element of authenticity. It also had Carrie’s mother die of a heart attack. De Palma dispensed with the device and refused to entertain the notion of such a banal finish. Carrie kills her mother by sending a series of knives flying at her, in an homage to Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood. Then he finishes with a dream. As Sue Snell walks toward Carrie’s grave, the hand of the title character sticks out of her grave in the final shock. Snell wakes up shaken. This scene was so effectively eerie—De Palma shot it backward to give it an uncanny look; you can even see a retreating car in the distance—that this surprise coda became an entrenched part of the horror formula. “After Carrie,” Wes Craven says, “everyone had to have a second