31 Days of Horror: Carrie

Sissy Spacek goes to the prom as Carrie in Carrie. They are all going to laugh at her ... but not for long.

In addition to our regular programming, every day this month, Last Cinema Standing will be bringing readers recommendations from the best of the horror genre as we make our way to Halloween. This should not be treated as a “best of” list but more as a primer. You can read the full introduction to Last Cinema Standing’s 31 Days of Horror here, and be sure to check back each day for a new suggestion.

Day 10: Carrie (1976)

Many horror films succeed because they are sustained slow burns, building tension as the story goes along before finally releasing it all in one glorious crescendo. Others are more direct. Brian De Palma’s Carrie is one of those others. Make no mistake. There is a gloriously gory and disturbingly cathartic climax. But from the opening credits to the final scroll, every frame is bathed in blood – menstrual blood, pig’s blood, the blood of Christ, and the blood of anyone who thought prom would be a laugh.

The film is about two very specific kinds of hysteria, and thankfully, neither refers to the misogynist interpretations of female hysteria often peddled in movies. Working from a Lawrence Cohen adaptation of a Stephen King novel, De Palma explores the psychotic depths of religious fervor and the dehumanizing effects of group think; however, all of this analysis and gore is wrapped up in an otherwise-conventional coming-of-age story, and from that, it derives its power.

Carrie White is a typical awkward teenager. She is late to bloom and draws the attention of a faceless mass of bullies. There are ringleaders, as there always are, but it is the crowd whose insults hurt the most. They do not know her, but they target her because it is better her than any of them. They blend in for survival, and Carrie, the shy, quiet girl from the odd family, sticks out just enough that she must be beat back down.

At home, there is no respite. Her mother is the kind of obsessive evangelical who believes human existence itself constitutes a sin. If we do not pray for salvation and God does not absolve us of the sin of being mortal, then we do not deserve to be saved. Piper Laurie plays Mrs. White with a reckless abandon and a refreshing lack of vanity. A beautiful woman, her inner ugliness seeps out of every pore until that is all the audience sees.

Going toe to toe and head to head with Laurie is Sissy Spacek as Carrie. Already in her mid-20s by the time she made Carrie, Spacek is perfect as the embodiment of a generation’s worth of repressed high school memories and pained social interactions. Youthful and freckle-faced, the best thing Spacek brings to the character is a well-spring of hope. In her eyes, there is optimism – until the mob goes too far, and Spacek shuts down that essential inner light like flipping a switch and plunges us into the abyss.

This is De Palma’s best film by some distance. Not a filmmaker known for his restraint, his confidence to dive headlong into the woozy delirium of the narrative is what sells the picture. The whole thing is an anxiety-inducing spiral into despair, and rather than hold our hands through the darkness, De Palma’s primary function is to push us away from the edge as soon as we have grasped ahold of something.

On top of all that, the cast and crew are playing with some of King’s best work, in which he steps outside himself to give us a unique and rich character not based on a middle-aged writer. The text, and thereby the film, has a lot to say about bullying and acceptance and abuse and community and religion and pain and the will to overcome and how consuming and destructive that will can become. It is almost remarkable it all fits into a horror story about a girl who becomes a woman. Such is the power of Carrie.

Tomorrow, we join another outcast teen, but one lucky enough to find a companion.

New movie review: Boyhood

Mason, played by Ellar Coltrane, looks up at the sky in the opening shot of Richard Linklater's magnificent Boyhood.

“It’s like all of life has unfolded before us just so we could stand here and say, ‘Fuck yeah!’”

A relatively minor character has this drug-induced epiphany in the closing moments of Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, and it is as apt an approximation of the preceding film as any. It may seem ironic to begin with the ending, but only at the end can one step back and appreciate the epic achievement of this film.

The groundbreaking nature of the project will be well known to those who follow these things. Linklater assembled his cast, including child actor and star Ellar Coltrane, and filmed over the course of 12 years, capturing as part of a fiction the very real growth of all involved. Coming together every year, the director, cast, and crew documented in real time the milestones and the mundane moments that make up life.

In ways both subtle and direct, it becomes clear this film is about time and the slow but inevitable passage thereof. Every second of the nearly three-hour runtime is required to realize the breadth of what is transpiring on screen. That the movie is rather lacking in plot, which we will get to in a moment, is largely a byproduct of its particular obsession with time, and for what it lacks in forward momentum, it makes up in thematic resonance.

There have been movies chronicling characters who age over time, but except for documentaries, there have not been movies that depict the genuine passage of life. Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette are bona fide movie stars, and to watch them age naturally on screen – middle-age sag sets in and silver hairs start to appear toward the end – is a pleasure and a surprise given Hollywood’s obsession with youth and appearances.

Hawke is the mostly absent father who wants to be a buddy to his kids, which leaves Arquette with the often-thankless role of the full-time parent and disciplinarian. These are stellar performances, utterly lacking in vanity and which never lose sight of the core of the characters, even as they grow and mature. Parents often get short shrift in coming-of-age movies, but the presence of these two, particularly Arquette, permeates the entire film, and though the movie is called Boyhood, it could just as easily have been Adulthood.

Or Sisterhood for that matter. Lorelei Linklater, the director’s daughter, plays Coltrane’s sister, Samantha, and from the start, she is just as integral to the puzzle as any other piece. While the movie is centered on Mason (Coltrane), Samantha is a fully realized character in her own right, the star of the movie that is her life – as we all are.

She grows up right alongside her fictional brother, and as in life, they grow apart as the years go by, but throughout, they share the kind of well-observed moments that are this film’s stock-in-trade. They laugh and they fight; they share secrets and they tattle; they are rivals and they love each other. They are brother and sister, and nothing could feel more real.

All of which brings us back to Coltrane as Mason, who experiences the boyhood of the title. The movie has many things going for it, but none of it works without Coltrane. In the opening shot, he lies perfectly still on the ground as the clouds go by overhead, and in this moment, it seems as though the universe revolves around him. This is how it is in youth – the world spins, and we stay fixed where we are. Only with the benefit of time do we realize we are simply floating along with everything else.

The power of Boyhood lies in its ability to make us think about these things. It will hit home in different ways for different people, and as the years pass, those same people will have entirely different viewing experiences as they transition from teenagers to adults and from children to parents. Its strength is that it allows audience members to project their own lives onto the characters, and it is unlikely there will be another movie that encourages as many knowing chuckles and nods of acknowledgement that “I’ve been there.”

The universality of the characters and situations can be misleading, though, as the true greatness of the film is its specificity. Audiences leave the theater inspired to reminisce about their own childhoods, to share experiences similar to those depicted, and to think back on how much they have grown and changed over the years. But this movie lingers in the heart and mind long after the cheery nostalgia has worn off and the ever-present “Now” returns. It does so because this is Mason’s story.

Mason is a bright, precocious boy – one imagines Coltrane is as well – who navigates the twists and turns of life in ways that any of us might but in ways that only he can. There is no plot, per se. It is just life. People divorce and remarry. Families move. There is sex and there are drugs. There is honesty and deceit. Love, pain, friendship, music – it is how we live filtered through the eyes of one boy and reflected back at us.

How he views the events around him is the only way to view what happens. After all, this world revolves around him. But in this world of Facebook, Twitter, selfies, and the like, there is virtue in stepping out of ourselves and lying at the center of someone else’s universe. Now, thanks to Richard Linklater, Coltrane, and Boyhood, we all have the opportunity to lie in the grass and watch the clouds roll by through someone else’s eyes.

See it? Yes.