‘De Palma saw horrendous things’: Inside the making of horror masterpiece Carrie

Back in the winter of 1976, Carrie White didn’t have all that much going for her. Neither, it seemed, did Brian De Palma’s Carrie. This was essentially a story about an unpopular teenage school girl experiencing her first period – hardly subject matter that attracts a mass cinema audience in normal times. Not many had heard of the teacher from Maine who wrote the book the movie was based on. In the original film trailer, his name wasn’t even spelt correctly: it was credited to “Steven”, not “Stephen” King.

Critics initially dismissed Carrie, re-released this month in time for Halloween, as “gory” and “silly”, with one writer deeming it “repellent… a pornographic grand-guignol bloodbath”. United Artists, the studio backing the project, launched the film with a garish poster depicting the main character drenched in blood. They clearly regarded it as an exploitation picture to be flushed out quickly for a young and undiscriminating crowd.

Nonetheless, against the odds, Carrie became a huge hit and even secured some Oscar nominations. Now, it is acknowledged as one of the most influential horror movies of its era. The endless cycle of high school slasher pics and all those queasy dramas about violent, germ-filled American adolescence that have followed Carrie owe it a very obvious debt. So too do the new wave of “elevated” horror films made today by directors such as Ari Aster (Midsommar) and Robert Eggers (The Witch), both fervent Carrie admirers.

Carrie’s success gave Stephen King’s career as a budding novelist a huge boost. It made De Palma bankable as a Hollywood studio director. Carrie was also the perfect showcase for its young stars – not just Sissy Spacek, captivating in the lead role, but the roster of supporting players such as Amy Irving, a pre-Grease John Travolta and Nancy Allen.

In some ways, the film now feels more topical than ever. Late on, Carrie uses her telekinetic powers to take vengeance on her tormentors. In an era when school shootings carried out by troubled kids have become increasingly commonplace in the US, the film has an obvious extra morbid resonance.

“To me, Carrie is timeless in the sense that it deals with the notion of being different and with bullying. Those themes sadly are timeless,” says Laurent Bouzereau, author of new book The De Palma Decade: Redefining Cinema with Doubles, Voyeurs, and Psychic Teens.

Carrie begins in the same way as the novel. The 16-year-old anti-heroine (Spacek) experiences extreme humiliation in the school showers. She’s pictured in slow motion, looking blissfully happy under the steaming water. Then the trauma begins. She begins to bleed from between her legs, doesn’t understand why, and is overwhelmed by terror. Her religious zealot mother (Piper Laurie) hasn’t taught her anything about her monthly cycles. The other girls mock her, throwing tampons and towels in her direction as she cowers in the corner of the shower cubicle.

“What made him [King] think that a bunch of guys intent (as King puts it) on looking at pictures of cheerleaders who had somehow forgotten to put their underpants on would be riveted by an opening scene featuring gobs of menstrual blood? This is, to put it mildly, not the world’s sexiest topic, and especially not for young men,” Margaret Atwood (author of The Handmaid’s Tale) observed in a recent New York Times article.

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Atwood is a huge admirer of the King novel, which she regards as being as much about “all-too-actual poverty and neglect and hunger and abuse” as it is about the “weird stuff” – namely the extrasensory powers that Carrie soon develops.

King was the quintessential blue collar writer. The story of how Carrie first came to be published has long since passed into US literary myth. The down-at-heel author was living in a trailer, working as a teacher in a small town called Hampden and was living in nearby Hermon, a place he later described as the “asshole of the world”. He was trying to write for men’s magazines but not getting very far. He threw an early draft of Carrie into the bin – but the pages were salvaged by his wife Tabby, who was instantly fascinated by her husband’s strange tale about the tormented teenager. “She wanted to know the rest of the story. I told her I didn’t know jackshit about high school girls,” King remembered in On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. She told him, “You’ve got something.” The publishers agreed and his career was launched.

De Palma was far too baroque a filmmaker to show much interest in the social realist elements of King’s novel. Instead, he directs in a stylised and extravagant way. The maverick auteur throws in moments of incongruously morbid humour, using split screen to add to the epic quality of the storytelling. He cuts the main set piece – Carrie being drenched in pig’s plasma at the end of the school prom – in exhaustive detail, choreographing it as if it were a complex battle scene.

Carrie is steeped in blood from beginning to end. The director, though, was at pains to explain this was make-believe, made from corn syrup and dye and designed to be “theatrically red”.

As a youngster, the filmmaker had spent a lot of time in hospital, watching his father, an orthopaedic surgeon, at work.

“He [De Palma] worked in the wards from a very young age and saw absolutely horrendous things, which made him somewhat immune to violence and blood,” Bouzereau tells me. “You can’t imagine how much blood is flying around in an operating room,” the director himself recalled in the 2016 documentary De Palma. The implication was clear: if he’d really wanted, he could have made the film far nastier and far darker.

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Carrie was as much a distorted fairytale as a conventional horror pic. The tone veers from creepiness to high camp; nearly 50 years on, it continues to wrongfoot and discomfit audiences. Atwood points out that the novel was written when “the second wave women’s movement was at full throttle” but the early scenes of the film showing naked teenage girls cavorting in the changing rooms are uncomfortably voyeuristic.

At times, for instance when Carrie uses her psychic powers to make kitchen knives fly off walls, or when a blood-stained arm suddenly shoots out of a grave, the movie skirts close to the madcap Gothic world of a Tim Burton fantasy. Spacek, though, plays her character with such earnest and emotional rawness that she defies audiences to laugh at her.

The young star had painted sets on De Palma’s earlier 1974 movie, Phantom of The Paradise (she was married to the production designer Jack Fisk, whom she met on her breakthrough film Badlands). When she did her screen test, she was already in her mid-twenties, far too old and also seemingly far too demure for a tortured soul like Carrie. She smeared vaseline in her hair, dirtied herself up and behaved in such a feral manner that De Palma knew instantly he had to cast her, despite the studio’s misgivings.

Spacek explained how she got in character: “I went to that place where all teenagers spend a lot of time, where you’re the victim and everybody hates you and you’re locked in your room, writing poetry and hating your mother.”

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Travolta’s supporting performance as the good-looking numbskull Billy Nolan is equally intriguing. He was a minor TV star when he auditioned. De Palma picked up on his boyish charm but clearly saw something darker in him. Travolta’s Billy comes on like a charming goofball. He enjoys cars and beer and looks as if he has stumbled out of George Lucas’s American Graffiti. But then he casually hits his girlfriend (Allen) when she calls him a “stupid s***”. There’s an element of sleaze about him too, underlined in the film’s notorious oral sex scene. He is the film’s dark angel, contrasted with the blonde-haired high school football hero played by William Katt.

An Alfred Hitchcock obsessive, De Palma can’t resist splashing in references to Psycho, but his frame of reference is far wider than that. Along with Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, John Milius and co, he was one of the 70s “movie brats”, madly in love with his medium and determined to use it in as flamboyant and expressionistic a way as possible. He and Fisk used Gustave Doré etchings of the bible as visual inspiration for the bizarre, candlelit finale in which Carrie is attacked by her mother.

Piper Laurie, in her first screen role in 15 years following her Oscar-nominated turn opposite Paul Newman’s pool shark in The Hustler (1961), gives a grandstanding performance (one that won her another Oscar nod) as the deranged, Christ-obsessed matriarch, terrified of her own sexual urges. She ends up being crucified in symbolic fashion – and clearly gets a masochistic kick out of it.

A former starlet, Laurie had stopped her movie career in its tracks largely because she was sick of playing insipid parts, but after Carrie, she went on to work with David Lynch in Twin Peaks, winning a third Oscar nomination for Children of a Lesser God (1986), and carving out a reputation as one of Hollywood’s most adventurous character actors.

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King’s novel has spawned other movies, TV versions and even a Broadway musical. The De Palma original, though, stands up as easily the best. It’s scary, heart-wrenching, grimly funny and searingly honest about every aspect of teenage experience.

“I really think that young people who would discover Carrie today would totally love it,” Bouzereau insists.

Carrie’s still-growing reputation was underlined in late 2022 when it was added to the US National Film Registry, where films are chosen for cultural, historic and aesthetic importance. For the poor, bullied schoolgirl, first seen crying in the showers, looking like a “hog in the slaughtering pen” as King so evocatively described her, that’s quite a transformation.

Carrie is re-released in cinemas on 18 October