We are excited to reveal our poster created by @johnpata! With every every decision made on the film we’ve kept this “modern-vintage” idea in mind and wanted to extend over to our poster. It’s inspired by a lot of our favorite older thrillers like Brian De Palma’s Carrie.

Like Carrie, Claire is a loner, an introvert, awkward, sexually repressed, the list goes on. Remember near the end of the film, when Carrie is walking out of the burning school with a deadpan face – void of all care or concern. The Carrie we knew before is gone. This is someone else. Someone filled with nothing but rage. There’s a sequence in THE STYLIST where I realized Claire was in a very similar headspace. And so I wanted to go the extra mile — within that sequence, we dressed Claire very much like Carrie – in a light pink nightgown. Our costume designer Halley Sharp made all my dreams come true.

I went on a De Palma binge while prepping for THE STYLIST, a lot of them were first-time watches, like Sisters and Blow Out. De Palma’s cinematography and editing style had a huge influence on Robert Patrick Stern (director of photography), John Pata (editor), and my choices.

Happy Halloween everyone!! I am a die hard Stephen King fan, so I decided to do this little piece after recently rewatching Carrie for the 100th time! I absolutely love everything about this movie. Hope everyone is making the best of their spooky holiday!

Previously:

Francesco Francavilla pays tribute to Phantom Of The Paradise

Earlier today, the band posted the above pic of Pino Donaggio and Brian De Palma on the band's Instagram page. "We fell for Pino’s work," the band wrote in the Instagram post, "as we toiled away to get our cover of his score for Carrie, for the release of @vikingguitarproductions Danse Macabre VII."

The Carrie medley consists of four parts:

I. Theme from Carrie
II. Bucket of Blood
III. School in Flames
IV. For the Last Time, We'll Pray

“Bernard Herrmann had just passed away and Brian was looking for someone to work on Carrie's music (1976): he didn't want any other American musicians and he chose me after seeing Roeg's film,” Donaggio said. However, there are some substantial differences between his musical style and that of the famous composer of the music of many Hitchcock films: "While Herrmann immediately prepared the audience for the tension, I preferred to relax the audience at the beginning and then give the sudden musical hit to make people jump out of their chairs, just like the scene where Carrie's hand comes out of the grave.”

The successful collaboration lasted for eight films and allowed Donaggio to work with many other great directors (among many: Dario Argento, Liliana Cavani, Pupi Avati). "The luck I had in America is due precisely to the type of film that De Palma made, where there was little dialogue and the scenes were mainly accompanied by music, which thus had the opportunity to emerge," added the Maestro, also recounting the working method used during the compositions for De Palma: "For all the films of the early years I wrote the music in Italy and De Palma listened to all the work only later, after I had already composed everything: every time in the evening before I was very anxious, as if I had to take an exam. Luckily it always went well. Now it doesn't work like that anymore. There are demos and auditions. With Passion (2012) and Domino (2019) he already knew what I was writing from the beginning."

Some other Carrie tidbits:

Last week at Pop Geeks, Sandy Helberg, who was one of the original sketch comedy players at The Groundlings Theatre in Los Angeles, told Johnny Caps a little story about how he helped get his wife, Harriet B. Helberg, a job as casting director for Carrie:

Johnny: The 70s was a pretty big decade for comedy anthology films. Why do you think that was?

Sandy: Well, I think it was sort of a new format. There was a movie that came out at the beginning of the 70s called TunnelVision, which Chevy Chase was involved with. They used a lot of comedic actors in one scene after another, and then Kentucky Fried Theater, the people who did Airplane!, came out with their own version of it, which was called Kentucky Fried Movie. Again, they had some terrific comedic actors. It was an easy and cheap way to do a film because you didn’t need anybody for more than a couple of days. Loose Shoes was, I think, Bill Murray’s first movie. I knew the directors, and I knew the casting director. She was my wife, so we worked together. I’d help her get jobs and she’d get me jobs, and I helped her get her first movie, which was Carrie.

I had gone in for a meeting with George Lucas and Brian DePalma. They were each doing new movies, and they were seeing people together. George Lucas starts to explain Star Wars to me, and he lost me. I thought, “They’re not going to hire a Jew in space. Let me hear the Italian guy”. He talked about Carrie and high school, and I thought, “That’s more my speed”, so I asked Brian DePalma who was casting it. He said, “Well, we lost our person”. I went home and told my wife. She called Brian DePalma that evening, and he invited her to have dinner with him, Martin Scorcese and a writer, and the next day, she had the job. She used a lot of Groundlings in Carrie. She had a great resource in The Groundlings because they had to get unknown people, and people that looked young and would work for a little money, and she was an expert at that.

The coming-of-age sub-genre weaves growing pains and internal terror with a very literal type of horror. The horror genre in general relies on subconscious fears, dragging out society's deepest dread and projecting it onto the big screen. There is an odd, undeniable comfort in seeing nightmares brought out into the open for all to confront. Fears are unifying, and even the most blatant horror dwells on an underlying relation to the panic of everyday life. The coming-of-age horror sub-genre hones in on a specific moment in time when bodies begin to feel foreign. Faced by everyone growing up, puberty is a universal experience, one that morphs the mind and body, leaving adolescents feeling confused and out of control—an ideal time for horror to infiltrate.

Stephen King's Carrie, much like coming-of-age movies to follow, focuses on the type of disconnect from one's own body that occurs during puberty. Both King's Carrie and Brian De Palma's adaptation kicks off with the shy, ostracized titular character experiencing a traumatizing first period. She is ruthlessly mocked in the girl's locker room and receives no advice or support from her heavily religious mother, Margaret. As Carrie's body develops, so does her power; her telekinetic abilities grow as she matures. Her stress and confusion pertaining to both the physical and mental changes she is facing sparks sympathy from audiences who may recall their own fear during their formative years. It is this sort of human connection that makes it difficult to villainize Carrie, despite the tragic havoc she wreaks on her classmates.

At the core, Carrie is still a child, scared and perpetually uncared for; her naivety, innocence, and anger hardens into a dangerous misuse of power. This trope is present in many coming-of-age horror movies: a young woman's development coinciding with a harnessing of powers. While the occurrences vary in outcome, the heroine is usually faced with a decision as to how she will use her power, the forces of good versus evil weighing heavy on her shoulders. Part of the terror associated with coming-of-age horror films is the unknowable ability of the protagonist, as neither they nor the audience understand the full extent of their powers.

Like “The Breakfast Club” on steroids, these five misfits slowly overcome their differences, bonding and becoming friends by the time Boone reveals a twist he must have thought would blow the minds of those second-guessing how the movie relates to all the old mutants from the “X-Men” comics. Whereas all the films in that franchise have run with the brilliantly relatable allegory introduced by Bryan Singer’s original “X-Men” movie — in which mutants are seen as freaks by their peers much as LGBTQ teens are ostracized and feared by a homophobic society at large — Boone isn’t as clear about how to treat his characters’ so-called gifts. (That said, this is the first Marvel movie to depict an openly queer relationship, giving Dani a lesbian love interest.)

Here, these traumatized young people fear themselves, the way some adolescents freak out over physical changes brought on by puberty. This metaphor feels literal in one scene — an overt homage to Brian De Palma’s “Carrie” — when Dani finds herself drenched in blood whose origins she can’t explain. Boone, who’s clearly a pulp/horror/classic-movie savant, repeatedly lifts shots and ideas directly from other sources, as in a “Psycho”-inspired shower scream later in the film. But instead of creating a new-and-improved experience for audiences, à la such magpie directors as Quentin Tarantino, he serves up something so familiar as to be clichéd.

Name a more iconic horror movie scene than Sissy Spacek getting drenched in pig's blood in Carrie.

We'll wait.

The signature Brian DePalma split-screen effect, the jeering crowd, the humiliation that gives way to unrestrained female rage — the elements that make Carrie a stone-cold classic are present in the new music video for "I Really Don't Care" from The Venomous Pinks.

"I’m pretty grateful for my bandmates," says Drea Doll, vocalist and guitarist for the band. "They let me run with any crazy idea I have."

Director Alexander Thomas asked her what her favorite horror movie was, and a concept was born.

Doll says, "Carrie is truly, I feel, one of the first feminist horror movies. We figured, 'Let’s do the prom scene, an homage to it where it’s a punk-rock prom.'"

In the video, The Venomous Pinks are the live entertainment at the fateful dance. Dressed in matching pink satin shirts, they finish the song as the room burns around them.

Bassist Gaby Kaos takes lead vocals on the track; she wrote a version of the song years ago in response to a bad relationship. In a press release, she says she wrote the song after leaving a boyfriend who wanted her to give up her dreams of a music career.

These days, the song has taken on an additional meaning — namely, that the band won't let anything stop them from accomplishing their goals.

This week on Scream Addicts, Jinx welcomes Rena Owen to the show.

An actor known for her incredible performance in the 1994 Kiwi classic Once Were Warriors, as well as being one of only 6 actors in the world to have worked with both George Lucas and Stephen Spielberg during her illustrious career that spans 3 decades, Ms. Owen has chosen Brian De Palma’s 1976 Stephen King adaptation Carriefor discussion this week.

Ms. Owen and Jinx discuss their initial experiences with the film, how the film’s look at bullying still resonates, and the film’s indelible performances. Along the way, we chat about Ms. Owen’s overall opinion of the horror genre, the blessing and curse of an actor being inextricably linked to an iconic role, and…why Jinx doesn’t much care for De Palma’s direction?! [*note: Jinx states that he likes De Palma as a director, but in Carrie, he wonders if De Palma's p.o.v. runs counter to the viewpoint of a high school girl, etc. Owen says she would have to watch it again to pay attention to that perspective. For more on that perspective, see/listen to Karyn Kusama discussing Carrie on Kingcast: "I don't know, personally, the movie has such a sort of florid sensuousness that to me it's like the female in De Palma directed that movie."]