In my recollection, the breakthrough 1973 Stephen King novel about high-schoolers was pretty popular with actual high-schoolers back in the day; I remember many upper classmen carrying around the paperback and comparing juicy bits, much as they did with Mario Puzo’s The Godfather a couple of years prior. The King book was one that gave pop culture a proper and explicit introduction to telekinesis, that being the move-things-with-my-mind power that poor Carrie White uses to fix both her religious-fanatic mother and her peer prom-ruiner’s at the story’s wild climax.

Then hotshot director De Palma, most of whose films up to this one reveled in a snarky, sometimes perverse subversive streak, brought not-inconsiderable irreverence to this project, which he definitely sensed could be a commercial hit that would sharpen his studio-filmmaking profile. Look at a dinner scene between Sissy Spacek’s Carrie and her unbalanced mom, played with pitch-perfect awareness by Piper Laurie. When Carrie reveals “I’ve been invited to the prom?”, Mom raises an eyebrow and says “Prom?” At that moment, lightning flashes like something out of a Universal Frankenstein movie.

The virtuosic director goes all-but-kitchen-sink in orchestrating effects to achieve maximum shock and horror: diopter shots, shock cuts, rack focusing, you name it. The way the movie hews to the time that it was made is in its matter-of-fact treatment of how high schoolers got it on, supposedly.

Here Carrie’s tormentors here are both super mean and super horny. John Travolta’s Billy, boyfriend to Nancy Allen’s gum-cracking, eye-rolling horror show Chris, is both dumb and physically abusive. There’s shot-reverse-shot bit in which Billy leers at Chris’s braless breasts under her sweater that shares the character’s joy of ogling. In the same scene, Chris uses fellatio to inveigle “dumb shit” Billy into taking part in her evil scheme to avenge herself on Carrie. And here too, De Palma can’t resist a joke, having Chris interrupt her efforts to exclaim “I hate Carrie White,” much to Billy’s confusion.

The 1976 movie’s opening scene, in which the horrified Carrie experiences menstruation for the first time in the girl’s locker room shower post-gym class, is shot in a gauzy, dreamy, slow-motion, and literally steamy male-gaze fashion that De Palma would use again in the opening of Dressed To Kill, with Angie Dickinson (and her body double) fantasizing rhapsodically about sex with a hunky stranger. Nancy Allen — director De Palma’s future wife, it’s worth mentioning — bounces by in the altogether, and De Palma lingers on Spacek’s Carrie soaping up her breasts, belly, and thighs. (The score by Pino Donaggio has a flute melody that suggests some kind of ad concerning the “special times” of one’s life.) But as much as De Palma luxuriates here, the strategy is to overturn whatever pleasure the male viewer might derive by depicting Carrie’s “plug it up” humiliation in excruciating detail.

The 2013 Carrie remake, directed by Kimberley Peirce, maintains the period of discovery — or, rather, the discovery of period — in the girls’ shower, but also keeps the taunting teens in towels or underwear. And it shows Carrie mostly from the shoulders up, certain shot choices paying homage to the shower scene in Hitchcock’s Psycho as she goes. (Why didn’t De Palma think of that?) As for sex, popular kids Tommy and Sue are sufficiently reflective characters that they interrupt their (very briefly depicted) coitus to discuss Sue’s guilty feelings about throwing tampons at Carrie. There’s more time devoted to the ins and outs of how Chris and Billy get all that pig’s blood than to the details of their fraught relationship. (Cell phone videos are added to the mix, too.) But as Manohla Dargis pointed out in her mostly favorable review of the remake in The New York Times, “the dread of the female body that deepens Mr. De Palma’s version somehow goes missing.”

That dread is not unrelated to a less specifically gendered trend that was brewing in genre movies in this period, eventually termed “body horror.” Carrie can nestle comfortably — or uncomfortably, as the case may be — between David Cronenberg’s 1975 and 1977 films Shivers and Rabid in this respect. And Julia Decorneau’s new, provocative French film Titane is a proud and prominent inheritor of what De Palma and Cronenberg were up to. Whereas Peirce’s remake re-centers the movie around Carrie’s relationship with her mother (in the newer film, Carrie is played by Chloe Moretz, and the mom by Julianne Moore), and the theme becomes twisted family relations, for better or worse.

A large part of what makes De Palma’s Carrie potentially problematic is also a source of its unsettling power. The girl’s shower scene notwithstanding, the treatment of teen sexuality isn’t intended solely to titillate; rather, it makes a mordant commentary on the use of sex as a weapon, leaning heavy on a female vamp stereotype. While we now consider that a retrograde cliché, it’s not a condition without real-life precedent. As good art sometimes ought to do, the whole mix renders the viewer uneasy.

Special Guests: Joseph Aisenberg, Nancy Allen, William Katt, Piper Laurie, Joe Maddrey
Guest Co-Hosts: Jamey Duvall, Keith Gordon

We’re wrapping up #Shocktober 2021 with a look at Brian De Palma's Carrie (1976). Based on the novel by Stephen King, the film stars Sissy Spacek as the titular Carrie White. She’s a young woman who’s lived under her mother’s thumb and religious fervor. When she experiences her first period, she also experiences a new ability to move objects with her mind.

Keith Gordon and Jamey Duvall join Mike to discuss the film. Interviews include Piper Laurie, William Katt, Nancy Allen, Joseph Aisenberg (Studies in the Horror Film: Carrie), and Joe Maddrey (Adapting Stephen King: Volume 1, Carrie, 'Salem's Lot and The Shining from Novel to Screenplay).

Who were you closest with on set? Was it Nancy Allen [again, she played Chris], since most of your scenes were with her?
Yeah, Nancy and I are still really, really good friends. And we were very close [on set]. I was always trying to steer her away from having a crush on Brian. Didn’t work — she married him! And got divorced [Laughs.] But I tried to warn her, I said, “Why are you doing this? Look, he’s got that look on his face, like he’s enjoying all this. There’s a sadistic guy in there.” [Pretending to be Nancy], “Oh, he’s so cute.” No, Nancy, no! I was also close to Betty Buckley [who played Miss Collins], she actually had been a previous girlfriend of Brian’s. And she didn’t know how to drive and I had a blue pickup truck, and Brian asked if I would pick her up every day at the Chateau Marmont and bring her to the set. And so I’d go by every day and pick up Betty, who would pull down the visor and put on makeup. And I’d go, “It’s 6 a.m., Betty, we’ll be in makeup in like half an hour. What are you doing?” She’d go, “Brian’s gonna see me, I want to look my best!” I’d go, “Brian? He’s not even gonna look at us. We’re gonna go right to makeup.”

So Brian was the set stud?
Well, I wouldn’t say that. I think Nancy had a crush on him and Betty was an ex-girlfriend. She was nervous about how he was going to do away with her character, that’s all she would talk about. Because it wasn’t specified in the script. It said, like, “chaos in the gymnasium” and then it was up to Brian how each individual person was killed. Like, my character got killed by the fire hose, which obviously wasn’t in the Stephen King book because there was no Norma in the book. But Betty was nervous about how he was going to do away with her and then the basketball, the backboard comes crashing down on her. She was terrified of that.

Were Brian and Nancy actually dating on set or did that come after? No, no, I think it was once it ended. I mean, everybody was busy. We filmed all day long and then Brian was one of the rare directors that would say, “Come on, kids, let’s go look at the dailies.” And then we’d all march over to the screening room and watch dailies together. It always amazed me that he would want us in there, because he was making his notes, working, while we were in there laughing, going, “Hahaha, look at that.”

Was he inclusive, then? I thought he was known for being more like a dictator. He wasn’t really a dictator. It was definitely his set. You always know who the director is: They’re the one in charge and they’re sitting in the higher chair. But he wasn’t very verbal. For instance, at the end of a scene, a lot of directors will go, “Cut. That’s great, let’s do another one.” Or, “Oh, that’s great, we can move on.” He would say cut and then you’d look and if he had this sly smile on his face, you knew he liked it. And then he’d just kind of mumble. And if you saw the camera move, you’d go, I guess we’re moving on. That’s good. We’re not gonna do it again. So it wasn’t a loud set; it was a very quiet set. It was really about the shots, and the lighting, and the look. We came in at the last minute like a football team, like, Okay, run this play. We have the field mowed, the people in the stands, and then the players come in to run one play. We were sort of the afterthought to everything that was going on. Everything that led up to it was what took the time, and it looks like that. To me, when I watch it now, it looks like a work of art; it looks like somebody painted this movie.

In 1975, when the film was made, the community center was the just-closed Pier Avenue School, on the corner of Pacific Coast Highway and Pier Avenue in Hermosa Beach. The art deco building today operates as a theater and public gymnasium, and is the home to the Hermosa Beach Historical Museum.

The building’s exterior and the outside stairway in the back played pivotal roles in “Carrie,” according to Jack Fisk, an art director on the film who has also been married to Spacek since 1974.

Pier Avenue School was one of three schools used to represent Bates High in the film, Fisk said in the 2001 documentary “Visualizing Carrie.” The bone-chilling final indoor scene was shot on a sound stage to take advantage of special effects involving fire, he said.

This week’s film screening, hosted by students from Mira Costa and Redondo Union high schools, will include a 1970s-themed costume party and a discussion of the film’s Hermosa Beach history.

Jamie Erickson, director of operations at the Hermosa Beach Historical Museum, will also show off a portion of the girl’s shower stall with the original pink tile that was part of a key scene. That part of “Carrie” happens early in the film, when classmates tease the shy Carrie White, whose fanatically religious mother fails to tell her what to expect when she gets her period.

The other photo was taken at a 2018 screening of Carrie at the Hermosa Beach Museum. It shows the shower that can be seen in the film, and which is currently in a city storage area at the Hermosa Beach Community Center and is not accessible to the public: