Carrie [2002]

If there's anything designed to make you feel old, it's a made-for-TV remake of a film you saw in the cinema on its first run. With the new [2002] two-part miniseries take on Carrie, there's an even creepier personal touch: when I saw Brian DePalma's 1976 film of Stephen King's novel on its first UK release, I was exactly the same age as the characters in the film - though I remember my sixth-form college crowd finding the world of American high school [not yet overfamiliar from dozens of movies and TV series] bewilderingly alien. Formal dress and couples-only tickets for a school disco ... uh, senior prom? Seventeen-year-olds who still had compulsory games ... uh, gym? The American kids in the film had more stuff than we did [cars, oral sex, telekinesis] but otherwise acted like British twelve year-olds [giggling in class, bullying outcasts].

Of course, DePalma's Carrie was only a movie, and one of the changes Lawrence D. Cohen's script makes from the more 'realistic' novel is to highlight the candy-coloured fantasy vision of high school life. King's Chamberlain was in rainy Maine, while DePalma's Bates High was sunny California overlaid with bubblegum pop, American Graffiti-look cruising cars and a pre-Porky's slo-mo steamy vision that was every horny youth's imagined version of the girls' changing rooms. A knock-out horror film, with a final kicker that remains the single biggest jump I've ever shared in a packed cinema, Carrie was also [after Graffiti] one of the most influential teen movies, marking out the territory explored in the 1980s by everything from Sixteen Candles to Heathers. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that British schools now have senior proms in imitation of those seen in generations of American movies. Certainly, when I went to my school renion a few years ago it was exactly like the ones I'd seen in Peggy Sue Got Married and [most obviously] Grosse Pointe Blank.

Watching the new Carrie, directed by David Carson and scripted by Bryan Fuller, I'm about the age of the high school principle who gets a bigger, more heroic role this time round [restoring a great King scene in which he faces down the bullying girl's nasty lawyer father] and am actually older than Patricia Clarkson, who replaces Piper Laurie as Carrie's mad Mom. Clarkson, an actress I like a lot [cf: Wendigo], doesn't go as over-the-top as Laurie did and suffers the death from King's book - a visual vocabulary now exists for showing a heart being telekinetically stopped in a Three Kings-style anatomical cutaway diagram shot, so Mrs White doesn't get crucified with the flying cutlery DePalma found more visually doable in '76 - but the use of a key line ['I should have known it'd be a red dress'] from the old script suggests that it'd have been more honest to bill the new Carrie as adapted from Cohen's script as well as the novel. Even some of the tiniest bits of business, like P.J. Soles swatting Carrie with a baseball hat after she loses a volleyball game are reused - though, in an almost amusing bit of literalism, the girls are now actually playing baseball to justify the nasty girl's headgear [Katherine Isabelle, of Ginger Snaps, gives the new version's best performance as the bully's snarky sidekick]. This is how TV in 2002 differs from movies in 1976: Chris Hargenson [Nancy Allen] snarls 'you eat shit' at Carrie, while her TV reincarnation [Emilie De Ravin] mildly whines 'you suck'. Moreover, the high school isn't now a fascinating culture so unfamiliar that scenes about the rules and rituals of staging a prom were actually interesting; it's a world we're fed up with, and the bland use of conventional fashions, music, decor and wisecracks do nothing to jazz it up.

The show's first problem must have been fitting in with the TV dictat that all King projects must be miniseries since the story is constructed so that the first two-thirds are all build-up [and barely seem to fit into a horror film] while the finale is all action [or retribution]. In an attempt to resurrect King's narrative trick of combining book extracts, witness testimony and newspaper reports Bram Stoker-style, the show has cop David Keith [who went the King route in Firestarter] interview the survivors of the prom massacre, trying to clear up the many nagging doubts about the event as we get closer to the big scene we know is coming. Various bits of the book left on the floor by Cohen and DePalma make it back in: Carrie blows up most of the town, there's the rain-of-flaming stones flashback DePalma shot but deleted from his film [which King slightly cribbed from a key flashback in The Haunting of Hill House], more scenes from the point of view of teachers, a few Maine-specific French character names are restored [the gym teacher is Miss Desjardin not Miss Collins]. But, like the scene where Chris pretends to make nice with a suspicious Carrie in order to set up her nasty stunt, this mostly seem like padding. In the first film, the actors make their characters tell with a few snippets of business and then don't need to have long conversations to establish who they are. I think William Katt's teased hairstyle and perfect teeth grin tell you more about Tommy Ross than the identikit hunk [Tobias Mehler] who takes the role this time out does in all his unimpressive scenes put together. And Jesse Cadotte's Billy Nolan is a preppy meanie who is all plot device - when Chris has qualms [Chris Hargenson? Qualms?!], Billy keeps her on evil track. Even King admitted that the way John Travolta played Billy as insecurely abusive, low-class and awed by his rich bitch girlfriend, scary, childish, ingratiating and vicious was what he wished he had written.

As for updating, Carrie looks up telekinesis on the Internet not a card-index, Tommy pegs his girlfriend's groom-a-geek-into-a-princess scheme as something out of She's All That ['let's make it a rule that if it happens in a Freddie Prinze Jr film we shouldn't do it in real life'] and Sue Snell [Kandyse McClure] is that special kind of de-ethnicised black girl whose race no one ever mentions. Implicitly, the lone black student at Chamberlain High might feel an added kinship with Carrietta White and the bitch queen bullies who give the latter a hard time ought to be racist as well. But it never comes up, as if the script were written colour-blind and not revised after a black actress was cast, one of those typical US TV instances of ostensible liberalism that comes across as a refusal to admit racial issues even exist. Angela Bettis, outstanding in a custom-made role in May, is acceptable as the new Carrie, though no more the tubby, spotty, unintelligent lump of the book than Sissy Spacek was [the nearest performance to King's character was Pauline Quirke in 'Special Offer', a very Carrie-like episode of Nigel Kneale's 1976 series Beasts]. Competing not only with Spacek but Emily Bergl in The Rage: Carrie 2, Bettis holds her own, though subtle updatings serve to make her a more pro-active character, which is screenwriting doublespeak at its worst. After all, the point of Carrie is that she is so unable to stand up for herself that her unconscious has to do the job for her, with apocalyptic results; if she's not a complete drip, the story doesn't work. Crucially missing is the sympathetic teacher's admission that Carrie's whining weediness annoys her too, giving a sense of why other kids might pick on the girl beyond their innate evil.

If you don't want a major spoiler, you might skip the next bit. If you saw the show and don't want to be reminded of how angry you were at the end, you can also do your blood pressure a favour by picking up at the last paragraph.

The dumbest thing that the new Carrie does is be a series pilot. This means that, at the end, Carrie doesn't die, but Sue convinces the cop that she did and helps her leave town. With The Dead Zone playing surprisingly well as a regular series, you can see the network TV thinking: Bettis wanders Fugitive-like from town to town, with optional sidekick McClure, occasionally unleashing her powers in Hulk-like outbursts to settle the problems of the special guest stars, while Keith plays Lieutenant Gerard and dogs her tracks. Hey, couldn't Emily Bergl guest-star as Carrie's missing sister? How about William Katt as Tommy's vengeful Dad? As it happens, no one was crazy enough to commission such a show, which means that the miniseries is stuck with the sort of ending guaranteed to make you throw things at the television.

There's nothing inherently wrong with remaking something that was a hit a generation ago. The twenty-seven year gap between Carries is approximately that between the Universal monster movies and their Hammer film versions, or the originals and interesting revisions of The Thing, Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Fly. But, somehow, redoing the Stephen King adaptations of the late 1970s and early '80s seems premature: especially since the default King adaptation is now television shows made by professionals rather than films made by visionaries. The trend for doing King again probably goes back to those franchise-spinning sequels to Children of the Corn or Pet Sematary, but kicked over with King's own miniseries redo of The Shining, to 'correct' the errors of the Kubrick movie [a TV movie of Trucks didn't claim to be doing the same for King's Maximum Overdrive]. Since then, there's been the Dead Zone TV series and a new 'Salem's Lot miniseries, with Firestarter [already sequelised] on the blocks as a remake. I've been enjoying the Anthony Michael Hall Dead Zone, but nothing in it has matched the best of the Christopher Walken-David Cronenberg version, and the Shining and Carrie miniseries just make you more aware of the real achievements of the first filmings of those stories. DePalma's Carrie was the first and almost last King movie made for audiences who had mostly not read the book or had any idea who the author was - his name is misspelled in some of the publicity materials. Like Kubrick, DePalma worked to translate King into another medium, spinning off in his own direction and letting his cast do the same. Most of the plodders with 'Stephen King's' possessory credits stuck to their titles are just filling air-time between commercials and hoping that a familiar title and premise will draw viewers. It's hard not to feel that everyone deserves better.
KIM NEWMAN

First Published In: Shivers [issue unknown]

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