Blu-ray Review: CARRIE (1976) Collector’s Edition

Released 40 years ago today, Brian De Palma’s 1976 adaptation of Stephen King’s debut novel Carrie remains a masterpiece of modern horror. It is a teenage pop nightmare of a film, a dreamy exploration of horrors both real and supernatural. Expertly directed, gorgeously photographed and acted with total sincerity by a cast of then-newcomers, it remains one of the very best King adaptations despite being first out of the gate.

Know how I know De Palma’s Carrie is a brilliant adaptation and one of the best horror movies ever made? Because other filmmakers have tried adapting it three other times across three other decades: Katt Shea in 1999 (with The Rage: Carrie 2, basically a Carrie remake and the best of the lot), David Carson for SyFy in 2002 and, most recently, Kimberly Pierce in 2013. None of them come close to touching the 1976 original.

From its famous opening sequence, in which a locker room full of teenage girls frolic naked in soft-focus slow motion before tormenting meek, terrified young Carrie White (Sissy Spacek) by hurling tampons at her as she experiences her first menstruation, De Palma lays out exactly what his Carrie is about: high school is a nightmare disguised as a fantasy. De Palma, ever the voyeur, relishes the opportunity to approach the material (adapted by Lawrence D. Cohen) as an anthropologist might. Here he imagines the realities of young life but filters them through his hyper-stylized aesthetic, his camera and composer Pino Dinaggio’s beautiful score commenting on the proceedings rather than simply observing them with stark objectivity.

There are too many perfectly constructed shots in Carrie to even begin to list them all — this is Brian De Palma, after all — but there’s one shot in particular that brilliantly captures the entirety of the film. It’s when Carrie and her prom date, the handsome and popular Tommy Ross (William Katt in a truly amazing and underappreciated performance), head out onto the gym floor for their first slow dance. De Palma slowly spins the camera around them, a teenaged girl’s fantasy of first love. Slowly, though, we realize that the camera is starting to spin too quickly; at the same time, the couple themselves are spinning within the shot (the actors were standing on a giant turntable). What begins as something beautiful quickly turns nightmarish even as Carrie and Tommy are blissfully unaware of what’s happening, and as the sequence reaches its own dizzy delirium, we realize that the whole evening is spinning out of control. Things are about to go terribly, terribly wrong. It’s such good storytelling and such masterful filmmaking.

Because, like many of the classic Universal horror films of the 1930s and ‘40s, Carrie is essentially a tragedy. We don’t want Carrie to become the victim of a horrible prank. We like seeing her happy. We don’t want her to think Tommy is somehow responsible because he’s a good guy who genuinely likes her. But what we want does not matter, because as De Palma’s long tracking shot through the gym and up into the rafters where Chris Hargensen (Nancy Allen) and Billy Nolan (John Travolta) lie in wait shows, these dark events are already in motion. The climax is inevitable, and De Palma’s masterstroke is in just how long he draws out what we know is coming. He teases us to the point of agony, then unleashes literal hell on the gym full of students and teachers. Tommy is killed never having the chance to tell Carrie he knew nothing about it. Teachers who showed Carrie kindness and looked out for her die violently. Her psychic fury does not discriminate the good from the bad, and even those kids who have earned our ill will by participating in her torment, pointing and laughing at the blood-soaked Carrie White, still don’t deserve to die as punishment for the crimes of youth. All of the deaths in the movie are tragic — none more so than Carrie’s own.

As with so many of my favorite horror films, the greatness of Carrie is in its attention to character — these are real people, given the time and the space to develop and interact the way these people would. Though she’s far from the description of the character King wrote in his book, Sissy Spacek has rightly been praised for her work as the titular teenager. She’s a wispy newborn deer who comes into her own by movie’s end; by that point, of course, it’s too late. Both she and Piper Laurie, who plays her abusive religious fanatic mother, are among the few actors ever nominated for Oscars for a performance in a horror movie (for Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress, respectively). But the rest of the cast is every bit as good. Chosen during a joint casting call with George Lucas, then putting together Star Wars, the actors were almost all unknowns as the time, save for Spacek, Laurie and Travolta, who was by then a heartthrob on Welcome Back, Kotter but who was making his feature film debut here. He’s great, as are Nancy Allen and Amy Irving, all playing believable teenagers who are varying degrees of thoughtless and cruel but not abjectly evil. They’re just young.

Like a few of Scream Factory’s other recent Blu-ray releases, Carrie has already been available to own in HD for a few years. Being Scream Factory, though, they know that fans have to be given something special if they’re going to buy the movie for a second time (or, if you’re like me, for the fourth or fifth). Their release of the movie boasts a brand new 4K scan, making for the best-looking Carrie available since its initial theatrical run. Presented in its original 1.85:1 widescreen aspect ratio in 1080p HD, this new scan (taken from the original camera negative) offers greater detail and less noise than the original release, plus more natural colors and skin tones. Unlike the original MGM Blu-ray, which offered only one lossless audio option, the Scream Factory version has DTS-HD lossless offerings for both the original mono track and the 5.1 surround mix.

In addition to over an hour of featurettes ported over from previous MGM releases — a general overview of the production, a piece on the cast and another piece on the ill-fated Carrie musical — Scream Factory has collected a number of new interviews included on a second disc devoted to bonus content. There are sit downs with writer Lawrence D. Cohen, cinematographer Mario Tosi, casting director Harriet Helberg, editor Paul Hirsch, composer Pino Donaggio and a new piece on the cast that includes comments from Nancy Allen, William Katt, P.J. Soles, Betty Buckley, Piper Laurie and Edie McClurg. Also included is another installment of Sean Clark’s “Horror’s Hallowed Grounds,” an ongoing series that visits some of the original filming locations of classic horror movies, as well as trailers for the 1976 Carrie and its sequels/remakes. Rounding out the bonus features is a collection of promotional material, including radio and TV spots and galleries of production and marketing images.

There are some who say that Carrie hasn’t aged well, mostly because of the hairstyles and clothes and a few of De Palma’s directorial flourishes (I’m looking at you, sped-up tuxedo sequence). I could not disagree more. Not only is the filmmaking just as precise and brilliant as ever, but the movie’s themes of growing up are timeless and what it has to say about bullying as relevant as it ever was, if not more. If anything, Carrie gets better every time I see it; I’m always gaining new appreciation for the way De Palma moves the camera and finding new human moments that make me love the movie even more. It’s ultimately the characters that bring me back again and again, as it is a horror film with essentially only one true horror sequence. But what a sequence it is. What horror it shows.

Movie score: 5/5, Disc score: 4/5