Tear Everything to Pieces: Power in Carrie

Adolescence is a bitch. 

It’s not really a surprise that horror movies appeal to teenagers; their bodies and minds are changing, often in ways that can be distressing, even if they’re desired. They’re starting to come to terms with their own power and powerlessness; they’re bigger, stronger and smarter, but still subject to the whims and rules of the adults around them. Their developing brains are also tuned to thrill-seeking, and horror can provide that pulse-pounding, risk-taking feeling in a reasonably safe environment. It’s no real surprise that crowds of teens often show up for the latest gorefest in theaters, ready for a good scare with their friends, crushes and frenemies.

The stresses of puberty and cultural fear of female power can combine in fascinating ways for storytellers as well. Sometimes the girl fights the monster (A Nightmare on Elm Street [for more, see Girl, Final — ed.]), sometimes the girl becomes the monster (Ginger Snaps, Jennifer’s Body), and often there is a hazy, dangerous relationship between girl and monster: think Dracula, or Candyman. A lot of these movies take aspects of all three.

Carrie is a fine example of both the girl-as-monster and girl-who-finds-monster-compelling.

One of the queasy questions underlying Carrie is the question of Carrie’s own monstrousness. Telekinesis aside, Carrie doesn’t belong. She’s naïve and doesn’t dress in the stylish clothes her peers wear. Her mother’s religious abuse has scarred her, and certainly added to her isolation, but even without that she might well have been shy and awkward. Even Sue Snell, a sympathetic character who becomes one of Carrie’s few allies, bullies Carrie in the bathroom at the start of the movie; their friendship begins not out of empathy but guilt. It’s not always easy to sympathize with someone as passive as Carrie appears to be in the opening scenes, a person who is so isolated from the norms of adolescence that she doesn’t understand the changes in her own body. I don’t think de Palma (or King) meant to suggest that the girls were right to bully Carrie, but the uneasiness remains. 

The tragedy of Carrie is that things go wrong when Carrie tries to take control of her own story.

I suppose this is when we get to Carrie’s mother, played with unhinged rage by Piper Laurie. 

It would be many years before the phrase “evangelical damage” became popular, but the pattern is familiar; the controlling behavior, the religious abuse, the way adolescence starts to shift the balance of power. Carrie’s discovery of telekinesis is significantly more dramatic than what most teens go through when they start shaking off the emotional abuse from a controlling, religious childhood, sure. But King and de Palma tap into both the universal drive toward independence that most teenagers experience and the more specific desire to escape the horror of a repressive, abusive home. King had been a high school teacher in rural Maine, and he clearly remembers his own adolescence with some clarity, even now: that man had seen some shit. Like so much of King’s best work, a real horror lies just beneath the supernatural trappings.

And the trap around Carrie just grows tighter and tighter.

Every action in Carrie is answered by an escalation. At school, Carrie begins her first period  in the shower and is pelted with pads and tampons. Miss Collins bans Chris Hargensen from prom. Chris, enraged about the ban, creates a plan to humiliate Carrie at prom. Carrie’s not just humiliated; her prom date is injured as well. And then…well. Then things really escalate.

The prom scene is justly famous. Carrie’s moment of triumph is quickly revealed to be nothing but a trap, and her only visible ally — Sue’s boyfriend Tommy — literally falls at her feet. (In the book, the injury kills him; I think it’s meant to be more ambiguous here. That bucket doesn’t seem heavy enough to do the job, if nothing else.) She is alone, her beautiful, sophisticated dress drenched in blood, and she is being laughed at. It’s all entirely too much.

Carrie locks the doors.

For most of the runtime of Carrie, Carrie herself is the victim: subject to the cruel whims of her religious fanatic mother and school bullies, with only a few allies to support her. But once her mother’s threat comes true — they’re all gonna laugh at you — Carrie becomes the monster. And then some.

A movie that begins with high school mean girls smelling blood and attacking the vulnerable ends in a bloodbath. Carrie herself dies after ending her mother’s abuse once and for all; she has ended the violence against her, but at a terrible, devastating cost she’s unwilling to bear. Only Sue, thrown out of prom by a well-meaning Miss Collins, survives. 

But even Sue doesn’t really escape. In the final moments of Carrie, she dreams of Carrie reaching for her from the grave, a shadow self, pulling her down into the darkness.

Sue is hardly Virginia Madsen in Candyman, drawn inexorably toward the darkness, but she’s definitely part of a long list of horror heroines who find a connection with the victim-monster. She too is part of Chris’s mean girl games. She too is trapped in a small rural town (in the novel, she’s even pregnant with poor doomed Tommy’s child, miscarrying on the night of the massacre; loss and freedom in one horrible night). And of course, teen viewers find themselves in Sue’s shoes too: complacent, sympathetic, well-meaning but worried for our own place in the social hierarchy…and curious, perhaps, about the power that Carrie represents. There’s a reason adolescent girls resonate with Carrie and its descendants like The Craft and Ginger Snaps, and it’s all about the cathartic power of destruction. Sometimes we get this ache, and maybe it’s for sex, but maybe it’s to tear everything to fucking pieces.