1970s, Fantasy, Horror/Eerie

Carrie (1976)

Director: Brian De Palma
Screenwriter: Lawrence D. Cohen

By Roderick Heath

The novel Carrie, published in 1974, vaulted a struggling young English teacher with a few short stories to his credit named Stephen King to sudden fortune and fame. Director Brian De Palma, looking for a project after his would-be breakout project Phantom of the Paradise (1974) had proved only a minor cult success, was recommended the novel by a friend who also knew King. After reading the book De Palma found the rights were unsold and snapped them up. Something of the material’s weird magic rubbed off. De Palma’s film of Carrie became his first big hit and marked his emergence as a fully mature filmmaker in his major phase, and boosted several members of its cast, including star Sissy Spacek and supporting actors Nancy Allen, Amy Irving, and John Travolta, to it-kid status. The film’s success also sparked a swiftly metastasizing industry adapting King’s work for the movies, which only helped reinforce his position as one of the preeminent genre wordsmiths of the last fifty years. King himself had only reluctantly committed to writing the novel after the first scene came to him a squall of phobic thinking when, working part-time as a janitor in a school with his brother and cleaning some girls’ locker room showers, was fixated by the image of some poor girl terrified by her period suddenly arriving whilst showering and being ferociously mocked by her classmates, a scene of a kind King had witnessed often in high school.

The taboo-grazing blood rite King had psychically conjured upon proved to be the ticket to directly tapping into the modern audience’s new hunger for a kind of direct engagement with things once kept off in the margins of metaphor in artistic report, in both the intimate engagement with a young woman’s body as an unstable and sometimes alien thing to herself, and the direct portrayal of the raw pack animal behaviour young people often inflict on each-other in the process of growing up, and the occasions where such behaviour gains a dreadful retaliation. The cementing of suburban youth culture in the 1950s made the dramas of adolescence increasingly profound as part of the average person’s life. Carrie’s appeal is, then, plainly emblazoned in its core imagery and concept, a tale recognisable from just about everyone’s youth in the games of social status amongst teenagers and fantasies of revenge stoked in the face of rejection. King’s ambivalence about his subject and characters was mediated to a degree by his choice of writing it as a modern version of an epistolary novel, that is, one that affects to relate a story through second-hand sources like letters, diary entries, and newspaper articles, holding the key personalities at a certain distance. Once boiled down by screenwriter Lawrence D. Cohen to something more immediate and reconstructed by De Palma into a succession of potent images, King’s story clearly had the directness and velocity of a modern myth.

For De Palma, the former no-budget semi-experimental ironist springing out of the Greenwich Village hipster scene, Carrie was a dynamic embrace of commercial populism, and yet still charged with a transgressive energy in style and story. After scoring cult successes with his early works like Greetings (1968) and Hi, Mom! (1972) on the counterculture-informed midnight movie circuit, De Palma cobbled together the money to make Sisters (1972), a blend of new age Alfred Hitchcock revisionism, Italian giallo movie riff, and New Yorker’s inside joke that put him on the path to mainstream attention, only be foiled by Phantom of the Paradise’s failure with its wilfully odd attempt to blend Grand Guignol pathos and ink-black satirical comedy. The ironic thing there is that Carrie basically presents the same mixture, complete with another tormented victim-monster at the centre like Phantom’s Winslow Leach, broken on the world’s wheel but also transformed into a force that starts laying waste to the iniquitous. This time however De Palma swapped giddy absurdum for tight-wound drama. De Palma’s infamous tendency to twist the knife deep and hard with his pitiable antiheroes found an ideal stage to play out on in King’s story. De Palma’s cultural and political cynicism likewise found a more personal realm to play out in, latching onto King’s reportage of a country in painfully dynamic social flux where medieval religiosity can sit cheek-by-jowl with the kind of blunt modern sensibility both King and De Palma personified in their individual ways.

As well as the worm-turns essence of the storyline De Palma was likely also attracted to a central character who plays as a distaff take on Psycho’s (1960) Norman Bates, with Margaret a still-living Mrs Bates, and her house as an islet of American Gothic: the homage is made more explicit in naming both the high school and the nearby slaughterhouse after Bates. And yet Carrie also sees De Palma defining himself askew from mere emulation of Hitchcock, indulging visual techniques antipathetic to the master. Carrie also had good fortune to be released after the enormous success of William Peter Blatty’s novel The Exorcist and its 1973 film, a zeitgeist-defining that identified the corporeal form of an adolescent girl as the ideal vessel for satanic hellraising in a fragmented and faithless modern world. As a story Carrie both rode that wave and also dismantled it, accusing repressive and neurotically obsessive religiosity as part of the conspiracy of torment that results in calamity, counterpointed by a new variety of milquetoast, disinterested, hands-off attitude by the representatives of adult authority in the hothouse environment of the average contemporary American high school which offers no harsh chastisement but no solace either. The first glimpse of Carrie White (Spacek) is on the volleyball court of Bates High School, failing to smack back a ball when it sails her way, earning the disdain and abuse of her classmates. De Palma follows with a long, languorous credit sequence, with his slow-motion camera and Vaseline-glazed misty imagery, glides across a school playing field and slides through changing rooms for female high schoolers as they wash and get dressed.

De Palma immediately pokes fun at multiple targets, playing out the voyeuristic teenage boy fantasy of getting an eyeful in a girls’ locker room and the kind of movies that had exploded around the same time built making bank with such fantasies. At the same time he plays at sentimentalising it, Pino Donaggio’s lush strings scoring rendering the scene like some lyrical depiction of the blooming glory of young womanhood. Cross-reference the more idealised, clean, arty version found in the early scenes of Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975). The caressing slow-motion tracking shot zeroes in on Carrie showering alone, lost in the warmth of the shower and the sensual pleasure of touching herself, the image of the protean adolescent ripe for plucking, until she experiences the raw terror of suddenly finding her nethers leaking blood, an inevitable and completely natural moment of burgeoning that is nonetheless a profound shock to Carrie as she’s never been told about it by her fanatically religious and abusive mother Margaret (Piper Laurie). Carrie’s terrified pleas for help reap only ruthless joy from her fellows who pelt her with sanitary products to the malicious chorus of chant, “Plug it up! Plug it up!”, which evokes the “One of us!” chant from Freaks (1932) but with inverted meaning: the exalted state of conformist normality can only be so exalted by finding a sacrificial lamb. Or perhaps the better Biblical reference point is the Gadarene swine, to contain the concentrated essence of wickedness to be released at some appropriate juncture.

This rite of blood and shunning is interrupted by gym teacher Miss Collins (Betty Buckley) intervenes with vehement anger, promising to punish the girls for their behaviour and helping Carrie out of her cowering humiliation and shame. But, as Collins herself confesses to the school principal Morton (Stefan Gierasch), she experienced a similar kind of exasperation to the girls at the spectacle of Carrie’s absurdity. Morton, confirming complete cluelessness and timidity when faced with such female trouble, lets Collins handle the girls, and Collins forces the class to exercise to the point of exhaustion on pain of being banned from attending the upcoming prom. When one of the girls, the wilful and entitled Chris Hargensen (Allen), refuses to play along, Collins smacks her and bans her, scaring the rest back in line. Chris plots revenge aimed not at Collins but at Carrie, and Chris’s former friend Sue Snell (Irving) accidentally hands her the perfect way to achieve it when she decides to try and cheer Carrie up by asking her own, popular jock boyfriend Tommy Ross (William Katt) to take Carrie to the prom instead of her. Tommy is initially dismayed by the prospect, but is eventually convinced, in part because he and Carrie recently shared a moment in English class, under the auspices of the patronising and disdainful teacher Mr Fromm (Sydney Lassick), where she pronounced one of his writing projects Fromm reads aloud with an acerbic lilt as “beautiful” and he quietly insulted Fromm for mocking Carrie’s moment of self-expression.

Carrie herself can only wander homewards after her excruciating ushering into adulthood. But another new trait has arrived along with her period, first manifesting in a moment of confusion during her panic when she screams as Collins tries to bring her out of her hysteria and a light globe overhead abruptly busts, and becoming more defined as she glares at a younger boy who calls her the teasing name “Creepy Carrie!” and seems to make him fall from his bike by force of will. Later Carrie investigates in the school library and realises she has telekinetic abilities. But returning to her home Carrie finds herself still entirely at the moment of her zealous, domineering, cape-swanning mother, who spends her days soliciting donations for some vague denominational cause and ranting about the influence of Satan, an imprint she sees now as fatefully taken hold of her daughter after long repressing it. “Why didn’t you tell me momma?” Carrie questions in tearful agonistes whilst her mother wallops her with a religious pamphlet and exiles her to a closet specially kept as a place of imprisonment and musing under the baleful glaze of a glowing-eyed crucified Jesus. Eventually, after the frantic, gruelling spectacle of parental abuse and Carrie’s anguish is expended she’s released and allowed to go to bed.

Carrie feels curiously distinct from the pack of 1970s American Horror cinema despite sharing key concerns with so much of it – a supernaturally-gifted child destroyer a la The Exorcist and The Omen (1976), and a setting befitting a genre becoming obsessed with both depicting and sating teenagers, which could still deliver movies as diverse as Massacre at Central High (1976), Communion (1976), and Halloween (1978), and a tendency Carrie’s success likely quickened. Carrie’s distinction stems from the opportune convergence of De Palma, his cast, and King’s story. De Palma made the $1.8 million budget, solid for a ‘70s genre film but still very modest, stretch a hell of a long way, and applies operatic reaches style that’s the complete opposite to the low-budget, DIY atmosphere of many films of the time. That stringency was exemplified by the so-real-you-can-smell-it intensity of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), although both films become fixated by a spectacle of witnessing horror, communicated through flash edits zeroing in on the eyes of a young woman’s – the arrested cosmic terror of Sally Hardesty gives way to the arresting cosmic wrath of Carrie White. Both movies also connect the griminess of working-class life as represented by industrialised farming, a zone where bloodshed is at once carefully controlled and rendered on a vast scale, and human degradation, tethered in the singular, queasy connection of Carrie’s menstruation and a fateful bucket of pig’s blood. The narrative’s slow burn towards a singular, orgiastic eruption of violence and character-driven drama in the meantime are also distinctive at a moment when the genre was becoming increasingly geared towards serving up shock machines populated by living mannequins. This informed the film’s embracing as a mainstream success, with Oscar nominations for Spacek and Laurie, a rare achievement for a Horror film.

Spacek herself, genuinely remarkable in the role, lobbied intensely for it after having worked under De Palma as a costumer on Phantom of the Paradise. Spacek had already established a unique ability on Terrence Malick’s Badlands (1974) to seem at once earthy and alien, open and recessive, and this talent is key to Carrie’s success, particular in the climax where her blood-caked, glaze-eyed visage shifts from human to demonic in the blink of an eye. De Palma depicts the multiple forms of abuse and misuse Carrie receives with a blatant verve that manages to walk a very fine line between savage intensity and campy extremity. Margaret White’s religious paraphernalia and fire-and-brimstone speechifying, brilliantly expostulated through Laurie’s well-pitched performance, is imbued with a faint touch of black humour (like flashes of lightning accompanying some of her grimmer pronouncements, almost like we’ve segued into a Mel Brooks film) that keeps the experience from being too nasty and convincing, but still evoking pain. Carrie herself, unlike the gawky, sullen character in King’s book, is allowed a sympathetic pathos reminiscent of a Dickens heroine, vulnerable and damaged but retaining of dignity and grit that begins to assert itself as her secret power grows, even if soon enough Little Dorrit goes Godzilla on their asses.

De Palma’s tendency to be mean to his protagonists in his 1970s and ‘80s heyday, a tendency that many onlookers found off-putting, wasn’t an incidental perversity but core to his essential worldview, beholding everyone as engaged in a battle to the death, whether they know it or not, with powers reigning over them and/or within them. Carrie gave him the perfect focal point for this recurring drama as she fights on both fronts and loses on both. Carrie’s stab at liberation is potent, as she begins to wield her telekinetic ability to hold her mother at bay and takes up Tommy’s invitation, met at first with incredulity, as a vessel that, no matter what motives are behind it, she can ride to some new shore. But there’s a weak point in that armour of emancipation which, when breached, has consequences beyond reckoning. One irony in De Palma’s treatment of King’s story, one the writer himself noted, was in seeing it as an account of a matriarchy, a world of women controlled by women existing semi-separately to the one shared by the genders, where the ferocity aimed at eccentricity can make the peevishness of boys look limp by comparison, and where feminine power exists in multiple forms, good and bad and smudged.

Collins’ embodiment of a positive force is complicated by her also being an avatar of an everyday world that can’t help but be exasperated by Carrie as an emissary from a slightly different one. Carrie’s need for her mother to show her something resembling unconditional love simmers right up until she’s obliged to kill her. De Palma raises the curtain on two different kinds of female manipulation, one essentially positive, as Sue talks Tommy into taking Carrie to the prom, and one negative, as Chris wields a mixture of unease-inducing derision and sexual appeal to push her boyfriend Billy (Travolta) into helping her plan to destroy Carrie. And Billy signs on with giggly-dumb charm, readily exchanging hanging out and driving around for bashing a pig to death, much to Chris’s flagrant erotic excitement, conveyed as De Palma cuts repeatedly from Billy’s hammer swings to Chris’s chanting delight. The linkage of cruelty to sexuality isn’t just the usual edge of sadism attributed to villains either: this is a portrayal of social order enforcement at a basic level, the core breeding class ensuring their perpetuation by guarding privilege and punishing outliers. Whatever gloss the ‘70s youth culture bestows on them doesn’t disguise their part in an ancient order. Collins’ collective punishment of the girls only has the effect of stirring more determined action from the hive.

Margaret White on the other hand tries to subsist within a bubble preserving another atavistic order, playing at detachment from all fashion, a bubble of faux-renaissance paintings of the Last Supper on the walls, candlelit dinners, and terrible wrath. Margaret of course comes to believe her daughter’s manifesting gift comes like her monthly from Satan, despite Carrie’s insistence that it comes only from herself, much in the same way as she retorts to her mother decrying her “dirty pillows” on display in her prom dress, “They’re called breasts, momma, and every woman has them.” Margaret’s raving climactic soliloquy to Carrie recounts her relationship with her long-since absconded husband, who respected her demand for chastity in their union until one night he came home drunk and molested her, to her eventual enjoyment, a lapse into humanity Margaret becomes convinced she’s being punished for through her cursed child. The example of mania her mother provides is one Carrie tries to move past but ultimately entraps her: the moment she’s presented with a source of rage and the power to do something with it she reacts in exactly the same way. Meanwhile Carrie’s timorous reaction to Tommy’s invitation gets to Collins who angrily confronts him and Sue, assuming they’re up to more mischief, but eventually, warily accepts their reasoning. Tommy goes to see Carrie at her home to repeat his invitation, and finally gets her to accept, and Carrie begins embracing her chance to bloom with determination.

Carrie’s story advances with the rigour and inevitability of Greek tragedy, a likeness that only becomes stronger as it encompasses an offended heroine whose story counts down in distorted gradations of unified time and setting, and a stage that becomes an amphitheatre of carnage and breakdown, and where the mechanics of what’s happening unfold with predestined smoothness. Intrigues simultaneously reach out to Carrie to rescue her and destroy her, charted with mischievous detail and coming together in the prom. Hitchcock, never of course far out of range of De Palma’s points of reference, is nodded to in the suburban gothic of the White house and in the name of the High School. De Palma’s aesthetic for the film is as hot as Stanley Kubrick’s for The Shining (1981) would be cold, via Mario Tosi’s cinematography. De Palma’s deeply sarcastic romanticism continues with Carrie’s walk home early in the film along sun-dappled streets replete with shady trees and red roses that mimic and mock her menstrual blood, and mirrors this imagery towards the end as a sanctified and white-clad Sue makes the same walk towards the White house, or where it used to be. Strong anticipation here for the aesthetic David Lynch would apply to Blue Velvet (1986) of a stylised, utopian, too-good-to-be-true suburban life.

Collins’ forced exercise regimen for the girls’ punishment becomes a little aria of camera wit, tracking along at thigh-height with the teacher as the girls are put through their strenuous paces, rendered ridiculous as they bob in and out of the frame with increasingly frayed expressions. This is in itself a more deadpan and playful riposte to the precursor scene where Margaret lords over Carrie where De Palma conveys the application of authority more ominously from on high, as Margaret slaps her daughter’s face with a booklet with a chapter title, ‘The Sins of Woman’ and, with a similar rhythmic intensity to the exercising girls, tries to make Carrie repeat her chant of “The first sin was intercourse,” which also echoes the girls’ chant of “Plug it up!” By contrast, De Palma sees Tommy and his pals hitting the town to be fitted for prom tuxedos, vaguely recalling the lads about town in Greetings, except that De Palma starts fast-forwarding through their yammering, a good joke in its own right that engages in a playful way with De Palma’s delight in the texture of film itself, and also a curt thematic underlining: the boys aren’t the show in this movie. The detention exercise scene also provides a definitive character moment with Chris’s attempted rebellion turning distraught after Collins slaps her, and her appeal to her friends – “She can’t get away with this if we all stick together!” – gains only timorous shakes of the head from most and, from a revolted Sue, one “Shut up Chris, just shut up.”

Irving, who would be promoted to the role of gifted-accursed psychic in The Fury (1978), De Palma’s thematic sequel, has an interesting role as Sue, whose journey is in a way the actual core of Carrie although she’s not the focal point, as Sue represents a kind of assailed middle ground in the story, someone who grows up a little faster than her schoolmates but remains dangerously naïve in aspects. Glimpsed at first eagerly joining the pack attacking Carrie, she’s pulled aside by Collins when she first comes on the scene and angrily berated for her behaviour, and looks bewildered, as if pulled out of sleepwalking. Sue’s desire to do Carrie a good turn – “We don’t care how we look,” she tells Collins when the teacher confronts her and Tommy – is a noble gesture with troubling caveats, in obliging her boyfriend to make that gesture on her behalf, but not imagining there’s personal risk in it, and in accidentally handing Chris the perfect venue for her own cruelty. Sue’s working on Tommy resolves when he finally says he’ll do it whilst she’s doing homework and he’s watching a James Garner Western on TV, a deft little joke that suggests Tommy enjoys playing the white knight. Irving’s on-screen mother Eleanor was played by her real one, Priscilla Pointer. Eleanor’s early encounter with Margaret, who comes to her house soliciting donations, sees the way adult transaction counterpoint those of teenagers, Eleanor trying her best to fend off Margaret’s proselytising with awkward courtesy before flatly bribing her to go away, a gesture Margaret accepts but not without making sure the offender feels the frost her righteous gaze.

De Palma also taps the paraphernalia of Margaret’s religiosity for exceedingly dark humour and even darker psychology, setting up a motif that has its brilliantly sick pay-off by film’s end. Margaret’s exiling of Carrie into the prayer cupboard sees her share space with a statue of St Sebastian, riddled with arrows, upturned eyes painted with phosphorescent paint to better depict ecstatic agony. Good education for a life of martyrdom. Carrie already has Tommy in her sights as a fair idol, a newspaper clipping of his footballing exploits stuck to the side of her bedroom mirror, a mirror whose gaze she cracks in a moment of anxiety but manages to reforge mentally in time to avoid her mother’s attention. Katt is also tremendous as the genuinely good-natured Tommy, who eventually finds not just pride but real affection in playing Carrie’s beau for the night as he comes to comprehend there’s an interesting, potentially lovely person on his arm. He deftly knocks aside her not-at-all-illusioned stabs at releasing him from duty by assuring her he asked her out “because you liked my poem,” although he admits later he didn’t write it. Meanwhile Chris draws in other friends into her conspiracy, including Freddy (Michael Talbott), who left school before graduation and works now in the local slaughterhouse, and her friend Norma (P.J. Soles), who volunteer to be on the committee overseeing the election of the Prom King and Queen, intending to stuff the ballot for Carrie. Chris gets Freddy to help her and Billy kill a pig and collect its blood in a bucket, which they rig up in the rafters of the high school gym, where the prom will be take place, to pour the contents down on Carrie as a sadistic coup-de-theatre.

Carrie works beautifully as a metaphor for the sheer goddamn pain of growing up as a human animal. Where in the book Carrie had her powers from childhood here it’s explicitly connected with her new maturation, connecting them as devices of creation and destruction. For Margaret the ‘Sin of Woman” is not just to experience lust but to propagate at all. Spacek herself defined her understanding of Carrie as a “secret poet” who has no gift at expression and assertion until some strange kink of fate gifts her this powerful talent, as if her stifled will has forced some latent part of herself to grow like muscle. Or perhaps it’s a test provided from on high, or on low, connected to rather than breaking from her upbringing, and what Carrie then does with it can be seen a radical extrapolation of the Christian concept of free will. The more immediately troubling facet of Carrie’s prognosis lies in its understanding the pressure cooker nature of modern teenage life and the age of the school massacre, the school a social zone designed to force young people to become independent entities but instead all too often producing both dronish cliques and outcasts and rebels, experiences that most make part of their permanent identity for good or ill. King noted in his book On Writing that both of the girls he based Carrie on from his experience died young, one by suicide, their pain turned inward and septic, but Carrie the book and film sees a time when that kind of sickness will be turned outward and become the stuff of mass media causes celebre.

Notably, in The Fury when De Palma picked up the same basic plot motif of psychic powers as a metaphor for adolescent genesis and the fine line between creative and destructive potential, he turned the tables in making the popular, sporty kids stricken with the same power, with Robin Sandza the ultimate coddled man-child jock, and Gillian Bellaver a more focused and virtuous version of Carrie, finally blowing the false parent/authority figure to smithereens. Carrie certainly cemented precepts Horror cinema would extend for years afterwards, but also seems from today’s perspective to have left a deeper influence on popular storytelling to come, many of which would invert the film’s tragic apocalypse into heroic narratives. Works like the Harry Potter series and a vast swathe of superhero movies take up its wish-fulfilment thread whilst avoiding its bleak contemplation of social and psychological determinism. The wave of high school movies, whilst having more realistic narratives, like Pretty In Pink (1985) and Mean Girls (2003) might also be counted as its children. The film’s underpinning similarities to George Lucas’ Star Wars (1977) as an adolescent fantasy about control and annihilation, despite the very different tonal and genre frames, is given extra piquancy by how many members of Carrie’s cast also tried to get in on the Lucas film.

In any event, Carrie’s climactic prom sequence is one of those cinematic set-pieces it’s hard not to relish in anticipation even as in involves terrible things, simply for the sheer verve of the filmmaking and storytelling force. The sequence divides in three miniature chapters, each keyed to a different emotional experience and a different style, beginning with a depiction of rising exultation, a midsection of simultaneous anointing and portent, and a climax that erupts in anarchy. These chapters also have metaphysical overtones connected with Carrie’s experience: heaven, purgatory, hell. Heaven, because Carrie’s entrance to the prom and her experiences seem like her deepest wishes coming true, as she connects with people for the first time, finding actual friends in Tommy, Collins and some other girls, with Sue watching on like a fairy godmother who’s made this particular pumpkin into a princess. Purgatory where the slow motion photography stretches time into a dream zone where triumph – Tommy and Carrie delighted to find they’ve been elected and ascend to claim their dues – and calamity – Sue and Billy hiding behind the scenery with their fingers on the rope – coexist, and finally the inferno released along with the torrent of blood.

De Palma had already established himself as a powerful visual stylist, but the techniques and structural elements he would bring into play here formed his arsenal henceforth and defined him as a mature talent, winnowed down a series of suite-like moves. One constant De Palma stylistic motif provides the crux of the movie, spinning his camera with increasingly speed whilst also zoomed in, delivering a resultant feeling of dizzied rhapsody around Carrie and Tommy as they dance, a swooning islet of pure teenage romanticism that’s sufficient in itself. The central slow-motion passage performs a similar feat of immersive style but to quite different effect, swooning headiness giving way to dreamlike ponderousness that exacerbates with malicious humour and charts coinciding actions with precision – Sue, having agreed to keep away from the prom to avoid any hint of unpleasantness for Carrie, sneaks in to revel in the scene she cares about like a good director, only to notice the trembling rope linked to the bucket above, and, following it, almost breaks in upon Chris and Billy in their hidey-hole. Only for her intervention to be forestalled by Collins, who thinks she’s going to make trouble, grabbing Sue and showing her out of the gym without listening to her explanation. De Palma dives in for a close-up of Chris licking her lips in sensual relish of her triumph, her face a gleaming mask of almost sexual satisfaction in her moment of revenge. And down comes the rain of red, red blood, splattering on Carrie, and with the bucket dangling and falling, hitting Tommy on the head and killing him.

The precise diagramming of the various story and character threads here and accompanying, interlaced ironies makes for a just about perfect unit of filmmaking, and that’s before Carrie avenges herself by wielding her powers in blind madness, psychically controlling doors and firehoses to herd and pummel the crowd, unleashing fire and flood. Here, De Palma’s virulent showmanship is also Carrie’s, apparent as she forces all the doors of the gym shut and then turns on a red fill light, all the better to perform devilish work. De Palma presents Carrie’s delirious perspective with wheeling kaleidoscopic images as her mother’s enjoining, “They’re all gonna laugh at you!” repeats in her head whilst she imagines the entire crowd, rather than the handful of creeps the more neutral camera reveals, laughing and jeering at her perfect humiliation. De Palma then turns to split-screen shots, which he had played with on Sisters but here found a more aggressive use for, to present the violent action in a flux of cause and effect, picking out both diverse events and different angles on the same moment. Carrie herself becomes cinematically bifurcated as she is mentally. At the centre of all this is Spacek-as-Carrie sweeping all before her, mouth twisted in an awful deathly grin when the blood first falls on her, reminiscent of silent film Horror images like The Man Who Laughs’ (1928) carved grin or The Phantom of the Opera (1926) wearing his Red Death mask, caught somewhere between lunatic hilarity and plain lunacy, before her face turns impassive and her eyes wide and aglow with berserker wrath as she rains down death.

There’s another sting in the little detail that the two people most responsible for her downfall, Chris and Billy, sneak out before she unleashes the mayhem. Instead Carrie’s indiscriminate hate falls on both creeps like Freddy and Norma but also on many absolutely innocent people, even Collins, who, realising what’s happening, cries at Carrie to stop it only to be crushed by a piece of stage scenery. Fromm is fried by whipping electrical wires and the backcloth catches fire, a rippling wave of fire rising behind Carrie’s red-smeared silhouette, become a creature akin to the awesome Chernibog in Fantasia (1940) commanding an army of imps dancing in the flames. Steven Spielberg might have kept it in mind just a little for the climax Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981); Quentin Tarantino certainly did for Inglourious Basterds (2009). De Palma pulls off a most difficult feat in forcing the audience to identify with Carrie, even love her, and then behold the spectacle of her maniacal anger, about as a pure an episode of Grand Guignol there is in cinema. Carrie, still lurching in wraithlike detachment, exists the blazing gym and wanders down the road, where Chris and Billy spot her as Chris drives Billy’s car with a glint of her own maniacal delight in her eyes, whilst Billy drools and giggles. De Palma’s editing here, taking the inward-stepping jump cuts to the dead man’s eyes in The Birds (1963) to a hyperbolic zone, skips in towards Spacek’s glowing eyes in lightning-fast jump-cuts that explicitly connect the glaze-gazed power of Carrie’s looking as she turns at almost the last second and casually swats the car aside with her power, then makes it explode.

Carrie’s return home nonetheless sees the avenging angel becoming a pathetic child again, washing off the blood that cakes her and searching for her mother, who has set up guttering candles throughout the house but seems to be hiding herself, eventually proving to be hovering behind the door to Carrie’s bedroom. Margaret recounts Carrie’s conception and then stabs her daughter with a kitchen knife, and stalks her through the house with a blissful grin on her face. Carrie defends herself by launching kitchen implements at Margaret until she’s been turned into a simulacrum of the St Sebastain statute, the lolling moans and grins of Margaret condensing martyred rapture and Sadean penetration into a singular new state. Carrie beholds the perverse pieta she’s sculpted – offered by De Palma and Motti in a slowly unveiling pullback that exactly hits the equator between black comedy coup and character pathos. Carrie’s subconscious takes over, consuming the house in fire and disintegration whilst she makes one last, desperate attempt to retreat with her mother’s corpse into the prayer closet. De Palma moves into assure she’s at least granted the mercy of dying from her mother’s wound rather than being crushed and burned to death.

All this is the kind of tragic narrative that can really only be served up in the Horror genre as entertainment rather than some as solemn cultural chore, Carrie sharing DNA with Lon Chaney Jnr’s afflicted Wolf Man or Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein’s Monster, born into a cruel world and departing from it in relief. The very end proves a deliciously merciless De Palma fake-out of a kind he would return to repeatedly in variations. After a brief vignette of Eleanor looking after a traumatised and tranquilised Sue, we see Sue walking down the pavement and entering the yard of the decimated White house, a neat rectangle of ground where the building was filled with grey stones, a suggestively cruciform For Sale sign planted amidst with “Carrie White Burns In Hell” crudely scrawled across it. Sue is envisioned in angelic white, a mourner paying tribute to a failed friend and kind of suppliant offering obeisance to a vengeful goddess, only for a bloodied hand to reach out of the ground and grip her arm. De Palma’s stylisation for this scene carefully announces it’s a dream, with Donaggio’s scoring presenting a lilting, Ennio Morricone-esque lyricism that suggests a fantasy of peacemaking, only for it to turn starkly and suddenly into a nightmare where the grip of such wounding horror never really lets go. De Palma cuts to black on the image of a distraught Sue being calmed by her mother, a vision which does, at least, finally restore the classical mother-child relationship to something like what it’s usually supposed to be.

1980s, Auteurs, Horror/Eerie

The Shining (1980)

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Director/Coscreenwriter: Stanley Kubrick

By Roderick Heath

A yellow Volkswagen Beetle winds its way along a vertiginous mountain road, a route that leads from the rational lowlands to the mountains of madness. We’ve already been introduced to Jack Torrance even though we haven’t seen him, a being enclosed in a tight bubble of metal, an economic and cultural refugee from the larger human world, entering a zone where his existence is viewed with implacable disinterest by the soaring, jagged peaks and silently abiding pine trees, merely waiting for winter’s hammer to fall. Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind’s pulsing, droning synthesiser version of Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique resounds on the soundtrack. Torrance in the flesh takes the shape of Jack Nicholson, authoritative Oscar winner flashing his trademark zesty grin. But the eyes are slightly fixed, the smile a tad strained, as he speaks with the manager of the Overlook Hotel, Stuart Ullman (Barry Nelson), a conversation punctuated with Ullman’s uneasy revelation that one of the previous caretakers, a man named Delbert Grady, killed his family during the long winter isolation with an axe, whilst Jack grins and responds it will be a topic of delight for his horror film addict wife. Mutually agreed subtext: Torrance is desperate for a settled job and a chance to break his writer’s block, and Ullman urgently needs someone who’ll take on a job that has a nasty history of chewing up human life.
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Like the conversation of scientists in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) who represent the urges of rational cooperation and irrational partisanship, Jack and Ullman’s exchange here manages to be at once perfectly bland, yet also conscious of standing on the edge of an adventure into the unknown where mysterious forces can already be sensed slowly gathering new strength. Down in the flatlands, where the mountains loom in the dreamy distance, wife Wendy (Shelley Duvall) and son Danny (Danny Lloyd) wait for news on Jack’s luck with the job. Wendy reads that eternal tome of the sensitively literate and rebellious, The Catcher in the Rye, whilst Danny has conversations with an invisible friend, Tony. But there’s more to Tony than simply providing a slightly detached and creative little boy’s outlet: Tony is an internal voice, a spirit guide, a doppelganger who hovers within and beside Danny, mediating his powerful psychic gifts. Danny senses Tony’s unease over the coming journey to the Overlook. When he asks Tony to show him why, the only image needed is one returned to again and again throughout the film like a pictorial leitmotif – a colossal torrent of blood spilling out of the hotel’s elevators, as if the heart of the building has stored up every drop of gore ever spilt upon the soil it stands upon.
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The story has it Stanley Kubrick, looking for a strong commercial property to film after the weak reception of Barry Lyndon (1975), sat day in and day out in his office working through piles of recently successful novels, and one day the sound of the books thudding against the wall ceased when Kubrick took up the third novel by a fast-rising horror writer named Stephen King. What’s fascinating about this vignette is how much it resembles some moments in the film, the anguished search for a story to tell, an idea worth hanging years of mental and physical effort upon, stoking the sensation that Kubrick was drawn to the book because it reproduced aspects of his own mental landscape. Then again, that’s probably true enough for any creative person. Kubrick had not tackled an outright horror movie before, although much of his earlier work had suggested some affinity, in his fascination for humans devolving into imps of the perverse, and moments measuring the precise impact of violence. Kubrick, penning the script with novelist Diane Johnson, entirely sublimated King’s story into his own sensibility, an aspect of the film that still rankles the author. What we watch when we watch The Shining is not just adaptation, but something more like translation, a tale remade through new methods of communication, and inevitable imprint of the new artisan. Kubrick’s The Shining, as King put it perfectly correctly, is cold where the novel is hot, the writer’s guilt-ridden, morbid fantasy of his own worst side unleashed by his drinking problem, transmitted via Kubrick’s contemplation of his own tendency to withdraw and struggle through endless phases of creative genesis, drifting through pentimento layers of past and present and future in contemplating civilisation and its discontents.
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Kubrick had already stepped back and forth through the Ages of Man from the horizon of human time to the gilded pretence of a recent past and on to a gleaming technocratic future, evolving somehow towards both divine perfection and primal resurgence all at once, the benign indifference of the Star Child and the savage grins of Dr. Strangelove and Alex De Large the Janus faces of evolution and poor old Barry Lyndon the beaten and curtailed by-product. Kubrick knew very well the human race’s capacity to put on its best face whilst committing its worst crimes, his singular, most obsessive theme. All found a logical terminus in the Overlook, a place where past and present join and twist and the present dissolves like white sky into snow. The Overlook Hotel. The description King’s idol Shirley Jackson gave to her Hill House could describe it just as well – “Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone…and whatever walked there, walked alone.” An outpost of affluent white civilisation, a bustling hive of activity when filled with staff. Imposed upon the crown of the American landscape, so offensive to the dispersed and decimated native inhabitants they even tried to stop its construction upon a burial ground. The Shining is the contemporary nightmare rising out of the dream of ’70s shambling westerns like Little Big Man (1970) and Jeremiah Johnson (1972). The mountaintop burial place whose invasion stirs the massacre of Jeremiah’s family in the latter film is the unavoidable touchstone. Folk cultural remnants decorate the hotel walls, whilst the art deco interiors quietly mimic and refine the simple, jagged geometries of the Indian artefacts. A common motif in late ’70s horror, of course – the Amityville house was also perched upon an Indian burial ground. A hedge maze adjacent, a feature strayed over from one of the Enlightenment gardens of Barry Lyndon, the orderly compression of space and time into a devious sprawl of false hope.
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Jack’s already simmering instability is merely stoked rather than imposed by the Overlook, his fantasies of godlike control over his mental world meshing with a locale that serves as the last stop on the psychic river flowing through a land won in harsh contest. Danny’s reassurance of his parents that he knows all about cannibalism from watching TV stirs a most unnervingly strained and lunatic grin from Torrance as he repeats his son’s words, testifying to a mind already frayed by being long outpaced by other modes of media communication even in the process of shaping his son’s mind. Methods of communication are a secret plane of warfare in The Shining. Jack’s inability to communicate meaningfully, represented by his writing or failure therein, is matched to his urging Danny to suppresses his psychic gifts, perhaps out of concern for the way people will think of him and perhaps jealous of them. Some vital mechanism in Jack has broken down, perhaps from the same process, of having to contour himself and his expectations into a workaday world, or perhaps from suppressing the gift in himself – if the two processes can be extricated at all. Jack hopes to dislodge the clog to his ambitions in the Overlook. Wendy, meanwhile, cute and gawky and ever so chipper, wears her identity like a baggy sack dress, the woman with a shrivelled sense of self-esteem who convinced herself she married a genius.
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The Overlook provides the struggling writer and his family with a little kingdom with a brief illusion of possession, reminiscent on one level of the similar smorgasbord of consumer delight George Romero sent his heroes careening through in Dawn of the Dead (1978), albeit slightly more upmarket. Head chef Dick Hallorann (Scatman Crothers) gives Wendy and Danny a tour of the hotel’s larder, stocked for a long winter and a veritable horn of plenty, a wonderland of space and illusory wealth backed up by an authentic aura of history. The Torrances settle into life in the Overlook, but after initial celebration of their new world, nothing goes right. Jack becomes increasingly tetchy and offensive. Danny keeps seeing strange and terrible things in the hotel corridors, and finally, fatefully ventures into Room 237, where something leaves him bedraggled and traumatised. This assault sparks suspicion and diverging responses of concern and infuriated frustration in his parents. Nature conspires to force a crisis. A terrible snowstorm falls upon the Colorado Rockies. Jack displays increasing signs of falling into a cabin-fever-driven frenzy with dangerous intentions. Soon Jack will also destroy the radio and snowmobile that offer the chance of rescue or escape.
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The horror artist’s imaginative landscape is transposed onto the locale, filling up space with illustrations of events gruesome and strange, the many crimes and lost histories straying out of their boxes into the halls and corridors. Trauma clings to the place like a subtle stink of rot, particularly infecting the notorious Room 237, a space Hallorann detests so absolutely Danny can sense it in him, obliging the chef to warn him away from it at all costs. Danny and Hallorann find instant accord, for Hallorann has the psychic gift too, and he seems to be the first other psychic Danny has encountered. Hallorann calls their shared gift “shining,” and gives nostalgic account of his ability to communicate with his mother without moving their mouths. There’s a hint here that Jack probably has the shining too, but has suppressed it so deeply he becomes a mere conduit for the psychic evil in the hotel rather than a bulwark against it, as Hallorann and Danny are. It’s also suggested that the building’s latent evil is often sparked by the intrusion of such preternaturally super-conscious people into its zone. Grady’s slaughter of his family was occasioned by the attempts of one his daughters to burn the place down in her awareness of what it is.
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Time quickly begins to break down once the family is ensconced in their private abode within the hotel, a space that serves as a kind of mocking simulacrum of a proper family hostel sealed off from the rest of this cavernous space. Kubrick’s deployed intertitles seem to precisely delineate the time but actually hack up the film into random shards, units of measurement without rule. Days dissolve into one-another; character actions take on a kind logarithmic variability, moving according to programs laid down by the Overlook. One of the most famous flourishes, the endless repetition of the phrase “All work and no play make Jack a dull boy,” testifies to an illusion of forward motion when in fact the some moment is repeating. Young Danny makes endless tours of the hotel corridors on his tricycle, a system that seems to depend on the same Byzantine logic as the hotel’s beloved hedge maze. The monstrosity at the heart of the labyrinth is no longer a fanciful Minotaur – it’s a suburban father. Kubrick reverse-engineers cinematic language in the course of the film, as if mimicking his time-warp theme. The stark, squared-off, rectilinear shots attune themselves to the hard blocks and angles of the decorative motifs and forms around the hotel, but also call back to early cinema and the work of Fritz Lang and other movie pioneers, their deadpan gaze upon severe and unyielding compositions. As in Lang’s Die Nibelungen (1924), the implacable regard of order and fate is invoked through such rigid figurations, as is the rectangular frames of the photos that in the very end prove to contain and cage the spirits of the dead in the Overlook. The eye of the camera is a mocking form of immortality, locking time in an eternal frieze.
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Part of the unique stature The Shining has acquired over recent years, which has evolved to the extent that a whole movies has been made the obsession with this one, seems rooted in just this aspect of The Shining. It’s a movie about looking, in much the same way as Blowup (1966), mediated through a master filmmaker’s eye, one whose visual style was based in his background in still photography. The very last shot reveals, unnoticed amongst the hotel’s keepsakes of a lost, glittering past a photo of a suited Jack standing before a large group of Independence Day revellers, a detail observed by Kubrick in a systematic journey in closer to the image, much like in Blowup. The truth is available if you look hard enough. Small wonder some folks scour the film in urgent hunt for details that might act like the small map of the hedge maze, a map that blends imperceptibly into the real one as Jack studies it. Jack’s own pretensions of omniscience are invoked here as he seems to see his wife and son wandering in the aisles of the maze. The shining is a way of seeing, reading, experiencing – “It’s just like pictures in a book,” Tony tells Danny in coaching him through the seemingly manifold terrors of the Overlook itself, which seems to lack sufficient power to actually hurt anyone, therefore requiring a pliable amanuensis like Jack to do it. Kubrick strips the games of look and reality down to brutalist essentials throughout, constantly hinting at unseen things. The Shining invites you to look closer but also observes the breakdown of order and logic, and the closer you get the faster this process speeds up.
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The broadest variation on this motif comes when Jack ventures into Room 237 in search of an apparent interloper who has roughed up Danny. Jack sees at first an extremely beautiful woman climbing sylphlike out a bath, encouraging Jack to embrace her, but then transforming into a garish hag covered in terrible burns and stigmata of disease. This scene mimics the forms of horror with the heartbeat-like soundtrack and steady build to grotesque revelation, but rather plays more as a smirking gag at the audience’s expense, with Jack as the frustrated avatar, inviting in with the desire to see something sexy and then give it a right good goose. In a place where time folds in on itself, beauty and ugliness coexist in one frame. There’s also a hint of in-joke to this scene, or at the very least a sort of knowing reference. Nicholson started in his career in the low-budget scifi and horror of Roger Corman, and this sequence essentially compresses one of his first starring roles, in Corman’s faux-Poe escapade The Terror (1963), into a few excruciating minutes. Poe is an inevitable touchstone for any American artist dabbling in the oneiric arts, of course, the saturnine poet who was found dying one day on a park bench after everything else in his life had slowly withered and died, lost in fantasies of a gallant past turned septic trap. Poe unwillingly but implacably observed the genteel fantasies of the southern planter class he didn’t quite belong to regressing into blood crime, psychosexual dwarfism, and lunacy. King’s approach to the Poe imprint was to use his motifs to interrogate American hierarchism – the bludgeoning effect of money, class, race, gender. Kubrick? Well, suffice to say Stanley seemed a little sceptical about everything.
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Sequences depicting Danny’s habits of charging about the hotel on his tricycle are excellent thumbnails describing Kubrick’s skill at compressing and paring back his style in order to land his effects with purified force. The director tracks the boy’s speeding advance from behind, in shots that intriguingly connect them with the same sense of headlong rushing with which he shot the B-52 bomber shooting towards apocalypse in Dr. Strangelove, or; How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1963), the sounds of his tricycle’s tires alternating between hissing smoothness on carpet and thunderous, irritating sound on the bare wood. You can all but feel Danny’s heedless release in the wealth of space after a life cooped up in an apartment, but the cunning control of the sound instils forces the viewer to also empathise in the finest nerves with Jack’s frustration with trying to chase a muse with the racket a young child can make. Kubrick makes you feel this aspect of his tale, to experience it, rather than be passively fed dialogue. It also establishes a visual pattern returned to in the finale, as the roving, pursuing camera fills in for the killer pursuing Danny through the maze proper. Even when the narrative seems to be spiralling into frenetic chaos, the visual language remains unerringly concise. The little sways of the camera tracking the swing of Jack’s axe. The jolting zooms that pick out terrible details and perverse exhibitions. The increasingly intimate views of his actors’ faces as they cave in to lunacy and distress, often with dramatically unusual angles. One example of this is a shot of Nicholson as Jack converses with Wendy through a doorway, filmed from below, a shot that turns him into a caged beast and also invites the viewer into conspiracy with Jack, like one of Richard III’s monologues, as he begins to grin at Wendy’s naive and forlorn expectations of easy escape. The rhythmic interpolations of that singular vision, the torrent of blood, the flash cuts to Danny’s frightened face as he experiences nightmarish terrors with his shining.
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Jack’s invocation to the spirits of the Overlook, uttered when he’s first seen in the hotel’s colossal function area called the Gold Room, with its chintzy splendour and gleaming, inviting bar, is, “I’d do anything for a drink – I’d give my goddamn soul for a glass of beer.” This line is almost parodic in its reduction of Jack’s moral and psychological collapse and enslavement to the Overlook to this singular formula, whilst also finally starting the process of nailing down Jack’s problem, his dry-drunk’s neurosis merely starved rather actively conquered. This is when Jack first glimpses the barman Lloyd (Joe Turkel), who seems at first like a fancy of the writer’s, suave and correct in his old-school aplomb, a character invented to match Jack’s remaking of himself as a worldly gentleman. He aids Jack in delivering verbal purgation of the motives that enforced his self-exile to the Overlook, not really an attempt to find creative fulfilment but instead an attempt to escape his alcoholism, and his guilt over losing his temper with Danny. Wendy proceeds through her days with a chipper, workaday front that is both entirely admirable and enabling of Jack’s instability.
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After their drive together to the hotel, Kubrick pointedly refuses to ever offer a scene where all three characters are seen together, except for a moment in which Jack is a quivering mess after a dreadful nightmare of murdering them and Danny wanders into frame sucking his thumb in the traumatised wake of being attacked by something. Hallorann fulfils the role of father gently coaxing Danny into communication and community. One key scene here involves no overt violence or action but generates a mood of intense disquiet, depicting Jack, moving in a state of intense distraction, slovenly, unshaven, balancing his son on his knee and making weak attempts to communicate with the boy. This scene might seem queasily familiar to anyone who ever grew up with a depressive or alcoholic parent – the spectacle of a parent, supposed figure of love and protection and unquestioning commitment, drifting away in a haze whose attempts to mollify a child are desperately unconvincing. Danny’s question in response to Jack’s agonising expressions of paternal interest is “You wouldn’t ever hurt mommy and me, would ya?”
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But the call of the Overlook is reverberating through Jack’s mind just as it rang out to Danny – come and play, forever and ever and ever. It’s a call that appeals more to a failed adult byproduct than to a wary and canny kid. Danny himself as already heard the call from the pair of twin girls, Grady’s daughters, who have appeared to him in the corridors, manifesting at the same time as the sight of their mangled and bloodied corpses. Danny’s capacity to weather such terrible glimpses depends on his ability to believe in them as mere illustrations rather than as true emanations. Jack instead interacts with them like a man stepping into private fantasies. Wendy’s stark, horrified reaction when she believes Jack might have roughed up Danny has the sorry effect of helping to drive him over the verge of the liminal as he stalks away into the depths of the hotel, arriving in the chintzy splendour of the Gold Room, where Lloyd converses with him in suave, correct old school aplomb, mollifying Jack’s fiscal anxieties and eventually appealing to his desire to be considered important. Lloyd suggests Jack is desperately important to a great project still unfolding at the Overlook. Later, re-entering the same space, Jack finds himself amidst a ritzy celebration of 1920s high life, replete with suited gentlemen and chicly clad flappers, and is bumped into by a waiter, whom Jack recognises quickly is Grady (Philip Stone). Grady protests ignorance of his real identity as Jack grills him about it in a mordantly red-painted bathroom, until the guise slips and Grady assures him with cold precision that he “corrected” his incorrigible family and encourages Jack to do the same with his, in defence of his post as the Caretaker, a role that has slipped any nominal bonds of merely earthly concern and become a post of cosmic significance within this time-space trap.
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Fittingly, considering such themes of type-casting and predestination, the casting imbues The Shining not simply with strong performances but with actors who are obliged to act out versions of parts they had before, or with whom Kubrick had history. Turkel had previously appeared in Paths of Glory (1957) playing a young and tragic soldier also sacrificed in the interests of a smooth-working machine. Stone, who had been in both A Clockwork Orange and Barry Lyndon, had played a retainer shocked by the pathology of the Lyndon household who eventually played successful intervener. Here once more he plays major-domo to the interests of the great estate, although the role of intervener is passed on to Hallorann. Duvall had been the big-eyed, soulful lady of Robert Altman’s Americana fantasias in the previous ten years. Thrusting Nicholson, hero of 1970s naturalism, back into such the zone of his early roles has a mischievous aspect to it, especially as Kubrick picks up and amplifies the coal-black comedy and purposefully cartoonish aspects of a Corman film like The Raven (1963). Kubrick’s fascination for performances pitched right on the edge of overt stylisation reached an apogee here thanks to Nicholson and Duvall. Nicholson’s bravura incarnation of Jack has the quality of a piece of paternal play-acting Big Bad Wolf or Captain Hook constantly threatening to turn into authentically ferocious violence. The film’s moment of truth portrays exactly this pivot, as Jack slowly backs Wendy up a flight of stairs, taunting her with increasingly maniacal flourishes and threats whilst never quite losing the quality of someone enacting a great big joke. Wendy’s name, of course, sarcastically twisted to “Wendy, darling,” amplifies the pantomime connection.
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The Shining is, of course, in spite of its stature and pretensions, a haunted house tale. An old and noble adjunct of the horror genre, the haunted house tale can be both a realm of subtle, evocative frissons and outright bloodcurdling showmanship, of gently psychologised anxiety and spectacular manifestation. The Shining manages to describe the range between both these poles. In many haunted house films from earlier times, hauntings usually proved to be illusory, as in the various versions of The Cat and the Canary (1927, 1939, 1976), usually remaking this hoary trope as a vehicle for proving the antiseptic values of modernity. But a later movement, perhaps set in motion by Jack Clayton’s ponderously literate adaptation of Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw, The Innocents (1961), saw the value of this trope as questions over the ambiguity of viewpoint became central, and the notion of a ready-made, coherent metaphor for the mind as a set of rooms never free of ghostly imprints of thought and memory. Examples of this mode came on through the 1960s and ‘70s, including Robert Wise’s take on Jackson, The Haunting (1963), Mario Bava’s Operazione Paura (1966) and Lisa e il Diavolo (1972), John Hough’s The Legend of Hell House (1973), Dan Curtis’s Burnt Offerings (1976), Richard Loncraine’s Full Circle (1976), Stuart Rosenberg’s The Amityville Horror, and Peter Medak’s The Changeling (1980).
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What distinguishes The Shining over and above most of these? Kubrick’s fastidious film language is one part of it, of course, the methodical yet remorseless intensification of mood and story that calls to mind the title of that James story – the screws are constantly tightening. But another, telling point of discursion is that in most of those films, the supernatural is an active threat. In The Shining the haunting is entirely passive, only acting through a human avatar – although The Amityville Horror also hinged upon the fright factor of a seemingly decent father turning brutal. One aspect of King’s great success as a horror writer lies in his precise refusal of ambiguities in regards to his generic devices, his monstrosities and ghouls, for whilst embracing the metaphorical meaning of his ideas, King’s realisation of them, from satanic lawnmowers to a girl’s wrathful psychic powers, are perfectly literal. Evil when it breaks out in King’s writer has punishing corporeal and moral dimensions. King liked the theme of ordinary people falling under the power of forces from without – even the hapless dog in Cujo is a victim of this – whereas Kubrick sees it as welling from within. Part of the tensions between King’s story and Kubrick’s realisation of it lies in what feels like Kubrick’s attempts to impose a level of ambiguity about whether what we’re seeing is an actual supernatural event. Much that we see here could simply be a reality created by claustrophobia, isolation, a depressive addict’s sullen fantasising, and shared neurosis of the Torrances. It doesn’t entirely fit: there are too many events in the story that seem to confirm the actuality of the supernatural’s place in the tale, including Danny’s communication with Hallorann and Jack’s escape from the freezer Wendy locks him in after successfully knocking him out with a baseball bat.
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It might be impossible to ascertain whether Kubrick ever watched Bava’s films, and yet the points of accord are hard to ignore: as in Operazione Paura and Lisa e il Diavolo, places become infected with the diseases in the minds of the people who live in them, who then find themselves doomed to act out the pathologies locked into the environs about them (Kubrick’s affinities with Bava would again resurface notably in Eyes Wide Shut, 1999). One scene cut from the film directly quoted Operazione Paura, in which Jack picks up a ball tossed his way by a ghostly presence. The deliberate replacement of tension sourced in what will happen with tension rooted in the question of when and how, blended with the theme of Jack’s temptations towards illusory fulfilment of his psycho-sexual needs whilst exterminating actual loved-ones, is similarly close to Bava’s Hatchet for the Honeymoon (1970). Kubrick’s own preferred genre, if he had one, was the war film – six of his thirteen movies depict warfare to a significant degree. His fascination with martial subordination and ritualised violence is evinced here too; The Shining is a portrait of psychic warfare. It’s there in the way Jack is subordinated to the hotel’s programme in the same way the soldiers in Paths of Glory are enticed to destroy themselves and others to live up to a patriotic ideal, echoing General Mireau’s bullying-obliging his subordinate Dax to lead a hopeless and cynically motivated attack on the Ant Hill, and looking forward to the lengthy studies in indoctrination and terrorisation utilised in the training process examined in Full Metal Jacket (1987). As in Lolita (1962), The Shining is also the spectacle of a cultured and respectable being falling to pieces in the face of personal obsession. As in Barry Lyndon, it’s a portrait of a man being slowly crushed by the knowledge he has stepped into the lap of luxury whilst never quite possessing it. As in Dr. Strangelove and A Clockwork Orange, the onrush of calamity is viewed always with a cruelly comic grin, humans portrayed less as thinking, self-aware organisms than as momentary embodiments of various traits, from monstrous will to wretched decency.
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Hallorann, a weathered and worldly black man, is the cheeriest character in The Shining, a man who knows how to entertain a kid and keep customers satisfied, and leaves behind the heart of darkness that is the Overlook to go lounge in the sun and watch TV. He initiates Danny into a new community, one that obeys different rules to the rest of society, a world without words. Hallorann calls to mind the intimacy of sharing the shine with his mother, an intimacy to which the Torrance family never aspires. King ironically edited himself out of the ideal nuclear family of the new age in killing off his own avatar and leaving Wendy and Danny with Hallorann. Kubrick concentrates more on the punishing reaction of the offended white male ego, an aspect of The Shining that was prescriptive in the climate of 1980 when Reaganism was on the advance and which today feels all but acutely prophetic. “White man’s burden,” Jack mutters to Lloyd, and soon the film reaches a zenith of deadpan black-comedy grotesquerie as Grady baits Jack, who weeks earlier was probably a good little liberal, with the news that his son is calling in “a nigger” to stymie their designs. Torrance repeats these totemic words in hyperbolic distress, indicating the degree to which he’s fallen under the spell of the old hates written into the structure of the hotel.
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Kubrick rhymes and contrasts this sublimation by Jack of the ancient communal hates encoded in the Overlook’s timbers with the amusing sight of Hallorann in his hotel in the midst of black erotica, a touch that also says something about the two men as men, as Hallorann is a bachelor off enjoying his sojourn whilst Jack is entrapped with his family. Making Hallorann somewhat older than Jack and Wendy removed any hint of sexual threat, but Hallorann is still closer to an idealised figure of paternal care. After all, he’s the sort of guy who will drop everything, fly across country, and venture into a blizzard the moment he senses Danny and Wendy are in danger. Jack’s devolution meanwhile sees him increasingly bullying and abusing Wendy for placing her concerns for Danny ahead of his anointed place and responsibility as caretaker and litterateur. Jack’s brutal murder of Hallorann as soon as he arrives is Kubrick’s starkest deviation from his source. This might well have been made to offer at judicious dash of traditional horror in the story – it’s the only actual death in the film – but it also powerfully intensifies the film’s increasingly maniacal mood and sense of exposure. Danny and Wendy must save themselves, for no white (or black) knights are on the march. But it’s also plain in this sequence, in which Jack hides behind a pillar and springs out at Halloran as if to shout “Boo!” whilst slamming his axe into his chest, that there’s still a sick element of play to Jack’s homicidal rampage.
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The darkly comic streak of The Shining might be identified as Kubrick’s signalling to the audience he feels himself above the genre on some level, except that, as well as coherent with the rest of his oeuvre, the humour entwines with the fervency with which Kubrick delves into this little imaginative universe he and his great team of collaborators fashioned. The atmosphere of extreme isolation and immersion in the subliminal is knitted together by the strength of Kubrick’s images and his music cues. The note of child’s-play-turned-murder-party is still present even as Jack is hunting his son through the hedge maze, which becomes a subzero game of hide-and-seek with a shiny axe in the mix, and of course in the most famous moment in the film, his spittle-flecked, mad-eyed mockery of television’s appeal, “Here’s Johnny!” Meanwhile Kubrick goes to town in unleashing strange and tantalising visions, as when Wendy spies someone in an animal costume fellating a hotel guest, and another guest with a bloodied wound on his brow beaming at Wendy with a hearty greeting, “Great party, isn’t it?” Yeah, it’s a real lark. Such dioramas of the inexplicable are another facet of The Shining’s mystique, evincing episodes of teeming strangeness contained within the Overlook’s embrace without ever pausing to explain and explicate them, rather suggesting that what is glimpsed and spoken of throughout is only the tip of this uncanny iceberg. Hallorann’s ill-fated dash to the rescue does at least present to Wendy and Danny the means to escape in his snow tractor, whilst Jack, injured and dissolving into babbling lunacy, sits down in the maze, unable to find either Danny or his way out, and is glimpsed next as a frigid, icicle-fringed corpse. It’s a truly pathetic end for would-be artist-god’s designs. The last shot, on top of its mordant and haunting evocation of eternal entrapment and the dissolution of meaning in the face of time’s eddies, begs a certain sympathetic question: is Jack happier this way?

1970s, Horror/Eerie, Television

Salem’s Lot (1979)

Director: Tobe Hooper

By Roderick Heath

When I was a very small boy, no more than four or five, a TV station advertised this miniseries using the unusual touch of excerpting nearly a whole scene, one in which the monstrous vampire Barlow (Reggie Nalder) erupts into a kitchen table conclave of a teenager, Mark Petrie (Lance Kerwin), his parents (Joshua Bryant and Barbara Babcock), and their priest (James Gallery), promptly murdering both parents. For a kid, this was raw stuff, and I freaked out, causing my father to order me out of the room if there was ever a sign of it coming on again. It’s still a startling, unnerving scene; Hooper, who made beautifully nasty hash out of family rituals in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), pulled out all stops in showing evil literally erupt into a middle class home to consume the nuclear family and all their social safeguards.

Salem’s Lot is the black sheep of the first wave of Stephen King adaptations. Unlike De Palma’s Carrie (1976), Kubrick’s The Shining (1981), and even Carpenter’s Christine (1983), Salem’s Lot had the disadvantage of being a made-for-TV production with the familiar rough edges of such efforts at the time—hurried lighting and camera effects perforated by cheesy televisual touches, like freeze frames and blackout cliffhangers created to make room for the ad breaks. But Salem’s Lot was made by a director hip to King’s essential aesthetic of melding gothic canards with a sense of the passion and cruelty inherent in everyday life in dreary small towns and suburbs, and how they provide sounding boards for explosions of more expansive evil and concomitant good.

Vampire movies these days seem to have been exhausted by the souped-up idiocy of the Blade movies and Van Helsing, which stripped away any hint of loathsome dread (This was written before I first heard of the Twilight franchise, which concluded this debasement — Rod). Salem’s Lot, on the other hand, employs generic clichés wittily. There’s the old haunted house on the hill —the Marston House—shadowy enclave of the malevolent memory and totem of fascination for local, imaginative youth. Recently bought by smooth, saturnine émigré Mr. Straker (James Mason), who’s opening an antique store in ‘Salem’s Lot, pop. 2013,” in rural New England (of course), the Marston House was once the scene of suicides and paedophilic murders. The house lurks oppressively in the mind of recently returned novelist Ben Mears (David Soul), who moved out of the town at 10 years of age, and has now returned to write a story inspired by the legend of the Marston House. Ben’s sure that the Marston House has a quality of radiating evil that attracts evil people, which has him pondering both the nature of Straker and his unseen partner Barlow, as well as his own.

Ben makes friends (and enemies) quickly, coming into contact with his old teacher Jason Berk (Lew Ayres); Susan Norton (Bonnie Bedelia), a bookish, lovelorn, “semi-liberated” woman between life phases; her genial doctor father (Ed Flanders); and a younger version of himself, in the person of horror-movie obsessed Mark. Weird stuff starts to happen. Two dimwits are hired to pick up a crate imported by Straker, which radiates intense cold and seems to sneak up on them in the back of the truck. They’re supposed to place the crate in the Marston House basement and padlock the house. They do the former, but run away before doing the latter. Meanwhile, two brothers, Danny and Ralphie Glick (Brad Savage and Ronnie Scribner), friends of Mark’s, are assaulted whilst heading home in the woods. Straker returns to the Marston House with one of them bundled up and prepared as a snack, only to find that whatever was inside the crate has busted loose. This was, of course, the monstrous Barlow, a Germanic vampire who moves from small town to small town, consuming all and moving on; soon, vampirism is spreading at an exponential rate through the town, eating up the good and the bad, the bright, brave, and stupid.

King’s oeuvre has obvious roots in the works of writers like Shirley Jackson and H.P. Lovecraft, both masters of the subgenre of New England horror that grafts Old World obsessions onto New World shores, and in 1950s monster movies like Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and The Blob (1958) in which the friendly night of American suburbia becomes evil-riddled and threatening. Most of the singular aspects of King’s imaginative appeal that made him the premier genre novelist of recent times are present. It’s easy to see the appeal he has for adolescents of all ages in contrasting oppressive everyday life, including acts of commonplace thuggery—here, in drunken ex-con truck driver Cully (George Dzundza) beating up his tarty wife (Julie Cobb) for cheating on him with her sleazy realtor boss (Fred Willard), or Susan’s ex-boyfriend Ned (Barney McFadden) assaulting Ben for stealing her.

This portrayal of the dark side of a “normal”, adult world is balanced by oddball outsiders whose strange awareness and retreats into private worlds of fantasy ironically arm them for the fight against evil; in not living in the “real” world, they’re the better prepared for its collapse. Mark is warned by his father he’ll never make a living out of his passion for horror trappings, but, of course, his geek smarts will fortify him in his battle against vampires, just as Ben’s imagination makes him keen to the threat of the Marston House when no one else is. As tiresome as King’s writing style gets—and why I prefer watching the movies made of his works— it’s this cable he has plugged into the yearnings of his readers that borders on genius.

Hooper aims more for atmosphere than slickness, employing touches that wink to fans of older horror movies: drawing out the parallel of Barlow’s arrival with that of Dracula at Whitby; the Psycho-esque look of the Marston House and its interior of pure gothic decay; fog-wreathed docks and shadowy graveyards; and most indelibly, modeling Barlow’s appearance after Max Schreck’s Nosferatu (apparently the idea of sacked screenwriter Larry Cohen, in the same year, oddly, that Werner Herzog did his own remake of Murnau’s sepulchral classic) rather than the novel’s more modern, suave Euro-trash monster. Barlow’s long-delayed first appearance, finally erupting into the prison cell of Ned, is a doozy. The 1970s, the busiest decade in the history of the horror film, had been largely absent of vampires, apart from the crappy tail-end of the Hammer cycle, the Count Yorga and Blacula films, and Jean Rollins’ bold, underground films, like Lèvres de Sang (1974).

In reviving a moribund subgenre, Hooper employs fresh details for his vampires, like glowing eyes and wire-riding levitations, that would energise subsequent variations like Fright Night (1985) and Near Dark and The Lost Boys (both 1987). The eeriest scenes have Barlow’s adolescent victims drifting out of the fog outside windows, pleading to be let in and scratching incessantly on the glass, evoking the purest essence of childish, nocturnal anxiety. The early scenes have an offhand, almost sloppy feel, but this proves to be part of an skillful conditioning style; as the humdrum gives way to the urgent, so the camera movements become more elaborate, with impressive sweeping crane shots and clever framing in the final third as our heroes enter Marston House to root out evil, suggesting a new overlording presence and order.

The town’s full name is Jerusalem’s Lot, which was also the original title of the novel, shortened at the behest of the publishers who though it sounded too religious. This makes clever association with biblical tropes: the holy city of Jerusalem segues into Lot and his daughters, the lone survivors, of the cursed city of Sodom and where Lot’s wife famously looked back and was turned to a pillar of salt. Salem’s Lot, the quintessential small American town, quickly turns into a septic den that Ben and younger double Mark barely escape. Lot’s wife could be Susan, who is caught by Straker and vampirised by Barlow.

Susan, drawn first to handsome stranger Ben, follows him into the house only to vanish, and Straker amusedly tells Mark that he took her to the man she really wanted to meet—an interesting hint of violently morbid sexuality that isn’t explored. But that’s always been King’s style. He provides ready analogues for real-world experiences (domestic violence in The Shining, groups for survivors of child abuse in It, sexual awakening and repression in Carrie) without risking alienating his audiences by exploring these metaphors in depth, cloaking them instead in deeper webs of metaphor and mystification. In a splendidly dark coda — a touch purely that of Hooper and screenwriter Paul Monash (who was having a good year in 1979 between this and his excellent adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front) — Vampire-Susan pursues Ben and Mark to Guatemala, where they wash up after they destroy Barlow, Straker, and burn down Marston House.

This leads to a strikingly tragic final scene where Ben stakes Susan despite her protestations of love before he and Mark continue a life in exile. This last note has an intriguing political undertone: Ben is defined as a double-outsider, both with his arty bent and his “left-wing” status. King himself, who published the novel in 1975, said the novel was explicitly inspired by his own gnawing anxiety over Watergate. In running from the United States, pursued by agents of spreading evil, Ben and Mark become emblematic dropouts fleeing an oncoming reactionary backlash.

Amidst the impressive cast, Mason, with ineffable cool but also a subterranean strand of repressed panic in attempting to appease his dreadful master, stands out; so does Bedelia, playing Susan with a mix of the worldly and the uncertain. The ever-entertaining Kenneth McMillan plays the canny but flaky local constable. Most problematic is Soul, who flounders in playing a troubled intellectual hero. His way of suggesting depth is to wrinkle his brow constantly and talk in a croaky baritone. Salem’s Lot is far from perfect—the finale wobbles, with the dispatch of Barlow, so memorably introduced, disappointingly easy, and there are faults in the story progression. But it’s still a hugely entertaining reminder of how well a contemporaneous horror yarn can work.

film freedonia

Film essays and commentary by Roderick Heath

Tag Archives: Stephen King

Carrie (1976)

The Shining (1980)

Salem’s Lot (1979)