WHAT WENT WRONG - Carrie (1976)

Episode Date: September 28, 2026

It’s been 50 years since Brian De Palma turned prom into a blood bath, so let’s find out what went wrong on ‘Carrie’. Join Chris and Lizzie as they dive deep into Stephen King’s first on-screen adaptation. Find out why no one wanted to adapt the novel, why De Palma had to beg for the job, and why he was dead-set against casting Sissy Spacek. Plus, discover why that deadly prom sequence was just as scary in real life. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

You go 15 seconds back and then 30 ahead. You land mid-sentence, so you're scratching your head. What went wrong and what can you do? Listen out free with just a click or two. Well, howdy folks, and welcome back to another episode of What Went Wrong? Your favorite podcast, yada yada, blah, blah, blah. I don't need to say the rest. We wanted to let you know that we are now offering bonus and ad-free episodes

to all Patreon, Spotify, and Apple subscribers for only $5 a month. Well, now that's less than going to one-third of a matinee at your local theater. Just so you know, because of technical limitations with Apple, you Apple special features recipients may not see the ad-free episode until the afternoon on release day. Y'all gonna have to be patient. Now go on and sign up on Patreon, Spotify, or Apple, and have a good day now, y'all.

You go 15 seconds back and then 30 ahead. You land mid-sentence and so you're scratching your head. What went wrong and what can you do? Listen at Free With Just a Click or Two Hello, dear listeners, and welcome back to another episode of What Went Wrong? Your favorite podcast, Full Stop, that just so happens to be about movies, and how it's nearly impossible to make them, let alone a good one, let alone, the first in perhaps over 100 adaptations of the most prolific American horror writer

of the 20th and 21st centuries. As always, I'm Chris Winterbauer, joined by Lizzie Bassett, Lizzie, where are we headed today? And why is high school the scariest place we've ever been? We're headed to the prom, Chris. Get on your peach-colored dress and cover up your dirty pillows because we're going underground into Carrie. I'm so excited to talk about this. I have read Carrie, which I'd never read before. I know you have. People may not know this. Chris is a Stephen King superfan. I believe you've read, how many of you read of his books? At least 40, maybe 50? 40. Wow. I read basically everything through, is it, Duma Key? I think in like 2011 or so. And then I kind of fell off when

we graduated from undergrad, but I was pretty consistent through the mid-auts. Okay, well, I need to get on this bandwagon because I absolutely loved it. I read the outsider, which I loved. I read the stand, which I loved. I've read like a lot of the big hits, but I haven't really gotten into more of the other stuff. And as you said, he's unbelievably prolific. So there's plenty for me to read. So this year for the month of October, if anybody doesn't know yet, we are doing a box office Club for our subscribers. We will be covering four new releases and also reading the books that they're based on. Those are going to be Verity, incidents around the house, which is adapted into other mommy, sense and sensibility, and Wildwood. So that's part of the reason why we're covering

this. Obviously, this is a book-to-screen adaptation, but also, it's the 50th anniversary of Kerry this year. And we are getting Mike Flanagan's miniseries adaptation of Carrie in October. So now's the time to talk about this. There's one more reason. Lizzie, that I'm so glad you picked it for this exact moment. What? The myriad ways in which this film is an homage to Psycho. Yes. Which we just covered.

And I didn't fully appreciate it. I know. An unintentional connection, but yes. Interesting. Yeah. Well, Chris, let's talk about it. What was your experience with Carrie? And what did it feel like rewatching it, especially now after Psycho?

Really quick before we even dive into that. If you guys hear any small children running around screaming, it's my telekinetic children terrorizing each other at the vacation rental. we're with my extended a family at. So apologies for any background noise. However, I do think it's appropriate. Honestly, I do feel like if any child is going to be telekinetic, it might be Nora, just throwing it out there. Maybe. But if any child could use sheer force to destroy a town or high school, it's Eve. And so just like her sheer strengths. Yeah. That's true. She's a bruiser. Yeah. So Carrie, I have read Carrie before. It's Stephen King's first, I'm sure you'll go into this

published novel, but it's not the first one of his that I read. But what I always loved about Carrie was how unusually brief it is for a Stephen King novel. This is before he got into candidly things like The Stand or It, for example, where we get the more, I don't know the exact right word, but indulgent King, perhaps you could say. Maybe a little bit more like world building or a sort of universe building. Yeah. There is an ensemble quality. Carrie feels very focused. I think it's a really great book. It's really interesting that this was his first published book because it's about a high school girl and he seems very far removed from this. I don't want to dive into the writing. I'm sure you'll talk about it. Lizzie. All to say, when I saw the movie, like many

horror films of the 70s, by the time I saw it, it felt dated relative to the updated sort of horror films that I'd seen in the 90s, for example. So rewatching it for the podcast, I kind of assumed, oh, this is going to feel a little bit, you know, dated. Maybe it won't hold up. as well. And as one audience member kind of rudely, although accurately pointed out, I have a real blind spot in my filmography with Brian De Palma, who I've seen a number of his movies, but I definitely don't know his work as well as other directors we've covered. Okay, anyway, I enjoyed this movie growing up. I always thought, oh, this is just the showcase film for Sissy Spaceic. You're just with her the entire time. That was my memory of this movie. Rewatching it, A, from the very first shot,

The slow motion with the sort of operatic sort of pastoral score that opens this scene of the girls in the locker room and it's like the Virgin Spring and she's bathing herself, immediately I was like, oh yeah, okay, Brian DePaulman knows what he's doing. This guy is a master of juxtaposition. And I got to say, this movie just surprised me at every turn. I forgot how much the film actually focuses on the terrorizing characters as opposed to Carrietta, Sissy Spaceic. I vaguely remembered Piper Lorry's performance as the, mother, but Betty Buckley, as Ms. Collins, really stood out to me in this rewatch as a fantastic performance. She's great. Yeah, and then, of course, like, you know, Amy Irving and whatnot, and John Travolta, they all pop up. He's one of my favorite parts of this movie. Yeah, he's such a turd. And I guess what I really felt watching at this time was, I thought it was such an interesting exploration of kind of the indiscriminate pervasiveness of violence, physical violence around Carrie. And then Carrie sort of, in the end, snaps and then externalizes all of those internalized feelings through her own tenel kinetic power, but the sheer volume of slaps in this movie,

for example, is really shocking. And I know some of it is the time, but I also think it's Brian De Palma making points about the casual cruelty with which these characters are interacting with one another in certain ways. And maybe I'm wrong. But a lot of that is in the book, but yes, almost all of it is on the page. Fair. But I'm saying, be it King or De Palma's interpretation of King, but the storytellers here, I think, are doing a great job of pointing to the ways in which, you know, violence begets violence and it just spirals out of control. And I know in the book, the climax is much bigger. Let's save that.

We're going to talk about it because, yes, the ending of the movie is in one very important way quite different from the book. Yeah. And I understand why they did it for this. I found, especially after watching Psycho and watching a bunch of Hitchcock, and then I did watch some De Palma that was also inspired by some other Hitchcock movies, when you talk about another movie. Did you watch Sisters?

I didn't watch Sisters this time. I saw Sisters years ago. I did watch Obsession, which came out the same year. And anywho, so I thought this movie held up wonderfully well overall. And I'm really curious, Lizzie, about some choices that he makes in terms of nudity, et cetera, and how you reacted to those because I had a specific reaction. But I may be wrong. And I also love the way he used music in this movie.

And I feel like the way that the music is used, yes, there are some specific horror homages. There is a screeching violin stab that is so Bernard Herman. Very intentionally, yes. Very intentionally. But the way that that final cue, as the house is in. imploding around Carrie and her mother does not lean into the melodrama or the terror of the moment, but almost juxtaposes a sort of beauty, right, to that scene, I thought was so effective.

And it was actually kind of one of the things that I was saying, oh, at the end of Thelma and Louise, I almost wished we had the Hans Zimmer, You're So Cool score, juxtaposed against the tragedy of that decision. I felt like De Palma pulled that off in this movie. Anyway, I just love it. I love he shoots the third act leading to the bucket pole. Like, it's a political assassination about to happen, right? You know, you're following the rope as if it's a fuse and the characters are looking at one another.

The use of slow motion, I actually think is like pretty judicious and very effective in this movie. So I thought it was great. I really liked it. I'm with you. I was reading that was almost done with the book when I watched the movie. And when the movie started and I saw how much nudity there was right away, I felt like my stomach kind of twisted and I thought, oh, no, is this going to be like lascivious in a way that the book is not. And I guess I should say, so I had seen Carrie many, many years ago. I probably haven't seen this for at least 15, maybe even 20 years.

And I remember enjoying it. I remember certain images from it, obviously. But it's not a movie that I had rewatched. And obviously, I'd never read it before. And the thing that I was really struck by in the book is that Stephen King, obviously, he was a 26-year-old man when he wrote this. And it is such a both compassionate. passionate and searing look at what it is to be a teenage girl and also a teenage boy. I think

actually John Tramolta's character, Billy, does get quite a bit more sort of internal exploration in the book that's really fascinating. Basically, the way he's written feels very much like a prototype for characters we get later in like the stand, for example, the sort of, you know, sociopath. But I was so impressed by the way that Stephen King wrote about teenagers, about the violence specifically of teenage girls because it felt very, very accurate to how vicious teenage girls can really be. But he does it in such a way that doesn't feel exploitative at all. And I think that to be a man writing about that is extremely impressive. And that's not to be like, oh, men can't write about women. It's not that. It's that he doesn't have this lived experience, which he will say. And so he's

able to actually put himself in the shoes of people and tell their stories in a way that I just thought was so amazing. So anyway, when the movie started, I was like, uh-oh, this feels very opposed to the way that he actually wrote both the shower scene and the book itself, almost like leering. But as the movie continued, and I settled into it, I understood more what Brian De Palma was doing, which is that he is heightening everything. He is making it campy. He is leaning into the satire of it. And I loved it. I thought it was great. You know, I think the nudity at the beginning, I don't know. Maybe you do need it to a certain degree, particularly because the women that are in that scene are not teenage girls. Like, those are very clearly, very developed women in their 20s, you know? And there is something about that juxtapose with how little Sissy Spacec is that does do something effective for the narrative. So I don't think he's just showing the bodies. But you mentioned the nudity. I mean, what did you think?

It almost felt like he was doing it also as a bit of a misdirect to the audience. Yeah. It almost felt like he was doing it as a sort of cheeky, you know, oh, yeah, come get comfortable, come look, I dare you, you know what I mean, to leer at this. And like, this movie's going to fuck with you by the end of it. You know, this is not actually what I'm doing. I totally agree with you. I think there is a Garden of Eden quality to that. So like the imagery that's evoked throughout the movie, the Christ imagery that he puts into it, the speaking of Eve as weak, et cetera, you know, this sort of banishment from the Eden, this idea of like women being comfortable with their sexuality.

I do think it sort of sets up this idea that there's this fraternity or sorority of sisterhood that's happening, right? All of these girls are running around. Like you said, they're very developed. Like there's this sense of we are all comfortable with one another. And then it tucked in the corner, right, is sissy space like the one virgin sort of of the group literally washing her body clean with soap in the way that she will be drenched with blood at the end of this film. And then she, you know, has her period. And everyone just turns on her. The group just ostracizes her immediately, not for her nakedness, you know what I mean?

But for her ignorance. I found it effective, even though I could see somebody else having the interpretation of De Palma just wanted some tits and ass in the beginning of his movie. Yeah, I don't think that's true. But it was the initial gut reaction that I had. I will say, Sissy Spaceic, as we'll talk about, is not an obvious choice for this character, especially when you read the book. Because she is so striking and so beautiful. I understand that she's unusual looking, but I did find myself wishing, and she is wonderful. I'm not saying that she shouldn't have been cast in this movie.

She's amazing. I'm thrilled that she is. I did find myself wondering what it would be like to actually watch a version of Carrie where you see a more plain, more normal looking girl in this role. I think it would potentially make it harder to watch because it would amplify the cruelty to a certain degree. She's so beautiful that some of it almost makes you feel like, well, you know, but she looks like that.

Like she'll be able to turn it around, you know? Yeah, but that being said, I do think in high school, there's cruelty that transcends, looks. Of course. There's other ways of being an outsider. And the other thing that I think it helps with is with William Katz character, with Tommy, I do think you actually start to believe that dynamic more as a result of maybe Sissy's Basics casting.

And there is an element of her, when she takes on her power towards the end of the film, even before she does it in a negative way, there's sort of like things are going to change around here and she goes and she's made the draft. I don't know. I think there are some benefits to it as well. I can totally see the downsides. But. Yeah.

And just to clarify, you know, the way that Stephen King writes Carrie, she's not, like, deeply unattractive. She's just a more normal, more average looking girl who by the end in the same way has, you know, spruced herself up. She's done the she's all that transition at the end into the prom dress. But I did find it interesting that King did explicitly write Carrie's mother in particular as being overweight and Carrie as either feeling that she is or anyway, there was some stuff in there about them being overweight that they did obviously erase for this. We don't need to get into it, but King has a tendency of doing that with his somewhat fallible characters. He did it in the stand. He does it in a number of, like,

its trope he leans into with it, and then eventually kind of tries to subvert, but doesn't really. So, yeah. I mean, I think it's common in a lot of books at the time. Yeah, 100%. So I don't know that you need that. I'm just saying there's something about how striking she is that makes it slightly more palatable. But let's get into it. Our main sources for today are the 25th anniversary acting Carrie making of documentary. Of course, Stephen King's on writing a memoir of the craft and many other articles, retrospectives, and interviews from the cast and crew. Here are the details, as always. Carrie is directed by Brian De Palma, written by Lawrence D. Cohen, of course, adapted from the 1974 novel by Stephen King,

starring Sissy Spaceic, Piper Laurie, Amy Irving, Nancy Allen, William Cat, Betty Buckley, John Travolta, Priscilla Pointer, and more. The IMDB logline is, A Social Misfit with Psychic Powers turns Prom Night into Hell on Earth. As we said, Kerry was the breakout novel for Stephen King. So let's start by talking a little bit about Mr. King. He was, of course, born in Portland, Maine in 1947, when he was only two years old, his father abandoned his family, leaving his mother to raise him and his brother, David, by herself.

As King put it, from a very early age, I wanted to be scared. He had a deep fascination with horror, starting in the early 50s with movies like The Creature from the Black Lagoon and the original invasion of the body snatchers, as well as the brain from Planet Eros, which according to him was, quote, in some way, I've never been able to figure out the basis for my novel, Carrie. Now, we discussed this on The Shining, so I will keep this background brief,

but King's writing career really started with, I would say, some light plagiarism. He would copy Combat Cacey Comics, but then he would add his own descriptions when he didn't like what was written. He showed them to his mother, not betraying exactly what he had done, and she was, of course, amazed, but then he admitted they weren't exactly original works, to which she said, write one of your own, Stevie, I bet you could do better. So King wrote in on writing, quote, I remember an immense feeling of possibility at the idea as if I had been ushered into a vast building filled with closed doors and had been given leave to open any I liked. There were more doors than one person could ever open in a lifetime, I thought, and still think. Now in the 60s after hitchhiking home one night from a screening of the pit and the pendulum, he decided he would turn the movie into a book. Novelizations. Did Stephen King invent them? I don't know. Also hilarious because of course the pit and the pendulum was already a book. It's based on a book. It's based on a book. short story by Edgar Allan Poe. But he wrote it in two days, printed about 40 copies,

brought them all to school, charged for them, and he sold two dozen copies in his first day. He eventually won a scholarship to the University of Maine, where he met and fell in love with Tabitha. Tabitha Spruce, who had eventually, of course, become Tabitha King, his wife, and partner. But something else happened in college. He picked up odd jobs here and there to make money, and one of them was working as a janitor in a high school. Now, when he was scrubbing the rust stains off the showers in the girls' locker room, there was something different about the bathrooms than the boys' rooms. Obviously, there were no urinals, and also the showers actually had curtains. But more specifically, Chris, there were some strange metal boxes attached to the tile walls.

They were too small to be for paper towels. So he asked his co-worker, what are those? To which the man replied, pussy plugs for them certain days of the month. Well, haven't heard that alliteration before. Now you have. He graduated in 1970 and his daughter, Neonel. was born the same year. He and Tabitha married shortly thereafter and had another child, Joe, two years later. Unsurprisingly, neither one was planned and suddenly Stephen King found himself desperately needing a reliable source of income to support his family. He struggled to find teaching jobs initially and instead worked in a laundry while writing on the side. And he did write

on the side. As you pointed out at the top, he had already written three novels by the time Carrie came along and they all sat unpublished. They were a rage, the long walk, and the running man. And in In 1973, the shit really hit the fan for the King family. They were living in a trailer outside Bangor Main, which is not a booming metropolis. They couldn't afford to fix the transmission on their car. Tabitha was working at Dunkin' Donuts, and they had no telephone. Stephen was still working at the laundry when he found himself thinking back to that janitor gig, and more specifically, those boxes in the girls' locker room.

He thought about how exposed a young girl would be in that space, especially if the showers didn't have curtains, and an idea started to form. quote, this one girl starts to have her period, only she doesn't know what it is. And the other girls, grossed out, horrified, amused, start pelting her with sanitary napkins. The girl begins to scream, all that blood. She thinks she's dying, that the other girls are making fun of her even while she's bleeding to death. She reacts, fights back, but how. Now, the how came from an article in Life magazine that he'd read years earlier, which posited

that some percentage of reported poltergeist activity may in fact be telekinesis. God, let's go back to the days when this is what was being published in reputable news sources. Chris, what is telekinesis? The ability to create physical disturbances, move things, etc., with your mind. With your mind? That's right. Now, the article also suggested there was some evidence that these powers may be stronger in young people, more specifically, girls around their menarche or advent of their first period.

Suddenly, the two ideas collided and Carrie was born. Now, initially, he thought it would be a good short story that he could submit to magazine outlets like Playboy. While it might seem bizarre to pitch this to a men's magazine like Playboy, it does make more sense when you realize that these magazines paid for short stories. Playboy paid like $2,000, which would have been more than they needed to fix their car. So he put Carrie on hold, though, when he finally got a teaching position at Hampton Academy in Hampton, Maine. A few months later, though, he came back to his story idea. So he wrote three pages of a first draft, and then, Chris, what happened next? I don't know. Did he put it away? Did he put it in a drawer?

He crumbled them up and threw them in the trash. Oh, that's right. Oh, this is right. Yes. And then he pulled them out. He didn't. We'll get there. So a couple of reasons why he threw it away. One, he did not find himself emotionally moved by the story at all. Two, he didn't like Carrie, as in the character herself. According to King, quote, Carrie White seemed thick and passive. a ready-made victim. Three, he was understandably uncomfortable with writing a story

where basically all the main characters are high school girls. And four, he felt it would only work as a novel in all the men's magazines had very strict word count limits. But the next night, he came home from work to find his wife with the crumpled pages spread out in front of her.

She had been emptying the waistbasket, found them, read them, and wanted to know what happened next. He said he didn't know jack shit about teenage girls, and she said, I'll help you with that. She told him, you've got something here. I really think you do. So at 26 years old, Stephen King started writing Carrie, mostly from the laundry room of their double-wide trailer. He drew on two, quote-unquote,

ghosts from his past. One was a girl from a very religious household who was relentlessly bullied at his elementary school. She would eventually die of a seizure. Another was another girl who was bullied who later died by suicide following postpartum depression. King wrote in on writing, quote, I never liked Carrie, that female version of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. Those are of course the Columbine shooters. But through Sandra and Dode, those are the pseudonyms he gave these girls, I came at last to understand her a little. I pitied her and I pitied her classmates as well because I had been one of them once upon a time. So because he felt the basic story was both too long for a short story and too short for a full novel, Stephen King took the Dracula approach. Do you remember the format in

which Carrie is written? It does not take the novelistic approach of, oh, we're going to put you either in the head of a third person omniscient narrator or the, you know, head of our characters. Instead, it's almost as if it's being pieced together, witness statements, you know, et cetera, after the fact. What happened in this town, you know, here is a collection of everything, you know, that kind of came together. Yes. What I love about it is that weirdly, it's both. So a lot of it are statements, research documents, as you said, witness testimony from this fictional white commission that's investigating the events that happened at the prom. Right. But then also you do get the internal monologues, not just of Carrie. You get Carrie, you get Sue Snell, for sure, you get quite a bit of

Sue. You get Billy, I believe you get Tommy. You get almost all of the main characters. Yeah, he'll do a lot, especially, I feel like if you go then to like it, for example, like you get a lot of the antagonist perspective, you know, not pennywise really, but the antagonistic children, you know, eventually in that one as well. Or the stand. That's another one that you get a lot of that perspective. Yeah, but it's remarkable to see it juxtaposed with the sort of research documents as well. It's really cool. I highly recommend everybody read it if you haven't. According to on writing, he never grew to like the character and never really understood what Sue Snell's motives were for sending her boyfriend to the prom with her, but he learned two very important lessons.

One, a writer's first impression of a character can be just as wrong as a reader's. And two, stopping a piece of work just because it's hard, either emotionally or imaginatively, is a bad idea. He sent his manuscript to his friend Bill Thompson, who worked at Double Day, and then he basically just forgot about it, thinking it would wind up the same place as his other three novels. But of course, Stephen King was wrong. In March of 1973, the receptionist at Hampton Academy told him his wife had called with important news and he needed to call her back. Over the phone, she read him a telegram from Bill Thompson.

It said, congratulations. Carrie officially a double-day book. Is $2,500 advance okay? The future lies ahead. Love Bill. Now, $2,500, pretty small advance even for the 70s. And it was only for the hardcover print. But it was enough to fix the transmission on their car.

So that was good. It was not, however, enough for King to quit his job. so he signed on for another year of teaching. And he held out hope that he could get more for the paperback rights than the advance that he'd gotten on the hardcover. He was hoping for $10,000 to $60,000. And for reference, Mario Puzzo had just been paid $410,000 for the paperback rights to the godfather. So he wasn't really hoping for much. Yeah.

And I feel like with a novel-like-carry genre, it's slim, 200 pages, you're hoping for paperback success. People are going to buy it at the airport and read it on the plane, you know, sort of thing. Exactly. But in May, Chris. He got another call from Bill Thompson. Are you sitting down? Bill asked. No, he said, do I need to?

We don't own a chair. We can't afford one. Bill said, you might. The paperback rights to Kerry went to signet books for $400,000. Wow. It was, of course, enough for him to finally quit the teaching job, focused full time on writing. And in April of 1974, Carrie was published in hardcover,

and it sold a modest amount. It got somewhat mixed reviews. But one year later in 19, In 1975, the paperback came out and stayed for 14 weeks on the New York Times bestsellers list. You nailed it. This sold over a million copies in its first year. Let's roll the clock back to 1973. Carrie had just been picked up by Doubleday, and a copy of the as-of-yet-unpublished novel had made its way to the desk of producer David Suskind. But it wasn't Suskind who picked it up.

It was a young freelance film reviewer named Lawrence D. Cohen, who moonlit as a script reader doing coverage for Suskind and others. And Lawrence was obsessed with this book. he tried as hard as he could to convince Suskin to buy the rights, but Suskin said, no, as did everyone else Cohen was doing coverage for at the time. And when the hardcover came out and failed to make much of a splash, it seemed like all those producers had been right. Maybe Cohen's instincts were off. Things didn't really change for Carrie until that whopper of a paperback deal came through and all of a sudden Hollywood started paying more attention, especially a young director named Brian De Palma. In fact, he loved it so much, he called his agent to find out who had the rights and was shocked

to learn no one had picked them up yet. Like Cohen pitching the book to every producer he read for, De Palma called every studio and told them how interested he was. I want to make Carrie. But he heard nothing back. More on Brian and why he heard nothing back in just a little bit. Meanwhile, Cohen had moved to L.A. and worked as a production executive on Scorsese's Alice doesn't live here anymore.

And he was referred by a friend to producer Paul Monash, who had a development deal at 20th Century Fox and was looking for a story editor. They met and Chris, they did not hit it off. Cohen didn't like any of the projects that Monash had mentioned, but then as he was walking out the door, he was literally already down the hall. Monash called out and said, wait, there's one more thing. He said, I've just bought the film rights to a little book that you've probably never heard of called Carrie. And Cohen obviously came rushing back into his office and took the job as quickly as he could.

Now, much to Cohen's surprise, Monash had commissioned a screenplay for Carrie already and really didn't like the way that it had turned out. Monash was frantic to get a working screenplay in order, and so Cohen, figuring he had nothing to lose, said, I can write it. So he took the gamble on him, and Cohen churned out a draft in about six weeks. Wow. And to be clear, he had never written a screenplay before. He just loved the book and was like, I can jerk. His first draft was very faithful to the book, retaining basically the same Dracula structure that King had put in place. Meanwhile, Ryan DePalma had heard that Monash had acquired the rights, so he called him up,

and met with him, said, I should direct this movie, and Monash said, no. No, that's right. Why? Well, Brian De Palma was not exactly a hot commodity at this point, and he had had an unusual path to Hollywood, so let's talk about it. He grew up in Pennsylvania, the child of a serial cheater. According to De Palma, quote, I used to follow my father around when he was cheating on my mother. I took photographs of him. I had broken into the office by ramming my fist through the glass door. I had a knife with me. I threatened him and said, where is she? I searched through the office and I finally found her in the closet. Jesus Christ! Well, he's effective. He was studying engineering at Columbia University when he saw vertigo and it changed

the way that he thought about storytelling. But he didn't start making feature films yet. He started making documentaries and some political films on the side. Eventually, he pivoted to studying film in the graduate program at Sarah Lawrence where he made a student film, The Wedding Party. And this was, I believe, in collaboration with a couple other students and a professor, I think. And do you know who it starred? Yeah, it was De Niro. Yes, Robert De Niro. So at this point, he started directing micro-budget movies like Murder Alamode,

greetings, and, hi, Mom, the latter two starred De Niro there, I believe. And then he got his big-ish break, signing up with Warner Brothers in the early 70s alongside Scorsese, Coppola, and George Lucas. He directed the Tommy Smothers comedy, Get to Know Your Rabbit. At the same time, Scorsese was editing Medicine Ball Caravan. Coppola had shot Finian's Ruffalo. Rainbow and Lucas was finishing THX 1138. Now, Chris, what commonality ties all of those movies together? I'm not sure. It's that they were all big time floppers. Oh, yeah. They all did really badly.

They were all sharing editors, too, though, because like Paul Hirsch was involved in this as well. They did all work with a lot of the same people, which will continue, as we'll see. Yeah. Finian's Rainbow I knew and THX I knew. I guess I didn't know Scorsesean DePalma at the same time. Yes. Flop Town, USA, taking place on the Warner Brothers Law. Yeah. But this led to you. to a real kinship between these four filmmakers. Now, De Palma had pivoted to horror with sisters in 1973, which I watched and loved. Yeah. It is bizarre. Charles Durning.

I know. Charles Durning is so great in this movie, one of my favorite parts of it. This movie, listeners, if you haven't watched it, you should. The best way I can describe it is, like, it's a rear window if you're watching rear window from the perspective of the apartment in which the murder happens and then also malignant. Yeah, that's true. There's a lot of Hitchcock in it. And doesn't he do split?

screen in it too, like at the end of Carrie. Yes. He does some really interesting filmic techniques. He also does, I can't remember which director called it this, the American cut, they call it, which is a punch in on axis, which Hitchcock did, for example, on Norma Bates, right? You see the wide and you punch in straight close on her, which was a very unusual type of cut. And De Palma does this too. He does it in Carrie to go close to her eyes to suggest that she's about to move things.

Yeah. He was both like an illusionist, like he would rip off all these other big filmmakers, but he was also creating so many cool things too. You know, it's such an interesting guy. Well, and I think Sisters is worth watching ahead of Carrie because, A, it's kind of his first full dive into the horror pool to a certain extent. And also, you can see him messing with the shots more in this, particularly the split screen. The way that he uses it in Sisters is very effective, although it's used a lot more sparingly

than it ends up being used in carry, which we will talk about. Well, and I feel like it's also, like, thematically makes a lot of sense, right? Oh, yeah. Sisters formerly conjoined twins that have been separated. You know what I mean? So the split screen. Spoilers, Chris. Yes, Margot Kidder with a twin on her hip.

It's fun. You should watch it. It's stuck on you, but better. Stuck on you, meets rear window, meets malignant. So what a pitch. He followed that up with Phantom of the Paradise, which also did not do well. So he's basically never had a hit, which is why Monash said, See You in Hell when De Palma pitched himself for Carrie.

And his movies are like highly referential. It's almost like Andy Warhol-esque. They're very stylized. Yeah, like Phantom of the Paradise. I mean, he's again riffing on so many other movies and whatnot. So. Yeah. Now, important to note you mentioned Obsession. He had filmed it, but it was also sitting around unreleased at this point, probably because his string of clinkers. And Obsession is a huge Hitchcock reference. I mean, it's basically, it is Vertigo almost. It's him and Schrader's version of Vertigo. Also, if you guys liked the movie Old Boy, the Korean movie, Old Boy, I feel like Old Boy takes a lot from obsession as well, if anybody's interested in likes that movie. Nice.

So Monash plowed ahead, helping Cohen finish up the script and submitting it to 20th Century Fox, who hated it. They rejected it immediately and put Carrie in turnaround. But Marcia Nassetteer, who had recently become a VP at United Artists and had already helped broker the deal for the film rights to the book, snapped it up right away. However, the script was pretty messy, which is understandable. This was Cohen's first ever screenplay, and he'd written it in six weeks.

So De Palma pitches himself again, and he says, I can fix this script. Finally, Monash called George Lido, who was De Palma's producer on Obsession, who vouched for him, as did some execs at United Artists, and finally, he gave in and hired Brian De Palma. Now, as promised, De Palma did, in fact, help Cohen rework the script, encouraging him to make it a more straightforward storyline. What you see in the movie is basically a linear narrative, which is very different from the way that the book works and remove all of the framing devices that were still present from King's book. United Artists approved this draft.

Another than a few changes, this is the one that went into production with a budget of about $1.8 million. Now, for context, another movie that we will cover later this year, Rocky, which won the best picture, Oscar this year, was made for only $1 million. So, as the film went into pre-production, Brian De Palma realized that his old buddy, old pal George Lucas was looking at a pretty similar casting pool for his next movie. They would both be looking at primarily young, up-and-coming actors who could play high school age or early 20s. So, Chris, what was George Lucas casting?

He was casting Star Wars. Yes, he was. Yes, they did. They sat in on each other's casting sessions. I forgot about that from our Star Wars coverage, yeah. Lucas did apparently kind of have first dibs, which makes sense, with De Palma kind of picking up his scraps, which resulted in a few actors who barely lost out on Star Wars parts winding up in Carrie. Do you know who they are? Didn't Amy Irving read for Princess Leia?

Yes, she did. She was a frontrunner. No, I don't. I mean, I would assume maybe one of the young men, William Kat, or John Travolta, but... Yes, that's exactly right. So Amy Irving, who plays Sue Snell in the movie, she was a top choice for Princess Leia. She obviously lost out to Carrie Fisher. But Brian DePalma loved to cast real mothers and daughters.

Yeah. So the upside is... Priscilla Pointer is her mom. Yes, he cast Priscilla Pointer as Sue Snell's mother in the movie, who's great. I actually really like the dynamic between the two of them. Yeah. And, of course, around 19-7. Irving also met Steven Spielberg.

They were together for 14 years. The other is William Cat, who plays Tommy. He was a very top contender for Luke Skywalker. He makes a lot of sense as Luke Skywalker to me. I actually think he's great in this movie. I think he's very good. I think he does a good job of... I actually believe that he's come around to carry.

But he really sells the arc very well across this movie. I think it's effective. He doesn't overplay it. No, and he also manages to play the job. jock in such a way that like it's not clear whether or not he's a bad person early on. And then it becomes clear by the end that he's definitely not. And he's been genuine the whole time. And one of the most brutal moments is when he gets hit in the head with that bucket and you just know that would fuck you up. Also, he's maybe dead. I don't know. I know. He said, yeah, exactly.

He might have been deaded by a bucket to the head. Yeah. The role of Chris, Chris Harkinson, was one of the hardest to cast. And reportedly people were nervous that Nancy Allen might not be able to pulled off given that she had almost no experience prior to the film. By the way, following Carrie De Palma and Nancy Allen actually started a romantic relationship and they eventually got married. They made a bunch more movies together. Yeah. Wasn't she in Dressed to Kill? Dressed to kill, home movies and Blowout. Oh yeah, blowout too. I like blowout a lot. I secretly like blowout a lot. Also, she looks exactly like Sidney, to a point where it was distracting. No, I watched it and I went, Sydney, what are you doing here? Get your dirty pillows out of this movie.

Now, John Travolta was one of, if not the biggest name in the movie. And as I said, he's one of my favorite parts in this. The way he's just covered in his own drunken spittle for most of this movie. Yeah. He's great. He's pitch perfect. He's a real dirtbag. He's a real perfect dirt bag.

He plays a dumb dirtbag really well. Yeah. He was, of course, starring on Welcome Back Cotta at the time. And he literally walked over from taping on his lunch break in his Vinnie Barbarino costume, which probably helped. Yeah. He was huge in television, but he hadn't done features at this point. No, he hadn't, although he would shortly do Saturday Night Fever after this and blowout. Exactly.

So Betty Buckley, who you mentioned, who plays Miss Collins, did not have a ton of interest in Hollywood and was much more focused on theater, but she had caught Brian De Palma's eye during auditions for Phantom of the Paradise. Now, she didn't get the part, but he pulled her into loop for both that movie and obsession, and he thought she was perfect for Miss Collins. She, however, not particularly interested because if you remember in the novel, The Gym Teacher, who has a little bit of, a different name is a pretty small part. But Cohen had composited the gym teacher and principal and even maybe some others into the Miss Collins character, making it much more prominent. So she was on board. Now, she also was in her 20s, making her basically the same age as the kids that she was teaching in the movie, which actually is not dissimilar from the book. They do mention that the gym teacher is close in age to all of them. But I wonder if that's why they do her makeup so aggressively.

Yes, they style her hair, they do her makeup. They style her outfits in a way. So to me, she does read older than her 20s. I would have guessed she was in her mid to late 30s, you know, but part of that's just generational time. I think that's the styling. I agree. What I do think is important is that there is a very striking contrast between her and Piper Lorry as the dueling mother figures for Carrie. I don't know what the actual age difference is between her and Piper Lorry, but I think it's pretty significant. Yeah.

Yeah. And I think that's actually a pretty important contrast in this movie. Piper Lorry is born in 1932. So they're 15 years apart. Yeah. Let's talk about Miss Piper, Lori, because she was an even tougher sell on this movie. If you don't know, she had been a teen star in the 50s in Louisa with Ronald Reagan and Francis goes to races, but she was quickly put out by Hollywood's treatment of young women, and she took an extended break from acting. She told The New York Times, every role I played was the same girl, no matter whether my co-star was Rock Hudson or Tony Curtis or Rory Calhoun.

She was innocent, sexual, simple, the less intelligent, the better, and complexity was forbidden and always slend. her. She returned in 1961 to star in The Hustler before again, saying, no thank you, and taking another break from Hollywood. She was completely out of the loop when casting for Carrie was taking place, so much so that no one had any idea how to get a hold of her. It was actually Marcia Nassatir's idea to cast her, and she had to track her down via a former agent to just even find where to call her. Finally, when Lori read the script, she went, huh? She thought it was way too cliche. She didn't even think it read like horror at all. She was very confused by it. but her husband was film critic Joe Morgansder.

And he convinced her to give De Palma a chance. Yeah. I didn't know that. Yeah. Interesting. He explained that De Palma's style was relatively comedic and encouraged her to read it as more of a satire than just pure horror. And when she went back and read it with that, it finally clicked for her.

So she really built this character as a caricature and played her as such. I think she is so good in this movie. Also, can't you see so much of this performance in what eventually becomes? Kathy Bates in Misery. Oh, yes. I feel like there's such a direct line between these characters, probably for Stephen King, but also for the filmmaking teams as well.

Yeah. The theatricality of her performance, I think, is a big part of it. I agree. I think one thing that I like about this movie a lot, and that De Palma does well, is that he's clearly convinced his cast, this is extremely serious for you.

But then you need to trust that my filmmaking is actually going to present it in a way that kind of tips the hand of the satire a little bit. saying, like the characters don't reveal that. Or sometimes the opposite. Like Nancy Allen had said that she actually didn't even really comprehend how vicious she and John Travolta were going to look in the final result. But that's important, I feel like, because her character would not understand how vicious they actually are. Because when you're in high school, you're a psychopath. Yeah, exactly.

Well, Chris, that leaves us with Ms. Carrietta White herself. Sissy Spacic was born Mary Elizabeth Spacic in Quitman, Texas. The name Sissy came from her two older brothers and stuck around. She was an excellent musician who planned to attend U.T. Austin, but her brother Robbie was diagnosed with acute leukemia when she was still a teenager. Her parents eventually let her spend what was supposed to be a few days in New York to take her mind off her brother's diagnosis, but it became a two-month stay when she fell in love with the city. Her brother sadly did die the following year, and Sissy abandoned any plans to return to Texas,

instead staying in the Big Apple to pursue music. And fun fact, Chris, she actually did record and release a single under the name Rainbow. Have you ever heard this? I've never heard this. Okay, it was a folk song called John, you went too far this time, about how John Lennon shouldn't have posed nude with Yoko Ono. Would you like to hear it? I would love to hear it also.

She's right. Everything you asked of me, I did. John, from holding hands to living in a scene. Sunlight, submarine, and you were something special. You get the idea. I kind of love it. It's great. It's funny.

It is funny. Fortunately, her cousin encouraged her to give acting a shot, which led to her first role in Prime Cut, followed by the lead role in Terrence Malick's Badlands, which had run into major distribution issues, and most people actually hadn't seen after it came out. But on the set of Badlands, she met a production designer named Jack Fisk. They fell in love, and they married two years later. And it was through Jack that Sissy first met Brian De Palma. and she did not make a good first impression.

Fisk had been hired as a replacement production designer on Phantom of the Paradise after De Palma had fired the previous one for not getting the sets built in time. Now, given that it was an emergency, Fisk had pulled in his then-girlfriend, Sissy, and her cousin Sam, to help paint and decorate the sets. And then one day, Jack had to leave the set. And so he left Sissy and Sam in charge and said, it's going to be fine. This set is ready to go.

But when Brian De Palma showed up, he informed them that it was ready to go for a different scene. It needed to be repainted and redressed for the scene that they were actually rehearsing, Sissy and Sam had no idea what they were doing, so they completely fucked up the paint job. And as far as Brian De Palma was concerned, he didn't think of her as an actress, more just the world's worst set decorator. But he must have gotten over it because he hired Jack again on Carrie as the art director. And he did actually want to consider Sissy for a role, but it wasn't Carrie. Any guesses which role he thought Sissy's basic was right for? Is it Sue Snell? No. No. Then I mean, I would guess Chris Harkinson. That's right, the villain.

Interesting. Yeah. Hmm. I could see it, definitely. I mean, again, she's very blonde. She's very pretty. So I do understand. Yeah. That's partially because he was very set on actress Betsy Slade for the role of Carrie. I don't even know Betsy Slade. Look at a picture of her real quick in our time. Because I think when you see that, you will actually see that visually she makes more sense and is much more in line with what Stephen King wrote.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. She has a mousy quality that I think, you know who she looks like quite a bit? She looks like Pauline Chalamey. Yes, she does. Again, she's very pretty, but she's not. Yeah, she's diminutive. She's also brunette.

She's close-cropped hair in these photographs, you know, that I'm seeing. You could see her as the outsider to the other women around her, you know, that he's cast. Yes, and she has a kind of chameleon face that I think you could dress down and make much less striking and then much more striking by the end. and versus Sissy Spacic, who, you know, sort of maintains that throughout. Sissy, however, had already read the novel and was completely determined that she should play Carrie. She insisted on reading for the part, but she had a commercial shoot that conflicted with the dates to Palma had held for the auditions, and he was not going to make an exception.

She talked to him about it, and he told her, you should probably go do the commercial, because I'm going to cast Betsy Slade, and you really shouldn't get your hopes up. And according to Sissy, quote, I think I said some expletive and hung up the phone. It just made me so mad. She was so determined that she bailed on the commercial shoot. She said, quote, I reread the book the day before the screen test, and I think I rubbed Vaseline in my hair, and I found some old sailor suit that my mother had made for me in seventh grade, and I took the hem out of it, and I really, really was into it, and I was feeling very sorry for myself, which was perfect for the character.

She said, quote, so when I went into the test the next morning, I don't think I even washed my face. They had hair and makeup there, and they saw me come in, and they just ran from me because I looked so awful. Of course I was. I think that I felt so used and abused at that point because I knew Brian, I was not his favorite, And that worked for me. I just decided I was going to get it. Of course, she came in and she blew Brian's first choice out of the water. It said that he, after watching the screen test, said, that's Carrie. She was 25 years old when she got the role.

And she'd played much younger before. I think she's supposed to be 15 in Badlands, and she's 22 or 23 when she made that movie. Yeah. You know what's interesting is that her size, I think, makes that believable. Sure. Her face doesn't. She actually doesn't look that young. But she's, I mean, she's great. She's excellent in this. Also, the work that she did for this character in this movie is really admirable. She worked with her husband quite a bit on the way that she would hold herself. She found a book of Gustav Dore's biblical etchings and really studied a lot of the poses from that. You can look these up, especially, you know, at the end when her arms are held out to the side. That's a direct reference to some of those. De Palma spent months and month storyboarding and drawing out each scene with stick figures. He said it's like probably the most time he ever had.

to conceptualize a story. He said, quote, things like the whole use of split screen and split diopter and slow motion and all this stuff was sort of worked out like a musical score. Meanwhile, Jack Fisk was busy designing the interior of the White House

to look like the kind of narrow Philadelphia house he'd lived in an art school. He hunted all over L.A. to find the right crucifixes, rugs, tapestries, chachis to decorate the house. My personal favorite is that Last Supper tapestry behind them on the wall at dinner. There are a number of Last Supper references in this movie.

Oh, yeah. That one is very striking. The religious imagery, obviously, you know, we plant the arrow-stricken Christ on the cross. For the crucifixion of Margaret White, yeah. Yeah, at the end, you know, her mother becomes the martyr she's always wanted to be in a way. There's some fun visual mirroring throughout the movie. Yes, we'll talk about that in a little bit. That's also a bit different from the book.

Yeah. So he drove all over Los Angeles looking for a house that could serve as the exterior and nothing seemed to fit. He ended up finding the right house in Santa Paula, which if you all don't know, is north of Los Angeles. It's near Fillmore, and you're driving the highway runs east to west up there, kind of the middle of nowhere. He said, quote, I saw this one house that had a vacant lot next door, and it was just bizarre. I couldn't figure out what was wrong with it. The more I looked at it, it was like asymmetrical. Things didn't line up.

Filming began in March of 1976 and lasted 50 days. Now, while the climax and gym scenes were filmed at Culver Studios, three high schools did stand in for Bates High School, peer avenue school, which is now Hermosa Beach Community Center, Pacific Palisades High School, and Morningside Elementary School, which is in the Valley, I believe. De Palma kicked things off with Isidore Mankovsky as his DP, but the relationship soured very fast, and he was replaced within days by Mario Tosi, who also did not love Brian De Palma, but at least was able to tolerate him. And like pretty much everyone involved in this movie, he'd done a few low-budget features prior to Kerry, but it was his first big break.

Now, when it came time to film the opening shower scene, the actresses hired to be showering nude were not stoked, and that is an understatement. Some of them were having panic attacks and many flat out refused to do it. There was some compromise in terms of using steam and smoke to slightly obscure their bodies, although not really. You can see pretty much everything. But it was really a Sissy's basic agreeing to stand nude in the shower without using a body double that convinced the other actresses to do it.

Though it should be noted that some stuck to their guns and that's why you see so many fully clothes girls in the final cut. They were not supposed to be. Speaking of Sissy in the shower, she asked for some direction from De Palma for the moment where she sees the blood, and he told her to think about getting hit by a Mack truck, to which she was very confused by, but luckily, Jack Fisk chimed in with, well, I was run over by a car once, literally, and proceeded to explain to her exactly what it had felt like he was run over by a car when he was a child.

Poor Jack also had to crouch down just out of frame holding the blood in his hand so she could reach down and grab it. He was just getting showered the entire time. Now, Sissy intentionally didn't really interact with the rest of the cast until it came time to film the prom sequence, which is one of the last. last things they shot. Costume designer Rosanna Norton had sourced most of the prom outfits from a rental prom and bridal shop that was going out of business, but she custom-made Carrie's dress herself.

Chris, did you notice anything about what Margaret says about the dress in the movie that seems a little off? God, I remember Sissy saying she made the dress Carrietta at the prom. No, I didn't notice. When she's getting ready to leave and her mother sees her for the first time, she says, Red, I might have known it would be red. But of course, what color is her dress? It's like peach?

Yes. Ooh, good job, Chris. Yes, a blush shade of peach. Oh, I almost said coral. That would have been bad. Coral is, yeah, I think technically incorrect. It's a very light peach. But if you asked David, he probably would have said magenta.

We love him. He's colorblind. Blue! Now, the reason that this is of note is that in the book, the dress is indeed red. They had changed the color for the movie, obviously, to have the blood show up more on the dress when it's dumped on her. But they hadn't changed the line when it came time to film the scene. And so they were trying to figure out what to say. And it was actually Piper Lorry who suggested that they keep it exactly the same.

Yeah, she sees what she wants to see. Exactly. Yes. Yeah. I love that. I didn't pick up on that. It's a great touch. I definitely didn't notice it in the scene.

It's awesome. Also, that shot of Carrie and Tommy dancing was incredibly difficult to capture. It's like 360 dolly around the two of them spinning, trying probably not to get dizzy while they're doing their dialogue. I can't imagine that shot. It's crazy. So exactly that. They built a circular dolly track about 14 feet in diameter

that allowed camera operator Joel King to move around Spaceic and Kat. He was lying down on a platform on the track shooting upwards at them. Sissy and William, they were dancing, revolving one way and the dolly was revolving around them the other way. The lights were also moving above them

at a different speed and in a different direction to give it all that dreamlike quality. It does seem to speed up a little bit too across the shot as well. Yes. That's accurate or not, but that's what it felt like. No, I think it does. I don't know if that was done in post or if that was actually them filming it.

But Joel King actually collapsed when they finished shooting this because he was so dizzy. If I'm running and I look over my shoulder too fast, I will pass out. Yeah. Like, that's just your brain can't handle it once you become an adult. No. But, of course, this shot was nothing compared to the crane shot that tracks Norma with the ballots to Nancy Allen and John Travolta with the rope under the stage to sue, realizing what's happening to the bucket in the rafters to Carrie and Tommy winning King and Queen.

It's a great shot. By the way, talk about Touch of Evil influences. This, I feel like, is so influenced by the crane shots in Touch of Evil. Well, De Palma was insistent that it be an uninterrupted crane shot. And according to Nancy Allen, it absolutely sucked to film this because they were stuck in their positions for like 12 hours. Of course, she's crouched underneath the stairs. And it was taking forever because one of the crate operators kept pushing too far,

in one direction, so they had to reset and do the shot over and over and over. Studio executives were really getting tired of how long this was taking and how much it was costing, so they're like, can you please just cover this from different angles and drop this? To which Brian De Palma said, you'll have to fire me first. He got his way. I'm glad he did. It is a great shot, revealing the bucket. By contrast, though, the actual bucket dump, apparently, not so bad. Sissy said they'd warmed it, so it felt like a heavy warm blanket.

It was an amazing sensation. And it was her own husband doing the bucket dump. from the rafters. Fisk told birth movies death, quote, there's a story I heard about the remake of Carrie, and they were talking about how they did all this stuff, and it cost them a fortune because they'd worked everything out electronically for the bucket to drop, and they said to Brian, well, how did you do it? And he said, well, Jack Fisk was on a ladder, and he dropped a bucket of blood on her. I believe they actually only filmed this once, but this meant that the blood splatter on Carrie's dress had to be consistent take after take. And Sissy Spacic, legend that she is,

opted to wear the same blood-covered dress day after day in order to keep the splatter in place. Some reports actually claim that she even slept in the dress to keep the continuity on both the dress and herself the same. The blood was also made from carose syrup, which is extremely sticky, so they had to be constantly misting her down to keep her from sticking to chairs or herself. She also stayed on stage during the reverse shots of the crowd from Carrie's POV so they'd have something to react to, even though, of course, she's not in those shots. And by the way, one of the big changes from the book is the ending. What's the major change from the book to the movie here? There are two that I think I noticed that, again, I've read the book in a long time.

Okay. The destruction in the book is much more widespread than in the movie. It's almost the whole town. Yeah. It's like literally the town, it's as if it disappears into a sinkhole. You know what I mean? It's like she destroys the power lines are on fire and, you know, et cetera. The other one is the way her mother dies is different. So those are both changes to it, but There's one that I want to talk about that I actually think is narratively the most different, even though it may feel smaller, which is that in the book, Carrie actually leaves the gym and is sitting outside before she makes a conscious decision to go back in and destroy everything. Right. Did not remember that, but that is a big change. It is a big change. They wanted her to be more sympathetic in the movie, which is why they make it more of a traumatic response, sort of a knee-jerk reaction.

It's interesting. I'll be very interested to see what Mike Flanagan does. I kind of hope he tries to stick to what's in the book there, but I don't know. I prefer the movie version personally. Really? Yeah, because I think it's more in tune with like the themes that are happening in the sense that she has this sort of like instinctive reaction to what's happening. And it's as if she's, you know, pseudo-possessed at the end. And yet she's still conscious enough.

To me, it accomplishes the idea that she's aware of what she did when she bathes herself at the end, right? She cleanses herself before her mother approaches her. And it doesn't give her a moment of like, oh, my God, what have I done? So I don't feel like it betrays, you know what I mean, the intentions of the book in that way. No, it doesn't. I will say, though, I appreciate in the book how much she is. And obviously, they didn't have time for it in this movie, which is why I'm excited to see a miniseries. But, like, she practices quite a bit.

And she actually gets pretty good at controlling it in the book. So it is a much more conscious decision. Right. But in the movie, it feels almost like it is. It's uncontrollable. Yeah, it's, again, it's hormonal. or something like that. I kind of like it being her choice.

Because, you know, you said that it's a lot about violence begetting violence, which is true. But I think there's something about it being violence begetting conscious violence that I actually think is a bit truer to life, maybe. So let's see. Let's see what Mike Flanagan does. Now, De Palma was, of course, insistent on using split screen for this entire sequence, and no one else thought this was a good idea. Cohen said, prior to shooting, Ryan shared with me his intent to use split screen for

the destruction, and I admit it concerned me. As a rule, I find that showy film techniques call attention to themselves and risk removing one from the story. Brian, however, had used it well in sisters and argued that it would supply more heft and spectacle to the sequence than conventional cuts would. It was a big gamble and I crossed my fingers that he was right. But De Palma was pretty fly by the seat of his pants with what was actually being captured in these shots. He didn't decide until the last minute that the principal should be the one to get electrocuted. He also decided he wanted the fire hose to operate at full force to which the fire marshal said, that's going to be extremely dangerous, considering you're firing it directly at people.

And apparently a stunt guy just said, ah, give me that and started manning the hose anyway. Turns out, fire marshal bill was right. That shot of PJ Souls, who plays Norma, where she's being knocked down and blasted in the face, it actually ruptured her eardrum. Fortunately, she got to a hospital and was able to make a full recovery, but that is extremely painful. A stunt woman named Mary Peters was also injured after being asked to repeatedly perform a stunt with the fire hose. she was like black and blue afterwards. And according to Nancy Allen, a stunt coordinator cracked a rib when he was thrown backwards

by the hose. I believe you can see this. I think this is the guy that gets launched back into the table and chairs. Several people were sent to the hospital after this sequence. But even screenwriter Lawrence Cohen was surprised by what became of Miss Collins, because he had written it that Miss Collins would approach Carrie to try and help her only to be sort of tossed backwards against a wall. He intended this, you mentioned it, as an homage to Psycho, in terms of, you know, killing off a core character.

But much to his surprise, he found Miss Collins essentially cut in half by a backboard with blood pouring from her mouth, and he was horrified in a good way. This is one of the things I remember most clearly from this movie. Betty Buckley, who played Miss Collins, was genuinely terrified of this shot. She had seen how many people had already been hurt by the fire hose, and she was understandably wary of De Palma and the stunt team at this point. They assured her that the backboard was fitted with a piece of balsa wood. It'll stop before it actually smushes you. Don't worry about it. Fortunately, on this, they were correct and she was okay, but you can see the look on her face.

She is genuinely very afraid of that thing. And by the way, the direction that Brian DePaulma gave her when she has the blood pouring out of her mouth was squirm like a bug on a pin. It didn't help that everything was also on fire. The whole ceiling was covered with crepe paper that would catch on fire all the time. they actually called the special effects special defects because things kept going wrong so frequently. And when it came time to shoot the car rolling and exploding, our poor camera operator, Joel King was back behind the camera.

Stunt coordinator Dick Ziker was driving the car and just like in the Dark Night, they'd fitted the car with a piston that would shoot down, causing it to flip over. They were, however, not as precise or careful as the Dark Knight team was and the car almost flipped into King who was operating the camera. He said one more roll and he'd have been smushed. Now, you mentioned this. One of the biggest departures from the book is Margaret's death. Do you remember how Margaret actually dies in the book?

Doesn't she stop her heart? Yes. She stops her heart sort of one beat at a time, which in the book is like, it's great. It's so much more emotional and in many ways personal. Yeah, it's very like agonizing. Yes. It's hard to visualize, though, I think, cinematically. That's the thing.

De Palma agreed. He figured it probably wouldn't translate as all that well to the screen. Again, very interested to see what Mike Flanagan does. Lawrence Cohen was out to dinner with Martin Scorsese in Hollywood when Brian De Palma came scurrying over to their table and said he had a great idea for how to kill Margaret. All the kitchen utensils will impale her. Cohen was like, um...

Pretty much everybody thought that this was in really poor taste, including all of the studio executives who just thought this was not a good idea. But Brian De Palma said, yes, it is, and he went ahead anyway. It is indeed awesome. I think this is shot in reverse, so they're pulling. Yeah, those are definitely reverse shot. Yeah, they're pulling them out of her. Yeah, with fishing line or monofilament.

It's great. It's over the top. She's like having an orgasm while she's getting stabbed by vegetable peelers. But that's the best part. She gets to be like, okay. She kind of gets what she wants. Well, but also, you know, you hear the tragedy of how she was effectively a victim of marital rape, although it's somewhat murky, I guess, in the sense of did she also desire it or not?

And sure, her relationship to sex is very complicated. It's very unclear. I feel like DePaul was making the point that in a weird way, crucifixion and martyrdom becomes a form of penetration that she's actually arguably interested in in this scene. Yeah. And so, I mean, it's a pretty fun sacrilegious sequence. Yes. It's pretty nuts.

I like it, personally. Oh, it's great. I love it. Now, the very last sequence that they shot was, of course, the house collapsing into the ground at the end. But, Chris, that was actually supposed to be the first scene in the film. Oh. Do you remember the incident in the book that happens very early on when Carrie is little involving the house? No.

When she's a little girl, she asks her neighbor about her dirty pillows, and then her mother comes out and drags her back inside. She accidentally causes a bunch of stones to rain down on their house in what is basically the first and kind of only recorded instance of Kerry prior to the prom. So Fisk had built the house at half scale, and they'd worked out a conveyor belt system to drop the rocks on the model house, but it kept getting jammed up because the rocks were too heavy. And this was a night shoot. At this point, the sun was coming up. the police were arriving because of noise complaints. And so Brian De Palma just said, fuck it, burn the house down,

just let it all fall apart and sink into the ground, whatever. And they thought they'd completely screwed it up. But when they watched the footage back, they loved it and realized it looked even better than the rocks had. So they chose to end the film with it instead. Oh, it's a great choice. That's my favorite sequence. And that's also my favorite cue in the score as well.

And by the way, that is Sissy Spacex hand reaching out of the grave. She insisted that it be her. So take that. everyone in The Odyssey. You weren't the first. And I bet she didn't even have a straw. Now, when the film headed into post-production, De Palma took the first vegetable peeler stab at it, taking the reins for six weeks. And he focused on the prom scene because he knew that he wanted to do split screen. He had like over 150 setups. So he tried to do it himself. But it turns out what they had shot was quite a mess because he had shot it with the idea of split screen in mind. Carrie's eye line often didn't

match the objects. She was supposed to be moving. The studio really hated it, so he actually handed it back over to Paul Hirsch, who was the editor. Hirsch tried to dial back the split screen and rely more on quick cuts, but much to his chagrin, he found out that many of the takes, of course, again, had been shot with the assumption they were using split screen, so there were often cameras or crew visible in the shots on the half that they assumed would be covered. Even though I love where this landed, which is a hefty mix of quick cuts and split screen, De Palma said, quote, it's the one thing that makes me think every time I look at the movie and say, well, maybe I didn't make the right choice there.

I think it's pretty great. I do think it's pretty messy in the middle stretch until the fire starts. It's just a lot of it. Yeah. I think that there's a goofy quality that maybe DePaul and he might not have wanted necessarily. There's a bit of a 50s sci-fi B-movie element to the way that the hose moves, etc. Again, I don't mind it. I like it personally, but I understand why it might bother him.

I can see also going from sisters to this because it's used so much more sparingly in sisters and then to go to this where it's just like a 10 minute stretch, basically, eight minute stretch of split screen. The cinematographer also was disappointed because De Palma moved ahead on color timing and correction without his involvement. I'm curious, how common is it for the DP to be integral to that part of the process? In my experience, the DP's there, has always been there for color timing. Because, well, to be fair, too, like, they're doing this chemically, which is going to be a very

different process than it's been digital for me. But, you know, asking the cinematographer not to be there would be, I believe, a pretty big decision. Oftentimes, the cinematographer may be on their next job. You know what I mean? When it's happening, they might have to review it remotely. That's what happened. Yeah. And De Palma just went ahead. Now, of course, when it came to the score, De Palma had actually planned for someone very specific to do it. Who was it? Bernard Herman. That's right. He had done both sisters and obsession with De Palma. Yeah. But he, of course, died on Christmas Eve, 1975, before Carrie had gone into production. So instead, De Palma tapped Pino Donagio, who had a successful career in Italian pop music. They would work together again on dress to kill, blowout, body double, many more. Oh, but he was also Dario Argento's composer for some of his films

in the Italian Jallo genre. And he composed the scores to one of my favorite horror films ever that we've talked about on the show, which is Don't Look Now. Oh. The Nicholas Rogue movie with Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland. Yes. Ninety-three, just a couple years before, which I think has a lot of interesting parallels to obsession in certain ways, De Palma's movie. In terms of a male protagonist in this instance, he believes he's seeing his daughter. It's not actually his daughter in obsession.

Right. Obsession is his wife. It's not actually his wife. I still haven't watched Don't Look Now. I need to. Oh, it's so good. It also has one of like the most notorious and rumored about sex scenes in the history of cinema, which is very interesting. All right. Of course, there are many very clear homagees to Herman and.

and particularly psycho across the score, as you mentioned. It's great. I do really enjoy it. It was interesting to watch it with David. I actually think he didn't enjoy it that much just because of how frequently the psycho stab is used because it is used a lot. That's used quite a bit, yeah.

I like the other elements of the score more personally. The psycho stab is perhaps too ubiquitous. To be clear, he really liked the symphonic and more orchestral parts, same way that you did, just didn't love the sort of psycho screechy stab. Now on November 3rd of 1976, Carrie was released and earned about $33.8 million worldwide. Sissy Spaceic was nominated for Best Actress. At the Academy Awards, Piper Lori was nominated for Best Supporting Actress. This was extremely rare for a horror film to get these nominations.

They didn't win. Faye Dunaway won for Network. Beatrice Strait also won supporting actress for Network, and of course Rocky won Best Picture. Stephen King said, quote, I liked De Palma's film of Carrie quite a bit. The attitude of the film was different from my book. I tended to view the events straight on, humorlessly, and a straight point-to-point progression. You have to remember that the Genesis of Kerry was no more than a short story idea.

While I think De Palma saw a chance to make a movie that was a satirical view of high school life in general and high school peer groups in particular, a perfectly viable point of view. Sissy Spaceic was excellent, but right behind her, in a smaller part than it should have been, was John Travolta. He played the part of Billy Nolan the way I wish I'd written it, half funny and half crazy. I agree. I could have seen a little more of Trevolta. Volta in this. After Kerry, King, of course, published his second novel, Salem's Lot. It sold three million copies in paperback. It went to number one. It did great. And of course, King then publishes The Shining, the Stand, Night Shift. He goes on and on. As you said, he's one of the most prolific

horror writers, and I would say also just writers of the 20th century. Lawrence D. Cohen continued working with King after Carrie. He wrote the four-hour teleplay for the 1990s miniseries, It. And then Stephen King will be an executive producer on Mike Flanagan's eight episode, Carrie premiering on Prime Video October 7th of this very year, which I'm excited. I'm excited to see. So, Chris, that wraps up our coverage of Carrie. What went right? So many things went right in this movie. But I would just be remiss if I did not give it to Sissy Spaceic. I think this is an example of a film where were it not for the wide-eyed commitment to her character, it would fall apart pretty quickly. I don't love the remake.

I love a lot of the elements of the remake. I love a lot of the cast. And I think Chloe Grace Moretz is a wonderful actress, but one of her strengths has always been a precocious knowing or as she seems to be older than she is. Yes, like kick-ass. Kick-ass. Let Me End, the American English remake of Let the Right One In.

Which I didn't like, but yes. And for that reason, I felt that Carrie's character didn't really make sense to me in that adaptation in the way that Spaceic really embodies I think what Kerry has to be for this story to work in, at least Brian DePaul's telling. You know, maybe Flanagan will do a different thing that could work. But I think that it's tricky to at 25 pull off sort of a 16-year-old late-blooming, naive, housebound, religiously tormented teenager.

That's a tricky Venn diagram to thread. And she does it amazingly in this movie. I agree. Secondary shout out, Jack Fisk, one of the greatest production designers who's ever lived. It sounds like a great supportive partner also. And also without him, we would not have had Spacey as Carrie. And he continues to work. I mean, Marty Supreme, I believe we just talked about last year that he did an incredible job on. He's amazing. They seem like a really wonderful partnership. I would like to read more about the two of them and the things that they've worked on together. They are still together, which is lovely to see. One thing I am very excited about seeing in Mike Flanagan's mini series, which, you know, I find Mike Flanagan to be very hit or miss. I, as everyone else did, really loved Hill House. I thought Midnight Mass was all right. And I thought there were some real stinkers in there. I'm kind of, I think, a real outsider.

His type of horror is just not for me. I will forever remain optimistic. I think he's wonderfully talented. It's just... Hillhouse was great. I wasn't a big fan. Well, you're wrong. Everybody tells me I'm wrong.

Clearly I'm wrong. No, that's fine. It just, for whatever reason, we seem to be on slightly different wavelengths, and that's totally fine. But I like the De Palma wavelengths, personally, quite a bit. I agree.

One thing, though, I am excited about is that just looking at who he has cast, they look quite young. And I believe that they are more age-appropriate, and I am curious how that will alter the feeling of horror over the course of this story. I think it may make it more horrifying, if done correctly,

or it might end up being, I don't know, more annoying and tweet. We'll find out. But I will give my what went right to Brian DePaulma. I think what he does so well in this movie is an ability to give his own spin onto an existing material without erasing what was so remarkable about the material in the first place. I think he understands where to step forward and where to step back in this movie.

And that's really hard to do. And I just think it's remarkable. And regardless of whatever adaptations will continue to happen of this novel, his movie will always remain its own separate piece of art, because that's what it is, while also, I think being a pretty faithful adaptation in its own way. So I think just think he's great. I want to watch more. You know, I've started watching more of his back catalog. Obviously, I'd seen sort of the heavy hitters, as I'm sure we both had. But it's very fun to watch some of his earlier work. And I just think, you know, he has some stinkers in there as everyone does. But he just has such a panache and such a style. And I think I had misconstrued what that was before diving into this movie. Yeah, I always find that my favorite Stephen King horror adaptations are the ones that bring a bit more of an unhainting. sense of humor to the proceedings.

Because King, I love Stephen King's writing, but it can be kind of down the middle American maudlin outside of the horror moments. And so that's for me, it's like, I find Kubrick's The Shining so funny on top of how terrifying it is. And that's one of the things I love about it that I know King didn't like

because he was like, Jack Nicholson's insane from the beginning of this movie. And Kubrick's like, yes, that's why it's hilarious, sir. And I think De Palma brings some of that sensibility to carry in his own way. I think, you know, you can find other examples of that, and I find the sort of more down-the-middle-one adaptations to be somewhat less. I mean, even Tim Curry is penny-wise. I just find so fun, you know, for example, as well.

Well, I think they did a good job of it in at least It Chapter 1, the more recent film. I thought was pretty great in that department. I agree. Very much enjoyed it. Yeah, I'm with you. You know, it's looking at something like even the outsider series that they did on HBO, which I really enjoyed, and I did read that book as well. I thought it was so great. And then it kind of falls apart a little bit at the end because the monster itself is like sort of silly and weird. And if you don't have that silliness throughout. Interdimensional space spider of some kind or something like that with Stephen King at the end. More of an interdimensional space worm, man. But yes. Yeah. But yeah, I think you're right that injecting some humor into it helps when you get to the climax ending of these things. But anyway,

I'm very excited to watch this series. And I'm very excited to kick off our book to screen adaptations. So, Chris, how can people support this podcast? And more specifically, how can they participate in our box office book club this upcoming month. If you guys are interested in helping out this show, a few easy, simple ways to do it for free. Number one, just thanks for listening. That's the most valuable thing you guys can do. We really appreciate it. We love making the show for you. Number two, hit subscribe or follow on whatever podcaster you're listening to us on. So we show up every Monday or Friday in your feeds on occasion. Number three, leave us a rating of review on whatever podcatcher you are listening to us on.

That helps us with visibility. All right. Now, if you do want to throw a few shekels are away, number four, for $5 a month, you can join our bonus feed, Apple, Spotify, Patreon. You get an ad-free RSS fee. That means you get every episode with no ads. And you get at least one bonus episode a month. It's usually two. And this October, as Lizzie mentioned, we are doing our box office book club. How's that going to work?

Lizzie and I are reading the books that are being turned into the following movies. Verity, Other Mommy, Sense and Sensibility, and Wildwood. We are going to record those bonus episodes. the Sunday after each of those movies comes out, we'll post these dates on our Patreon, and for people who are patrons through the Patreon platform, we are going to live record those episodes, and we will have a section of audience Q&A slash participation during those recordings where you all can be part of our book club together. And we're going to talk about the adaptations themselves and the movies and the source material, et cetera. Again, we will post all of those dates on Patreon.

but if you sign up on Patreon, you can participate in our book club this October. And of course, those episodes will then be released the following week for all of you that just want to listen. If you would like to go full telekinetic and physically change our worlds with your donation for $50 a month, you can get, I don't know what you're going to do, Lizzie. Is it Pinodonagio? Is it Brian De Palma? Is it Sissy Spacic? Is it Stephen King? Whatever Lizzie decides to do right now, a $50 shout out for our full stop patrons, just like one of these. Unfortunately, to really do the Carrie Scaries justice, I would need a visual medium, so I'm just going to read your names. But feel free to imagine me taking down the gymnasium while I do it. Mike and Clemy Burbage.

Anthony Thomas. Mandy Rar Listen. Pete Ree Peterson. Team Lizzie always primer, never primer. Hell yeah. John D. Wilcher, the cast and crew of Win a Trip to Browntown. Mark Bertha. Alex Barrett.

Frankenstein. Angeline Renee Cook, Evan Downey, Amy Elgeslager McCoy, Johann Gior Gunnersen, Jory Hillpiper, Felicia G, Datum 3, Karina Kahnaba, James McAvoy, Cameron Smith, Suzanne Johnson, Ben Shindleman, the Provost family, the O's, sound like O's. Galen and Miguel, the Broken Glass Kids, David Friskillante, film it yourself, Kate Elrington, MZodia C, Grace B, Blaze Ambrose, Rural Juror, Nate the Knife, Lena LJ, Greyhound, Brittany Morris, Darren and Dale Conkling, Matthew Jacobson, J.J. Rapido, lousy Susan, Sadie, just Sadie, Brian Donahue, Adrian Peng Correa, Chris Leal, Brooke, Steve Winterbauer, Rosemary, Southward, Jason Frankel, Soman Chianani, Michael McGrath, and Lydia Howes. Thank you all so much from the bottom of my scary, Carrie heart. My house just imploded. Thank you, Lizzie, so much. What do we have coming for the fine folks next week?

We have... Would you like to play a game? I would like to play a game. Where do you have saw? Saw. Saw. The movie. I saw it.

I saw. I taught it, I thought. I thought. I thought. I thought. I thought. We have Saw. We are just, you know, I had to do a horror follow up to carry.

And this is one I've wanted to cover for a long time. It's a really cool story. Just another example of a tiny little indie horror film that took the world by Storm. I think it's really fun to do in the world. the year of our great lord obsession from this year. So I'm really excited to talk about it. Can't wait. Yeah, we have more coming up this month. I'm glad we're doing Saw because then we head into Sense and Sensibility, which will be very different. Yes. All right. We'll see you next week for Saw. Bye.

What went wrong is a Sad Boom podcast presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer. Post-production and music by David Bowman. This episode was researched by Laura Woods and edited by Karen Krupsaw. I'm a lot of