You know the story. You remember the blood. But nearly 40 years after the publication of Stephen King's Carrie and the film adaptation that followed, somehow we haven't learned its lesson about the horrors of bullying quite well enough. We are trying, now more than ever: With government and media attention about bullying at an all-time high, we've come a long way since the days when King wrote his original novel, with numerous awareness campaigns and state laws created to address its devastating effects.
But even today, statistics from the National Association of School Psychologists place the number of bullied students at over 3.6 million annually, and the news constantly reminds us just how much cruelty still persists in schools like the one Carrie White attends. That's why Carrie, the new remake coming out this Friday and directed by Boys Don't Cry mastermind Kimberly Peirce, is one of the few movies actually worth a do-over.
(Spoilers for *Carrie *follow, but come on, the original 1976 version is on Netflix.)
The story, in a nutshell for the newcomers: Carrie White (Chloë Grace Moretz) is a bully-magnet. The child of an unstable religious zealot (Julianne Moore), she's been abused by pretty much everyone her entire life. She's humiliated at the hands of her high school classmates when she gets her period (much later than most girls do) in the locker room, as the other girls throw tampons and pads at her and crowd her into a tiled corner. When she gets home, her mother punishes her by locking her in a cupboard where she is forced to pray the "sin" of becoming a woman away.
One of the girls in the locker room, Sue Snell (Gabriella Wilde), regrets the episode and takes pity on Carrie, convincing her boyfriend Tommy Ross (Ansel Elgort) to take the poor girl to the prom to try and make up for it. But after the leader of the mean girls, Chris Hargensen (a disturbingly convincing Portia Doubleday), is banned from prom for tormenting Carrie, she plots revenge with her boyfriend Billy Nolan (Alex Russell). Meanwhile, after the locker room incident, Carrie slowly discovers that she is telekinetic. She restrains her mother with her new powers and goes with Tommy to prom, where the king and queen ballots are rigged in their favor, so that at her crowning moment of acceptance, Chris and Billy can dump a bucket of pig's blood on her head. After a lifetime of abuse, Carrie finally loses it.
A few of the details of Peirce's version are revived from King's original novel and/or updated to suit the times: The principal's ashtray becomes a shattered water jug; Miss Desjardin (Judy Greer) gets her name back from the "Miss Collins" of the original film; Carrie is driven home by her mother (played, as predicted, to a stunning T by Julianne Moore) instead of being allowed to walk home alone; star athlete and ill-fated prom date Tommy Ross, instead of being a smarmy patsy, actually seems like a decent, if self-absorbed, guy, sticking up for a poem Carrie reads aloud in class rather than the other way around. And older boyfriend Billy Nolan (Alex Russell) loses the dopey, drunk puppet persona (practically mandated by John Travolta's casting in the original), and becomes something a little more sinister: a dangerous, intoxicating, and modern thrill for pernicious queen bee Chris.
In a modern twist, Carrie is also further tormented by a video of her locker-room nightmare making the rounds on smartphones and online. Perhaps most conspicuously, Brian De Palma's 1976 fixation on sexualized teenaged flesh – flouncing naked in the locker room, jiggling during gym-class exercises on the playing field – is excised completely, which of course refocuses the plot back on the real allure of King's Samsonian story: teenaged cruelty and the havoc it wreaks.
At times, like most remakes, Peirce's take stands too squarely on the back of its predecessor, and certain scenes play out like blocking: the prom-prepping montage, Chris' hammy confrontation with Sue in the gym. The graffiti CARRIE WHITE EATS SHIT spray-painted across the lockers seems way too obvious in a modern school where whispers and texts are far more effective and less-punishable tools of cruelty. While mildly charming, the familiarity of these imitations also distracts from the chilling horror of the thing, especially in its catastrophic climax. Peirce's deliberately modern updates are far more thrilling and her crew could have employed more.
Chloë Grace Moretz, who has done staggeringly well in the past with outcast roles (see: Kick-Ass's Hit-Girl), is a little harder to believe in the title role as a weirdo, largely because I believe we've come to accept Sissy Spacek's wide-eyed, hapless alien as the type of untouchable that makes sense even to pettier adults. Moretz, on the other hand, plays another type of outcast, the pretty but confusing-to-outsiders loner, abused purely by mandate of an aristocratic vote within a small, vicious community. Peirce's version is vastly more sympathetic, which is why it doesn't seem quite so wrong that unlike Spacek's iteration, Chloe's Carrie is conscious throughout her rampage, filled with an empowered revenge that is far easier to understand through the modern lens of bullying and its devastating impact. She decimates those who deserve it – with the help of gorgeously, masterfully gruesome CG and art direction – and spares those who don't.
Still, the greatest accomplishment of this new version is that when you leave, it's not Moretz's face that will follow you around for days. It's the faces of the bullies, played by mostly nameless newcomers, but whose remarkably well-performed cruelty will still seem hauntingly familiar all the same to anyone who has ever experienced it. It's their condemned ghosts who will haunt you, not Carrie's.
This is the reason one remakes Carrie in 2013: to reframe unadulterated, schmaltzy horror into a more nuanced, realistic terror, the one that leaves you, on the one hand, oddly charged if you've ever felt been a victim, or scouring your mental Rolodex for the Carries of your own teenaged past if you were one of the kids dishing it out. This Carrie does what it ought to do: It proves that every generation needs its own cautionary tale about preying on the vulnerable until its circumstances are no longer relevant.
My mother is an avid, lifelong Stephen King fan, and she was Carrie's age when De Palma's film was released. To her and her friends, the cackling savagery of Chris and Co. in 1976 seemed obviously farcical. Carrie was about the thrill of the scare, not the realities of the parable. To me, the daughter for whom bullying is now a culturally recognized problem -- and high school still not that far in the rear view mirror -- the fake-tanned, her obviously insecure clique play almost too real. I can't wait to hear what high schoolers -- the ones who are actually Moretz's age right now -- think of them.
