I suppose we're meant to view Carrie as a revenge movie. The popular girls mistreat the weird high school outcast, but they don't know who they are dealing with, so they get roasted alive in the gym. In fact, the gym scene comes off as very silly, while the scenes between Carrie and her crazy Christian mother remain unsettling and sometimes scary (okay, sometimes silly too).
Or is it just me? Is it just that I am terrified of weird Christians? (This would explain the time when Kristin and I were at Blockbuster in Urbana, and I was like "We should rent The Exorcism of Emily Rose! It's so scary!" And then we asked the guy behind the counter, and he was like "Dude, have you seen that movie? It's not even a horror movie. It's like, a courtroom drama. No, we don't have it." Sort of as if he had personally tossed it in the dumpster to save customers from having to watch such an unscary movie.)
9 comments:
Part of me likes to think of Carrie as a truer to life coming of age film. I know that a lot of people talk about Carries maturation as horrific, and that this is the dominant theme of the film but it feels more like Holden Caulfield than peasant treatment of menstruation. I mean she ends up losing (or killing) everyone she knows and finds out just how terrible the world around her is.
I do agree that the discussion about 'dirty pillows' is one of the creepiest moments in the film. I don't know if that makes me afraid of Christians or just afraid of any euphemism for breasts.
I agree that Carrie's home life is the real horror. The movie has the feel of something originally really good wherein the producer decided it needed more Hollywood and got a telekinesis ending. But, it's based on a book so I assume it's fairly faithful.
Also, I think that's the best picture currently on the blog.
If Chris were still with us (do you like how I make him sound dead?) he'd agree that Christian horror is by far the scariest. He used to claim that it's more effective because there's more at stake (not just your body, but your soul).
I miss Chris.
But I think the argument about "not just your body but your soul" should only hold up if you believe stories about souls. I mean, if you really don't believe in an afterlife, shouldn't soul-based horror be the silliest kind of horror?
But also maybe Carrie isn't an example of that at all. There is a supernatural element to the story (well, paranormal, which isn't really the same thing), but we're not meant to think Carrie's mother is right. She is creepy-religious, but the movie doesn't support her view.
(T-I am also afraid of breasts.)
Sorry, slight edit:
I think this kind of soul-threatening horror doesn't at all rely on the premise that souls are real or that it's right. It simply draws from the fact that religious culture is scary, no matter how irrelevant to daily life.
I may here be deviating from Chris' theory, but for me, Christian horror is scarier because for so many centuries people thought it *was* real, so they had time and impetus to perfect the extreme atmosphere and mythos. Who cares if it's true now? It's a great horror tradition because it once was thought to be real.
To revive a perhaps dead thread, the threat of damnation lives strong within me. Though I don't believe in a soul, there will probably forever be a shred of doubt lurking behind my eyes during every Christian/Catholic horror film. My fear is that maybe, just maybe I got it wrong in my attempt to figure it all out.
The scariest thing I've ever
encountered was a book by Robert Anton Wilson. Without getting into too much detail, the threat of temptation and the damnation of my immortal soul still seemed to be kicking around when I was 19.
I just really like the iconography.
Actually, no. I also like religious horror for this reason: when the forces of good and evil go to war it's ... sanctioned somehow. It's not like a crazed serial killer--that guy is definitely doing something he's not supposed to. But when it's Satan and his minions...well, that's *right* somehow because it participates in the whole good/evil paradigm.
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