A Little Background and a look at Carrie

I am a big movie buff in general, but I have to admit that one of my true guilty pleasures has always been the horror film. As a kid I used to watch Saturday afternoon monster movies on the local Syracuse station. It seems every market at that time had their own Elvira inspired show, with a host or hostess done up in ghastly Gothic garb and spouting bad puns. Locally we had two: Baron Daemon and Dr. E. Nick Witty with Epal. Baron Daemon, a vampire in the over-the-top Dracula mold, started out as a late night host for B horror films like Mark of the Vampire or The Manster. Daemon reached such a height of local popularity that he even released a record. It was a 45 with "Transylvania Twist" as the A side song. The flip side was "Ghost Guitars." I had that record. Mike Price, who played Baron Daemon, sang/spoke the lyrics. He became so popular that he was eventually moved to a daily afternoon kids show that featured cartoons and Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers serials. Dr. E. Nick Witty and Epal remained a Saturday afternoon staple for several years. It was here where I was able to see the classics: Frankenstein, The Wolfman, Dracula, The Mummy, The Creature From the Black Lagoon. I also discovered Roger Corman through such films as The Attack of the Crab Monsters, Little Shop of Horrors, Creature From the Haunted Sea, as well as his Edgar Allen Poe series.

Dr. E Nick Witty and Epal

Anyhow, that's where I learned to love fear. And I did love those movies. Even the really bad ones like From Hell It Came (a killer tree stump, for God sake) and the epitome of bad: Plan 9 From Outer Space (zombies and aliens - what's not to like!) As the years have gone by I've learned to differentiate between good horror films and bad ones, but those wonderful black and white cheesy monster movies still hold a special place in my heart.

So what makes a good horror film? In a word: Suspense. Not gore, not blood, not special effects. In the end, all of those things may help build suspense, and that's fine, but when a film maker makes those other things the focus, the film suffers. Suspense in one form or another is the key to any drama (or comedy for that matter.) Suspense is built through dramatic irony - when the audience knows something that the characters on screen don't know. When the beauty queen says yes to the nerdy guy, we know it's a cruel joke - but the nerdy guy doesn't. When Carrie wins prom queen, we know it's a set-up. She doesn't. But we also know something that the perpetrators don't know - that Carrie has freaky powers. So the suspense is two-fold: first: is Carrie's one moment of joy going to be ruined by a horrible practical joke; and two, what will Carrie do when it does happen?

So what makes Carrie a good horror film? Is it that final violent orgy of destruction as Carrie gets her revenge on her tormentors? No, that's just the icing on the cake. What makes it a good film is everything that led to this point. (By the way, I am speaking of the original Brian De Palma version, not the re-make). Most of the film is the story of a misfit. A poor, socially awkward, sexually naive girl who is struggling to fit into that cruelest of all societies: high school. She is ridiculed and embarrassed at school, and she is preached at and emotionally abused by her religious zealot of a mother at home. We feel for this girl. When she is pelted with tampons by jeering girls in the famous locker room scene, we feel a strange mix of revulsion and empathy. The point is, we care about Carrie and when we begin to realize that she is being set up we are torn because we really don't want to see her humiliated, but we do want to see what her tormentors have planned and we really want to see her response. Knowing this, de Palma builds to the climax slowly, stretching time as we follow the rope up into the rafters to see the bucket of pigs' blood poised above Carrie's head. The suspense is almost unbearable at this point and de Palma plays it out for as long as humanly possible so that when the climax arrives, it is appropriately violent. We have waited for this and now we will not be disappointed. There is a subversive quality to the film in that the audience is enticed, ala Hitchcock, into siding with a mass murderer. We want to see her revenge. But then we quickly realize her revenge is indiscriminate. Wrongly believing that everyone was in on the joke, the innocent as well as the guilty are punished.

The point is, the over-the-top violence is earned through a slow build-and-release of tension, through developing characters we care about and through building suspense.

Next up: My take on Psycho.