Meeting Brian De Palma, Peeking Behind the Curtain on Carrie (1976) — Halloween Special

The following is a transcript of a podcast between the three hosts of the Cinema Retro Podcast — Miles Stephenson, Isabelle D’Amico, and Jake Mercier — as they dive behind-the-scenes on Brian De Palma’s 1976 horror classic Carrie:

Miles:

I had the fortunate opportunity to meet Brian De Palma a couple of years ago at a writers event in Long Island. And I went up to him and began talking to him about his use of the split diopter technique, which I think is a really interesting and unique visual flair that Carrie and a lot of his other films have. And I asked him where he got the idea for that. And he said that he was inspired by Orson Welles' use of deep focus in Citizen Kane and the idea that you could have one object in the foreground and one in the background and they could both be in focus on opposite sides of the frame. And I just thought that that was a very interesting thing about this movie. But before we get too much into analysis, can I pass it over to you, Jake, to give us a little synopsis of the film

meeting De Palma

Isabelle:

Wow, that was great. What a great anecdote.

Jake:

So it's basically a really messed up Douglas Sirk suburban melodrama. Carrie White, who is played by Sissy Spacek, is this high school girl who seems to basically kind of be a little underdeveloped. Her mom is a crazy religious fundamentalist and she has her first period at high school and had no idea that that was a thing. And so she goes crazy. Her mom is convinced that that's evidence that she's a sinner and basically torments her. She's also getting tormented at school as well. And she realizes she has this telekinetic power that she then wreaks havoc on the rest of her classmates and her mother. 

Isabelle:

I think prom is a big part of the whole movie. The girls that are bullying her, they're threatened with the punishment of not being able to go to senior prom unless they do detention with the PE teacher. The evil seniors who we had met at the beginning of the film dumped pig blood on her as the ultimate prank. And that's when she freaks out and takes revenge on the school and burns down the gym and everybody dies essentially at the prom.

Miles:

Carrie was Stephen King's first published novel. One of the big changes in the book with the mother character at the end is that Carrie kills her by using telekinesis to stop her heart. But De Palma and the screenwriter, Lawrence Cohen, they thought that would be a hard idea to translate visually and show in the film. So they were like, how do we kill off the mom? They were kind of thinking about it for a while. And then legend has it that at Musso & Frank— I don't know if you guys have been there in LA, it's a really cool old Hollywood establishment. Faulkner apparently drank his liver into disrepair there and Hemingway had a little booth and one of the hosts threw Steve McQueen out on the curb after he was fighting with Charles Bukowski. There's so many legendary stories there.

my visit to Musso & Frank in August 2024

Miles:

But anyway, apparently Martin Scorsese was having dinner with the screenwriter Lawrence Cohen and then De Palma comes in and he says, I know how we're going to kill the mom. We're going to have this kind of Kurosawa-inspired telekinesis knife attack where she gets crucified with all these kitchen knives. And they were like, that's kind of a crazy idea. But then it worked out and I think it's kind of one of the crazier set pieces in the film.

Isabelle:

Yeah, definitely. It's perfect. It has that totally over the top melodramatic ridiculousness but also kind of grotesque, I'm glad that they ended on that.

Miles:

I think that gets to something. I watched it with my roommate who hadn't seen it before. And afterwards I was like, what do you think about that? His immediate reaction was “that was a horror film?” He was confused. I'm like, “well, why would it not be? Just cause there's no jump scares?” And I guess it kind of gets to what is a horror film. Because I really think that the theme of the movie is about adolescent trauma. And adolescent failure and humiliation in a high school setting. And yes, you have the supernatural elements and it has the aesthetic conventions of horror, but thematically and narratively, how is it really a horror film?

Jake:

Yeah, if you see a horror movie that is all blood and guns and jump scare, it's like, yeah, it's crazy in the moment, like a roller coaster, but once you get off the roller coaster, you're done and then you move on with your day. Something like this really penetrates your soul and in such a scary way. But I think what also adds to that is it's underrated humor. I's actually funny in some sense. I think about, even the mom saying, you're going to prom and then the lightning strikes like that's what brought me to like the Douglas Sirk analogy because of these hilariously melodramatic moments. These neurotic bizarre people are part of what draws you in 

Miles:

Totally. The mother character was played by Piper Laurie. She was an Old Hollywood actress. But at the time of the movie, she had put her career aside and she was living in somewhat of a retirement with her family. And when she first read the script, she didn't get it at all and she kind of hated it. And then her husband read it and was like, well, I think De Palma is coming at this almost like a comedy. And then after she had kind of reframed it that way, or her husband had reframed it that way, she read it again and she kind of liked it. And then she of course was nominated for an Oscar and she just couldn't believe it because during the making of it she saw it as this kind of silly romp. And then all of a sudden she's being considered as a legitimate dramatic performance and she didn't take it that seriously.

Piper Laurie

Miles:

Carrie is almost like a creature. She's in this kind of state of nature. She's not fully human. And she's kept apart from society. And going back to the split diopter, I think that's another use of that is that he always juxtaposes some authority figure or some group and then has Carrie by herself in the background and the group in the foreground or vice versa. And so the use of the split diopter really enhances that alienation that we feel for Carrie. She's othered very aggressively by the camera and by the story.

Jake:

Miles, can you explain what the split diopter is for listeners who may not know?

Miles:

Yeah, split diopter is a camera lens attachment that allows you to have one thing in the foreground and one thing in the background and have them both in focus at the same time. And so it's basically an illusion of deep focus because deep focus is where the whole frame is in focus versus the split diopter: it's just the background and the foreground, or rather, two distinct focal points. It lends an almost kind of like a comic book feel to some of De Palma scenes because you have these two disparate images smacked side by side.

Jake:

Carrie obviously impacted so many horror movies after this. The two I thought of: The Stepford Wives and Rosemary's Baby. It's almost like that could be like an unofficial trilogy of Carrie being like the coming of age, Rosemary's Baby having a kid, and Stepford Wives moving into that suburban community. Like that's a trilogy of female horror.

Isabelle:

Yeah. I also like a good body horror film every now and then and I think this has many elements of that. So stuff like Raw is very much in the same vein. How scary and alienating the female body can be but also how crazy and powerful it is as well. It’s interesting that De Palma opens up with this very soft, sensual, steamy, very voyeuristic point of view of the girls and of Carrie in the shower. And then that's immediately broken by her getting her period. This is a very real primal horror kind of thing about femininity and about the cruelty of young girls and it's kind of takes you out of the voyeurism in a way. It's this sharp dichotomy that's a little jarring that he throws at you at the beginning of the film.

Miles:

Totally. For me, in terms of movies in the Carrie universe, so to speak, I go to Hitchcock. A lot of the Movie Brats mimicked the great directors who came before them and De Palma has often been called the New Hitchcock. If you go and watch an interview with him and Dick Cavett, they say, some people are saying you're the New Hitchcock. Do you think if you were to frame this movie with a Hitchcockian lens, what do you think about that?

Jake:

Interesting.

Isabelle:

I mean, Hitchcock was really good at finding the horror also in relationships between people and in the inner psyche of people

Jake:

I think what strikes me as most similar is how good they are at handling suspense. That moment where it's like it's taking forever for the blood to drop on her head and even then you're still so with it. His handling of suspense was definitely masterful in that sense. And I saw a lot of aesthetic similarities to that in Psycho. 

Miles:

The throughline between Hitchcock and De Palma… I would say, voyeuristic obsession, I would say suspense, I would say kind of a perverse sexuality. I see a lot of those similarities. I mean, there's definitely a lot of direct homage in the film. The name of the high school that Carrie burns down is Bates High School from Psycho’s Bates. And then Isabelle, you mentioned like the sound effect with the knives and that's totally taken from Hitchcock. So there's a lot of direct homage and I think also the way that De Palma thinks about where the camera is at all times. I think that's what kind of separates him from maybe a B movie director in this genre is he's constantly thinking about how can I move the camera in this scene on a crane or something to give it this really kind of dynamic scope. And that's what Hitchcock was famous for, you know, these incredible ways of placing the camera in a scene.