Despite Laurie’s wittily unhinged performance providing the essential glue that sticks everything together, it is three scenes without her that define Carrie’s place in the communal mind of film fans. The first is the shower scene, where De Palma’s Big Themes come together with his mischievous manipulations of audience. At first, the scene is soft porn . . . and fairly shocking soft porn for a ’70s movie at least partly aimed at under-18s.
Carrie has just done the perennial school outsider thing and fucked up the last point in the volleyball game. We enter the shower and, in graceful slow motion, get every boy (and man’s) fantasy of being allowed access to the wonders of the girls’ changing-room. Hot girls laugh and play, and Nancy Allen’s small pert breasts bounce towards us, and all is voyeuristic thrills and guilt-free perving. We then move gradually towards Carrie in the shower, alone, hiding her body from us and the world. But even she – and we only really realise how pretty Sissy Spacek can be in her moment of prom joy before she unleashes hell – is allowed to turn the viewer on, caressing her legs in slow motion, hands moving inevitably towards crotch. Except – this is not wank fantasy. This is horror. And what greater horror for a girl than realising that blood is gushing out of you for reasons unknown, or for a boy than having that reality rubbed in your face? De Palma gave each and every gawping lad a right slapping here, and the older you get, the more you know you deserve it.
But if boys can be sexually inappropriate, De Palma seems to say, then girls can be downright evil. Now in real-time and with a suddenly shaky camera, he follows Carrie as, thin and hunched and terrified, she runs to her classmates for help, looking for just one who will tell her what is happening to her. Instead, the girls become a bullying, baying mob, laughing, throwing tampons at her, taunting and lashing out until she’s a cornered rabbit, in foetal position in the corner of the shower, reeling in shock at how much she is despised. You want to cry. How many horror films make you want to actually cry tears of sympathy?
But even this wonderful scene has to take second place to . . . The Prom. Oh my. Where to start. The stunning crane shot that shows you around the gym, allowing every main character to walk into shot, unaware that these will be their last carefree moments? Or how touched you are when Tommy begins to really like this fragile, alien girl, and gives her the dream prom moment for such a cruelly short, crucial moment? Or the dastardly plot, revealed in its hideous glory in fast edits, a stunning parade of ropes and buckets and different views of different characters?
This stuff is all amazing. But I suspect, for anyone who has ever watched this film, we all recall little except the blood from the sky, and the look of unbearable agony, and the strange comedy of the bucket striking Tommy’s head, and the way the lights catch Spacek’s white, translucent face as she stands, hands tensed into claws, body caked in crimson blood.
And then . . . The Eyes. I mean, the ensuing mayhem is as beautifully choreographed as everything else. But nothing that happens to any of the guilty parties is as horrible, as wrong, as shocking and mesmerising as Sissy Spacek’s gigantic ghost eyes cutting through her veil of blood and tears. You really believe, for a few stunning minutes, that this girl could kill people just by staring, really, really hard.
You know a movie has got you for life when you refuse to accept that what happens, happens. I’ve never been able to watch the prom scene in Carrie without wanting it to be different this time. Why doesn’t Tommy know something’s wrong? Why doesn’t that nice Miss Collins spot the bucket, or Chris and Billy sneaking around? Why doesn’t Sue get onstage and make Carrie move rather than twat about underneath the stage? Why doesn’t that nice Miss Collins recognise that Sue is the nice-ish girl and listen to what she’s saying? Why can’t they just choose someone else to be prom King and Queen, and then Tommy can take Carrie home and give her a first magical goodnight kiss? Then Margaret finally runs naked through Main St and gets carted off to the funny farm, leaving Carrie to move in with Miss Collins, who, through much love and liberal parenting, transforms Carrie into a normal member of society who, eventually, uses her telekinetic powers for good, foiling rabid fundamentalist pro-lifers and maybe preventing Liverpool’s domination of European football in the 1980s?
But no, damn you . . . No. That bucket of pig blood falls on Carrie, every time. It’s probably just as well, because, if we could really change films, really stop that idiot from checking out the bumping noises in the dark cellar or shagging his wife’s sister, we would deny ourselves things as black magical as the terror of Sissy Spacek’s face, saucer eyes alien and deathly, drenched in symbolic menstrual blood and fit for crucifying her mother with kitchen implements and grabbing Sue’s arm from the depths of her coffin, due to live on in everyone’s nightmares. We’d just never let it happen. Because – and this is so key to the achievement of Spacek and De Palma here – we feel so, so sorry for Carrie. Even when she’s on a tamponic rampage. Even when she chops that nice Miss Collins in half with a basketball board. We don’t blame her for wanting to kill us all. I’d kill me all, too, if I was her.
And, finally, the final scene. A girl walking to a grave, shot at night with fluorescent light and made to walk backwards away from the headstone, so that, when the film was run backwards, it would amp up the unreality of the picture; clue us in that this is just a dream. It didn’t help. That hand shot – much more slowly than you recall – out of the ground, and people in cinemas screamed and wept and had nightmares for weeks, just like poor, mad Sue Snell in her hospital bed. Everyone’s copied it – hell, Buffy repeated the theft around 50 times – but no one came close to the primal effect it had on audiences, or its implication that trauma never, ever ends, not even when you sleep, and, for all any of us knows, even when you die.
A great movie. Period.
MARTIN
1978
Starring: John Amplas, Lincoln Maazel, Christine Forrest
Dir.: George A. Romero
Plot: Does a boy need fangs to be a vampire? Horror legend bites the hand that feeds him.
Key line: ‘There’s no real magic. Ever.’
Beloved of critics, horror fans and B-movie aficionados, ignored by the general public, Martin is Zombiemeister George A. Romero’s secret masterpiece. A unique mix of vampire film, serial killer thriller, sombre character study, social critique and vérité art movie, it concerns a teenage boy called Martin Mattias who believes he is an 84-year-old vampire. This presents two pressing problems: first, he craves the blood of beautiful young women; second, he has no fangs, no superpowers, he doesn’t burst into flame in sunlight, and garlic and crosses have no effect on him. In short, he just appears to be a common-or-garden psychopath. This allows Romero, who also wrote Martin, to explore the gap between romantic horror myth and the grim reality of brutal murder. Romero literally attempts to drain the blood right out of the monster movie.
The setting for this disturbing, uncomfortable movie is crucial. Martin (Amplas) is sent from whereabouts unknown to live with his great uncle Tada Cuda (Maazel) and cousin Christina (Forrest) in the crumbling steel town of Braddock, Pennsylvania. The dying, economically deprived suburb provides an appropriately bleak backdrop for a boy whose reality has no connection to his fantasy life. While Braddock is shot in grainy colour, Martin’s sudden visions of olde worlde vampiric seductions of helpless maidens are in monochrome, plucked, as they are, from literature and early cinema’s images of Dracula’s eroticised killings. As the town decays, we see Martin decay right along with it, trapped within a barbed visual comment on the absence of magic in both Martin’s life and America’s present.
Crazy uncle Tada is part of a heavily Catholic Eastern European family who believe that vampires exist, and that the family is cursed to produce one every now and again. Martin is the latest, and Cuda’s self-appointed mission is to save Martin’s soul before killing him. Christina, understandably, reckons that the entire family are loonies and that Martin’s mute, introspective weirdness is entirely the fault of their religiou
s manias. Both might have a somewhat different opinion of the situation if they knew what Martin had done on the train to Braddock.
Martin, you see, has found ways around the whole no-fang problem. As we watch the opening murder on the train, we immediately understand that we are in neither conventional horror movie nor conventional serial killer terrain. The first ten minutes of Martin are among the most disconcerting in cinema.
First, we are given no time to get to know either killer or victim. The camera lingers a little upon the extraordinary John Amblas (who has to carry the film on little more than a blank, intense but vulnerable, stare) and we get that he is Martin. He’s a relatively typical, almost good-looking teenage boy with a short mullet, t-shirt, bomber jacket and jeans. He chooses his victim almost arbitrarily and instantly. Before we’ve had time to adjust to Romero’s jolting edits and jarring close-ups of syringes and hands flopping from beds, Martin has broken into her cabin. We immediately cut to his fantasy: a monochrome shot of the woman as smiling, willing victim, reaching out to be taken. Crash – we’re back in reality. The woman is not there at all. The toilet flushes and we realise where she is. We almost expect him to change his mind and bolt. He doesn’t. He positions himself behind the toilet door.
When the woman emerges from the loo, she is not the long-haired glamour-girl in lingerie that he wants. Her frizzy hair is tied up, her face smeared with a clownish mud-pack. Her nightie is green and thermal and she is blowing her nose.
She gets on to the bed, turns, sees Martin in the shadows . . . and does something weird. She just . . . looks at him. It’s not a look of desire, exactly. But it’s not the shock and panic that anyone would feel when seeing a strange man in their train cabin with a syringe between his teeth. With so little information to go on, we wonder: do they know each other? Is this all some kind of kinky sex game? Or was she, for some other, more mystical reason, expecting him? Before we can ponder any more, Martin lunges.
What ensues is not a movie murder. And it definitely isn’t sexy. It’s a fight between determined ineptitude and an unwilling victim fighting back against a ‘freak rapist asshole’. He’s stuck her with the drugs, but she’s taking a long time to go under. As they grapple clumsily, he pleads with her not to fight or scream and seems to lack the requisite skills in physical violence to subdue her. You think she’s going to survive this, but the drugs do work and no one is coming to her rescue. He manages to stop her from screaming and she asks if he wants money. She reaches for a shoe to hit him with, but drops it. She finally passes out . . . and an exhausted Martin assures her that it won’t hurt, although she can’t hear him.
We cut to the train’s exterior, and then quickly back to the cabin as he carefully positions a razor blade. The woman’s face is now clear . . . the face-pack was removed in the struggle. In the darkness we see that Martin is now naked. He removes her nightgown. He begins to make love – gently – to her sleeping body, placing her arms in places that enable him to pretend he’s being embraced. Finally, after too long a time for the viewer’s liking, he reaches for the razor blade. He picks up her wrist and holds it high above their bodies. He slices . . . but only draws a blob of blood. He slices again, harder, faster – success! A river of blood flows gracefully down her arm and spurts onto his bare chest. With a look of manic excitement, he presses her wrist to his mouth, and drinks.
He discards the blade. We see a tight close-up of it seeping blood into the carpet. Martin’s mouth is ringed with blood and he tenderly kisses the woman. As he does, she seems to wake for a moment . . . and the prospect of her waking and seeing and understanding what’s been done to her suddenly seems far worse than her death. But . . . no. Her eyes are glassy. Martin puts his fingers gently on her eyelids and closes them, and continues to gorge on her wrist.
Another cut to the train’s exterior, and then quickly back to the cabin light being switched on. Martin’s tryst is over and there is work to be done. We look up at him standing, covered in gore. He is quizzical, arranging the dead woman on the bed like a window-dresser arranging a mannequin. In montage, he cleans up and adds the final touches – more razors, pills – to make it look like a suicide. As he dresses we finally get the opening credits.
This all goes way beyond ‘horror’ and bathes us in real, true, genuine horror at what we’ve just watched. The only murder I can compare it to in this book is the killing of the mother at the end of Heavenly Creatures (see here). But even though Peter Jackson’s film is about a true-life event, he at least gives us 90-plus minutes of character and back-story in order to pack the moment with emotion. Here . . . we don’t know these people, and the anonymity of the act along with the devilish detail all makes it seem that much worse. If what Romero is trying to say in Martin is that all our fantasies about mythical erotic monsters are evidence of a sickness within us, that we find stimulation and glamour in what is, when all is said and done, the violent ending of a person’s hopes and dreams and loves and future, even that the horror and thriller genres in themselves are romantic justifications of despicable crimes . . . then he’s cracked it. Cheers for that, George. Thanks.
Much of the success of Martin as art comes down to the performance of John Amplas. Amplas was actually 28 when he played this teen psycho, and, although Amplas looks no more than 17, it needed an experienced actor to pull off the near-impossible – make you feel sympathetic towards a lead protagonist with no redeeming features. Martin is either lunatic or cold-blooded killer or both. He barely says anything. He has no witty lines, no cool moves and no human warmth. But, as the slayings persist, you find yourself rooting for his redemption. Some of the credit for this goes to Lincoln Maazel, who has a whale of a time playing the old-school creepy cartoon hysteric Cuda, growling ‘Nosferatu!!!’ at the kid and refusing to accept the possibility that the myths of the old country are just myths. But, in order to keep the movie from sliding towards camp, Amplas can’t be a cartoon. There is no eye-rolling, giggling or slavering. Just this cold haunted visage, more frightened than frightening, silently absorbing the madness and drowning in it. And because of the vulnerability within Amplas, you root for the idea that nice, sane Cousin Christina is going to provide some sort of redemption for Martin. OK, it would be a redemption involving locking him in a maximum security psych unit and throwing away the key. But the fact that you even find yourself pondering the real-life consequences for Martin speaks volumes for what Romero, Amblas and the sad hulk that is Braddock, Pennsylvania achieve with a story that is potentially ludicrous.
The abrupt, ironic climax of Martin ensures its status as a horror movie that lingers and disturbs. Our lost boy has begun fucking with his MO, killing homeless men in nearby Pittsburgh, killing a housewife that he has had a conventional affair with, and confessing his crimes on a local radio phone-in. Of course, anyone calling himself The Count and describing himself as a vampire with deadly earnestness is treated as an entertaining black joke by the DJ, and Martin becomes a cult hit with the listeners.
When Martin only escapes arrest by virtue of some conveniently placed drug dealers – a bizarre diversion which gives Romero the chance to try out some blaxploitation chops – he makes a last call to the radio, explaining to the DJ that, ‘in real life, you can’t get them [people] to do what you want them to’.
Suddenly Martin is walking through some sort of Mardi Gras-style parade. He seems to quite enjoy himself, marching along, like a child. But normal human pleasures are not part of Martin’s world. We suddenly jump to Martin asleep in bed at his great uncle’s home. Cuda is ranting at him about breaking a deal about killing the townsfolk of Braddock. He’s sussed Martin’s crimes, but, of course, still believes they are the crimes of a vampire. He has given up on saving Martin’s soul. He hammers a large wooden spike into Martin’s chest.
As the credits roll, we see a hand sowing grass seed over a grave in Cuda’s front garden and hear the radio phone-in, growing in volume. The DJ and his regular callers want to know what happened to their f
avourite eccentric The Count. As we watch Cuda wipe Martin’s presence from the world in broad daylight, the calls become increasingly ridiculous, with callers writing songs about him and insisting that his cape was paisley, not black. As Cuda crosses himself and places a crucifix upon the grave, we hear a caller say, ‘It was a good gimmick.’ But the last call is from a man with a soft, creepily gentle voice. He says he has a friend who he thinks is The Count. We suspect there’s no friend.
In death, Martin has achieved the mythical status he so desired, enough to inspire followers. He was wrong about there being no magic. It’s just that, these days, the spells are woven by the monsters of the mass media.
NATIONAL LAMPOON’S ANIMAL HOUSE
1978
Starring: John Belushi, Tim Matheson, Peter Riegert, John Vernon, Donald Sutherland, Tom Hulce, Stephen Furst, Verna Bloom, Kevin Bacon
Dir.: John Landis
Plot: The dregs of society vs the military-industrial complex. With tit gags.
Key line: ‘TO-GA!TO-GA! TO-GA! TO-GA! TO-GA! TO-GA!’
Some idea of the nihilism with which screenwriters Harold Ramis, Douglas Kenney and Chris Miller approached this movie becomes apparent when you know that one of their original script ideas had been called Charles Manson In High School. Perhaps they felt the best way to get rid of America’s long ’60s hangover was to poke fun at the most horrifying product of hippy culture, removing its power by making him just another subject for dumbass gags.
The first and still the best campus ‘gross-out’ comedy, Animal House also introduced non-Yanks to the bizarre, arcane world of American university Fraternity and Sorority houses – especially those that the rich attended – with their sado-masochistic initiation rites, addictions to barbershop quartets, and freemason-style cliques and codes.
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