It is strange to think that the high school prom is an American tradition that Brits are attempting to import, despite Hollywood doing its best to warn us about it over the years, in all sorts of films. Supposedly a romantic event for teenagers, an appropriate night to lose one's virginity and an opportunity for the prom queen to experience a status boost equal to her wedding day, it has been regularly exposed on screen as a theatre of cruelty, anxiety and most of all, humiliation. The two classic texts are surely the Farrelly brothers' There's Something About Mary (1998), in which Ben Stiller gets his penis caught in his zipper, and Brian De Palma's Carrie (1976), in which Sissy Spacek gets a bucket of pig's blood tipped over her head. It is this second film, a macabre masterpiece of supernatural teen melodrama based on the 1974 novel by Stephen King, which has now been remade by Kimberly Peirce, the director of Boys Don't Cry.
The result is efficient, but only tentatively updated to the digital age of cyberbullying and social media, and it is strangely pointless. Peirce's Carrie is sort of similar to De Palma's, only not as good, and the legendary final moments of the first film are outrageously messed up.
Now it is Chloë Grace Moretz playing shy, teenage Carrie, previously home-schooled by her religious fanatic mother, Margaret, played by Julianne Moore, and now routinely picked on by the mean girls and queen bees of high school. Naive Carrie is horrified when her first period begins after a swimming lesson. Screamingly afraid that she must be dying, Carrie cringes in the locker-room shower, while the sneering girls humiliate her by throwing tampons and chanting. It all escalates to a horrible act of spite against Carrie on prom night, and this triggers the terrifying telekinetic powers that abuse and victimhood have been generating inside Carrie.
In many ways, Carrie's story is very contemporary and yet atypical. It is almost unique in the horror canon in that it shows a woman doing the scary killing, with female characters at the centre of the drama. Having been used to Bella Swan's rather fey acquaintance with vampirism in Twilight, it is refreshing (in a way) to see Carrie's story again and have the "blood" motif of fantasy and horror satirically reconnected with the political reality of womanhood. Did the deluge of blood in De Palma's Carrie inspire Kubrick's elevator blood waterfall in The Shining? Carrie's delirious, ecstatic murderous act at the end can even be read as a quasi-Columbine event; an apocalypse of teen misery and hate.
But how is it "updated" to the 21st century? The answer, of course, is that in this movie Carrie's mortification is filmed by bullies on their mobiles and uploaded to the web, although its online impact apparently ceases to be of interest immediately after that.
It's the film's obvious and sole innovation. I wondered about a Japanese Ring-style horror for those meanies watching it on YouTube, although that doesn't happen. But there's nothing much else to distinguish it from the 1970s original. Nowadays, the bullies would surely be gloating eternally on Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter etc, but this is all absent – unlike, say, Sofia Coppola's The Bling Ring, which showed how people are immersed in the web. I think that in 2013 Carrie's bullies would also be into reality television, especially as TV talent shows like to tip pig's blood over the hapless wannabes of prom-queen celebhood.
The first Carrie can be congratulated for intuiting or predicting all this. But the second Carrie largely coasts along, pedantically imitating the first film in modern dress. As for Moretz herself, she has played formidable roles in TV's 30 Rock and Kick-Ass and Kick-Ass 2, the second of which specifically addresses the teenage issues of exclusion, status and popularity. But Moretz just looks too tough. She should be playing one of the bullies. Moore is a hammy self-harmer, who has some faintly bizarre dialogue with her daughter. "I can see your dirty pillows!" "Breasts, Momma …" It might have been interesting, though very self-conscious, to have Spacek return to play the mother.
Visually, it is doggedly unoriginal and uninteresting, with the exception perhaps of some touches in which Peirce's imagination suddenly takes flight: two Ballardian car-wreck moments for Carrie's chief enemies: a grisly collision with a steering wheel and a chilling facial emergence through the windscreen. Carrie's own terrible emergence into womanhood was an unforgettable, bloody nightmare the first time around. This is pretty anaemic.
