Three years after Stanley Kubrick unveiled the vast mysterious grandeur of his film version of The Shining, John Carpenter demonstrated a very different and more unassuming approach to Stephen King with this adaptation of King’s cult horror classic; it came out in 1983 and is now revived for its 40th anniversary. Carpenter’s attitude was very far from Kubrick’s transformative auteurist vision, closer to Brian De Palma and Carrie in fact. It did not behave as if King’s book was raw material to be refined and elevated into art; Carpenter’s Christine kept the trashiness, pulpiness and pure un-grownup-ness, like a mixture of Duel, Crash and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
It’s the story of a red-and-white 1958 Plymouth Fury automobile called Christine with a mind of its own, discovered as a mouldering wreck by a teen car enthusiast 20 years later, lovingly restored and then revealed to be an evil monster: its radiator grille a fiendish grin of sadism, its dashboard radio always liable to burst forth with classic 50s rock’n’roll, a car that infects its or rather her owners with horror, rage and murderous despair.
Keith Gordon gives an outrageously hammy performance as Arnie Cunningham, a nerdy high-schooler who is still a virgin, oppressed by his uptight parents but best pals with the school’s football star and all-around hunk Dennis (played by John Stockwell, later to be Cougar in Top Gun and then a well-respected director). But above all, Arnie is a real fan of auto mechanics, and takes the workshop or “shop” class at school, where he is horribly bullied by a Grease-chorus of nogoodniks led by Buddy (played by the formidably tough-looking William Ostrander).
Arnie’s life turns around when he sees a rusty, beat-up old shell of a car in the yard of a malign old man who tells him it’s called Christine. He buys it for 250 bucks, thus blowing a great deal of his college fund, and finds a local garage run by a cranky old-timer (Robert Prosky), where he can restore this vehicle with leftover body parts in return for doing odd jobs. Christine emerges with demonic sleekness and sexiness, and this car suddenly makes Arnie the big guy around campus; he even dates hot new student Leigh (Alexandra Paul) although it becomes horribly clear that losing his virginity isn’t now the priority it was, and it is Christine, and not Leigh, with whom twisted Arnie is in love. But the car’s evil essence makes itself clear and brings into the plot a cop, amusingly played by Harry Dean Stanton.
Christine is a perfectly enjoyable tale of the macabre, which can be read as a satirical parable of that particularly male kind of arrested development which manifests itself in car obsession. And of course from our own 2023 viewpoint, there is another layer of irony in seeing this creature from America’s automotive golden age, and the opening sequence showing it being produced in a Detroit factory that is now a thing of the past.
• Christine is released in UK and Irish cinemas on 20 October.
