I have always been suspicious of the “coming-of-age” film, where our hero finally grows up and finds themself. In part, because it implies that there’s a singular self to find, rather than a whole melted Quality Street tubful, but also because some are not horror films.
Some films about the teenage experience – and stay with me, because I know this sounds bananas – some films about the teenage experience, about that period in your life when you are scrabbling downhill to find some kind of identity, when your body is shifting like time-lapse photography of deserts, when everyone is suddenly MAD, and sex exists … Some of these films are written as comedies! The idea. The idea that there could be a single thing to laugh about. This, in part, is why I love Carrie. Carrie (played by Sissy Spacek, whose almost translucent complexion and wide foetal stare gives the appearance of a just-hatched squab) commits two terrible crimes. The first is that she doesn’t conform; the second is that she tries. That silly, silly fool. It’s this transgression that takes her up on to the stage at prom, only to be drenched in a bucket of blood. As coming-of-age ceremonies go, it’s only Carrie’s that I can accept might have been more humiliating than my 1994 batmitzvah.
Watching the scene as a teenage girl there is something particularly chilling about seeing her onstage covered in blood, because this experience is something that haunts you. This fear of blood in the wrong place, usually spreading quietly on the back of pale jeans, shame, and of everybody seeing. Coming-of-age stories are often read as awakenings but, in Carrie, it’s recognised that this time in your life often feels like the opposite; instead of excitement and potential, most of us feel a new sort of dread. The supernatural powers Carrie discovers with puberty are, for many girls, mirrored only in the way our new bodies mean that grown men will leer at us from cars; it’s an unwanted power, and a dangerous one we can’t control.
Which, I suppose, is the point of movies. While at home, the teenage fights with our mums went no further than a few screams; here in Bates, a town where teenage life is so brittle and dry it goes up in flames, Carrie’s relationship with her raging mother Margaret ends on a fight to the death with knives. But the irony is it was Margaret who warned her against going to prom, who said everyone would laugh at her, even miss-seeing her pink gown as red, the colour it would eventually, horrifically become. The final twist in this coming-of-age story is not Carrie’s undead hand bursting out of the soil, but the idea that your mother is always right. Spoiler.
