I like horror movies but there have been a few that were just too creepy and upsetting, and the one that creeped me out more than any other is the original “Carrie” with Sissy Spacek, based on the Stephen King novel. If you haven’t seen the movie, this blog post has lots of spoilers – as does that trailer linked to above, which basically gives away the entire movie!

I was thirteen when the movie came out in 1976. I was a pretty sensitive kid, and I remember going to the theater with my mom to see some other movie. We were waiting in line, and I glanced over and just by chance saw the coming attractions poster where Sissy Spacek is smiling as the prom queen on the left and covered in pig’s blood with big wide eyes on the right. The moment I saw the poster my stomach just dropped. Something about the image just chilled me to the bone and I knew I would remember that image and that moment the rest of my life. I can’t even remember now what movie my mom and I were seeing that day but I’m pretty sure I sat there in the theater the whole time thinking about that poster and knowing I would have to walk by it again when we left. I felt genuinely distressed, and all that winter while the movie was in the theaters I avoided looking at the movie ads in the newspaper and was cautious whenever TV commercials came on in case the trailer for the movie were to pop up – much the same fear I had a couple years later (warning: creepy ventriloquist doll!) with the trailer for “Magic.”

I finally worked up my courage and saw “Carrie” on VHS when I was about twenty with my friend Kathy, my once-best friend whom I’ve written about a few times. I was glad I got through the movie but I still found it very creepy, and the prom scene and the ending still got to me. Years went by and then one night in the early 2000s I woke up with insomnia and turned on the TV at 2:00 AM. Sure enough, the prom scene was playing on the screen – the precise moment when Sissy Spacek has just been doused with pig’s blood and is hearing that voice in her head: “They’re all gonna laugh at you!” It took me a moment to register what I was even seeing and then the shock came over me – OMG! I immediately turned off the set. That movie really left a mark on my psyche, even decades later.

So to confront my fears, I finally sat down and watched the movie again with my roommate a while back, and I’m happy to say I had a great time revisiting it. There’s nothing kinky about the movie, but as others have commented online, it’s definitely much campier than I remember. I still find the last half hour pretty creepy but now I can enjoy and appreciate it. It’s one of those movies where everything came together perfectly, the cast, the story, the direction, the music, and all the creative camera moves and techniques such as the use of split screen and slow motion during the prom scene. Brian De Palma’s earlier “Phantom of The Paradise,” has a similar feel and is another one totally worth seeing that also has a couple scenes that freaked me out, but nowhere near to the same degree.

I know some would probably say, “It’s a good movie and has its moments but it’s not that upsetting!” Somehow though it just really wormed its way into my head when I was young. I think there are a few elements that frightened me the most: first off, just the fact that what happens to Carrie is so unfair. She’s bullied mercilessly and the bullying finally turns her into a monster as she snaps and takes her revenge (though I’ve read some interpretations saying that she disassociates during the climax and doesn’t fully realize what she’s doing). For me, one of the saddest and most frightening moments of the movie is that once she’s burned down the gymnasium and killed everyone, she’s left walking home all alone in that bloody dress. Something about the ruin that she’s caused and the damnation of her own life in that moment just seem terrifying to me. And the shot of her as she slowly walks out of the gym with the fires raging behind her and the doors then swinging shut and locking everyone inside just feels so hopeless and desolate.

Roger Ebert (warning: bloody Sissy Spacek pic!) in his review made the interesting observation that the horror doesn’t come from an outside monster or from some supernatural being – the horror comes from what the characters are: the mean girls who bully Carrie, her crazy religion-obsessed mother (whose religious worldview is actually reinforced by the ending), and Carrie’s own growing powers that finally lead her to snap and take revenge on her tormentors. An interesting aside, before the movie was released the name Carrie was quite popular as a girl’s name, but it has apparently declined significantly since then, not surprisingly.

It was reassuring for me to read a few interviews with Sissy Spacek where she said that the making of the movie was a completely positive experience for her and that she enjoyed shooting the prom scene. To maintain continuity and as part of her method acting technique, she apparently actually slept in the bloody dress for three nights in a trailer parked by the set where they were filming. And for much of the production she avoided the other actors in order to heighten her feelings of alienation. It made me feel a little better to know that she wasn’t freaked out by any of it.

But for me it’s still the number one most frightening horror movie ever. A close second, I would say, is “The Exorcist,” which is just as creepy and disturbing, though I’d give “Carrie” a slight edge. Plus, as some reviewers have pointed out, “The Exorcist” at least leaves you with some hope at the end since the devil has been cast out (at least for the moment), whereas “Carrie” is relentlessly hopeless and sad. Even Amy Irving’s character, one of the only survivors, is obviously left to cope for the rest of her life with a serious case of survivor’s guilt and PTSD. As for myself, Sissy Spacek’s blood-soaked image has probably crossed my mind thousands of times over the years. When I’m alone in the dark and getting up to pee at 2:00 AM my mind will still sometimes go to that image. I don’t completely understand why that particular image upset me so much, whereas other bloody images from other horror movies were not that bad – but boy, it sure did!

There are certainly other horror movies that really gave me the willies but none as much as “Carrie” did: “Poltergeist,” “Halloween,” “Alien,” and more recently, “Midsommar.” The woman in the bathtub was pretty bad in “The Shining,” as was the ending of the original French version of “The Vanishing.” The first time I tried to watch David Lynch’s “Eraserhead,” I was in a theater and found it so upsetting that I walked out halfway through. (I’ve since seen the whole thing – very good but definitely not for everyone.) “Prince of Darkness” was another disturbing one from the ’80s, an imaginative Antichrist movie directed by John Carpenter that features a video transmission from the future showing a shadowy figure emerging from a tunnel – something about that brief moment, which occurs several times, just gave me the chills. For me, though, “Carrie” will always be right at the top of the list.

If you have a “favorite” horror movie that did a number on your head, leave a comment as I’d love to know what it is. And if you’ve read this far thanks for indulging me here. It is a little embarrassing admitting how much that movie affected me, but I’m also happy to say that I’m now a big fan in spite of what it did to me in my younger years. But I’ll probably still continue to think about “Carrie” (and sometimes “The Exorcist”) when I have to get up late at night to go pee.

Cool pic with Sissy Spacek outside a theater back in 1976.