ORLANDO — Brian De Palma’s 1976 horror movie Carrie had plenty of firsts: the director’s first big box office triumph, the first film version of a Stephen King novel, Sissy Spacek’s breakthrough that earned her a best actress Oscar nomination, and the first appearance by Piper Laurie in a movie in 15 years. Today, the film is regarded as one of De Palma’s finest and a classic of the horror genre.

One of the great pleasures of reading Joseph Aisenberg’s exceptional film study book Brian De Palma’s Carrie: Studies in the Horror Film (Centipede Press, 2011) is the fun of learning the back story to this classic: from King’s struggles to find a publisher for his debut to how it found an early fan in the director of the Hitchockian thrillers Sisters and Obsession, prompting De Palma to find out which studios had an option on the book. He landed the assignment from United Artists for a relatively low budget of $1.6 million, and De Palma then assembled a remarkable cast that would include future Oscar winners (Spacek), big box office stars (John Travolta), TV favorites (William Katt, The Greatest American Hero series), and even own future wife (Nancy Allen.)

Reading the book, it quickly becomes obvious that Aisenberg is a big fan of the movie, which you’d expect, but this delightful page turner also provides one of the most refreshing and engaging looks at how filmmaking is a truly collaborative process. it wasn’t just De Palma and screenwriter Lawrence D. Cohen who made the most crucial creative decisions, but so many of the cast members offered invaluable suggestions as well. Get the right mix of talent together, Aisenberg suggests, and the end result can be pretty damn impressive.

What is the book Brian De Palma’s Carrie?

Originally published in 2011 by Centipede Press and reprinted in 2021, Brian De Palma’s Carrie open with a quick history lesson: how King conceived the story and his struggles to find a publisher, to how De Palma discovered it and signed on as director – back in the days when King was anything but a household name. That gets the reader through the first 50 pages of this 250-page book, and then Aisenberg delves into a shot-by-shot review of the movie itself.

Books that study classic films chronologically can be, for lack of a better term, fairly dull, too often resulting in a dry, academic film school-type review of the technical aspects of the movie, best suited for film students drooling to become the next Spielberg or Hitchcock. Yawn.

Happily, that’s not even close to where Aisenberg takes us. His in-depth analysis of the movie is anything but boring and pedantic, since he approaches it not as a film scholar but as a movie geek. That’s what makes it so much fun..

Aisenberg quickly assumes the mantle of our Carrie tour guide, enthusiastically giving us the full “Here’s how Carrie got made” tour with an almost giddy enthusiasm — a suitable tone and approach, considering that this turns out to be a fascinating backstory. While describing a particular scene, his narrative quickly breaks off from that moment on celluloid to golden nuggets of unique information, and Aisenberg keeps surprising us with new fun facts, such as:

• De Palma drew inspiration from two radically different movies, The Bridge On The River Kwai and Deliverance;
• Spacek got so caught up in her role as Carrie that she slept one night covered in the fake blood from the prom scene (for continuity’s sake), and sometimes stopped bathing so Carrie would seem more pathetic;
• It was Laurie’s suggestion that as she got impaled by knives in Margaret White’s final death scene, she would have the character in the throes of an orgasm, a suggestion De Palma liked;
• Nancy Allen thought her character, the Carrie-hating fellow student Chris, was mostly a comical figure, and was stunned at how evil De Palma ultimately made Chris seem;
• Betty Buckley, who played Carrie’s kindly gym coach Miss Collins, went through a fairly terrifying experience as the crew filmed her death at the prom, when a blackboard crushes her.

Like an excited child taking his friends for the first time to Disney World, Aisenberg has a grand time walking us through every memorable moment in the film, including interviews with the director and cast, and controversies that still linger. The most intriguing: the enduring critical debate about whether Amy Irving’s Sue Snell was in on the plot to humiliate Carrie at the prom. As the author notes, more than a few critics suggested back in 1976 that Sue convinced her handsome boyfriend Tommy (Katt) to take Carrie to the prom, setting her up for her painful downfall. Those critics found lots of ambiguity about Sue’s true motives. In a lengthy interview with De Palma that forms the third part of the book, the director denied that Sue was part of the vicious plot, but as Aisenberg points out from the earliest reviews, quite a few critics made note of that ambiguity.

Movie books can be pure catnip for cinephiles, but the fun of Brian De Palma’s Carrie is that it’s not a scholarly exercise that tests the readers’ patience with lots of $14 words and arcane, stale cinematic theories. Aisenberg’s approach is anything but formulaic: he keeps surprising us with some new tidbit that makes the book more and more engaging as we go through. Meticulously researched, his discussion of the final plot twist (when Sue wanders over to a For Sale sign by Carrie’s house) is particularly enjoyable, especially since it’s fun to discover the many (happily discarded) alternatives that got proposed first. And Aisenberg isn’t shy about noting continuity errors and minor mistakes that got into the final film, despite his obvious passion for both the film and its legacy.

Following his analysis, Aisenberg provides transcripts to his interviews with De Palma and screenwriter Cohen. De Palma’s responses are often short and precise, while Cohen goes into great depth on the movie’s history. Most interesting: De Palma’s surprise that some people view the movie as a condemnation of female sexuality, a viewpoint he never intended.

Why Did Joseph Aisenberg Decide to Write This Book?

Freeline Media reached out to author Joseph Aisenberg to gain additional insights into this book.

Freeline Media: Tell us the origins of this book: How did you set out to write the ultimate insider look at Brain De Palma’s Carrie?

Joseph Aisenberg: I have a long history with De Palma. I saw Carrie as a kid on late night TV, and freaked at Spacek’s hand coming out of the grave. It’s really all I remembered of the movie ’til I saw it again at 14. That time around I thought it was a disgusting and sleazy film, because I’d been raised religious (take note). Even so, the slow motion scene with the bucket of pig’s blood getting poured all over Spacek stuck with me; if it came on TV I’d usually watch that part if nothing else. By the time (de Palma’s 1984 thriller) Body Double came out, I’d lost God but was learning to be a cinephile. I thought Body Double and De Palma were both trashy ripoffs of Hitchcock, of course. Somewhere around the end of my teens though, I saw his Get To Know Your Rabbit, a disastrous production. I really liked the whacked out, counter culture humor and jaundiced satire of counter culture attitudes as being rather easy to commodify in the long run.

Anyway, after that I decided to watch De Palma’s Sisters and boy did it get under my skin; the Hitchcock elements were both parodied and modified into something far out and new, and also scary. Bolstered by that, I noticed the nearby college was showing Carrie as part of its English Department Movie Series. I went, I saw, and was blown away. I was only a few years out of high school by then, so the movie hit home in all kinds of ways. The imagery just pulled you directly into Carrie’s plight; Spacek kept you there. And after that, I watched everything by De Palma I could find. Soon I was thinking and thinking about his movies all the time, the great sequences, how they worked you over. I taped Carrie off cable and watched it over and over to everybody’s bewilderment. Ultimately it was De Palma who got me into criticism, of film and literature. Hanging out at the above mentioned college’s great library with a friend one day, I looked to see if they had any books on De Palma. They had two, so I got a courtesy card, checked them out and was soon reading my way through all kinds of film criticism, history; all kinds of other stuff, too. I didn’t go to college myself, but my interest in De Palma helped me get some semblance of an education, broadened my horizons out all to hell and back. Anywhoo, much as I enjoyed the books I read (more were coming out every year), they didn’t really express what the films meant to me. Caught up mostly in questions of De Palma’s purported misogyny, and I didn’t think he was. Also, these critics would come to the movies, all movies actually, with pre-conceived Freudian-Lacanian-Laura-Mulveyan ideas about gazes male and complectified castration anxieties that demanded things be understood certain ways, despite the dramatic context of the imagery they hauled out and carved up. Due to this, I dreamed of writing the kind of book I wanted to read about De Palma, focused on the visual ways he built stories and how this made us feel and react to the characters in them, because I liked the women in those movies; didn’t think he was just showing them up as shallow, cunning and manipulative the way a Carol J. Clover casually claimed.

Over time I taught myself to write criticism and started publishing in an online mag, Bright Lights Film Journal, whose wonderful owner Garry Morris was receptive to the letters I wrote him in response to pieces he’d published. Eventually I wrote for him a long thingie about Carrie. He suggested I turn that into a book and got me in touch with the owner of Centipede Press, the fantastic Jerad Walters who put up with my slow progress and perfectionism. It was the luckiest thing I’ve had happen to me as a writer. Over three years I expanded the thing, researched and wrote and rewrote, determined to make it the ultimate combination of geekery and critical analysis. For awhile I was living in a hoarded out mess of paper and books related to that damn movie! So nice when I was finally able to get rid of the stuff. I trust this is a very thorough answer. 

FM: You had extraordinary access to the cast and crew of the film for interviews. How challenging was that to set up?

JA: I didn’t actually have access to all those people, only a few. I tried to get in touch with everyone, of course, but I couldn’t. Fortunately they’ve given all kinds of interviews from the time the movie came out up to the first DVD special edition of Carrie, and beyond. The internet is a great repository. The now defunct podcast Movie Geeks United hosted by Jamey DuVall, and a sister podcast whose name I forget, did a fantastic series on De Palma, talking to many of the actors, editor Paul Hirsch, production designer Jack Fisk, etc. I really built on their work. The few interviews I did get, with De Palma, Lawrence Cohen, Betty Buckley, Marcia Nasatir, were easy enough to obtain, actually. By the way, Nasatir was so unpleasant, uncooperative and prickly the interview lasted only five minutes.

FM: What kind of feedback have you received from fans of the movie — and of the Stephen King book?

JA: I’ve received little feedback. Occasionally people will ask me to review their works or want help getting interviews for their projects, ha ha. The guy who asked me to do the commentary track for the movie, a nice guy named Justin Beahm, told me the thing was “renowned” but said he actually hadn’t read it. I have never heard from a King fan. You’d probably have to be a way out, no holds barred freak, to go to my book looking for a quick fix of Kingiana, I should think.

FM: Looking back today, from the date when you first published the book, what do you think the book’s legacy is?

JA: Carrie and De Palma have been reputationally up at times, but mostly down. Carrie was well regarded when it first came out, but not when I first got into it. I was shocked to learn Spacek and Laurie had been nominated for Oscars. That never happens for horror movies in general and De Palma was in such low regard by the 1990s it seemed impossible to imagine.

But I noticed shortly after I wrote my book actual cinephiles were saying it was a classic, and other people were writing about it too, making that De Palma-defensiveness in my book a little outdated now. I’d like to think maybe my book helped get the movie more of the attention it deserves. I’ve also seen that the new books about De Palma are citing mine! This is true immortality. If you want to write about the director now, you have to go to my book which means, hopefully, that my interpretation is brainwashing them, swinging things off the misogyny track, so that they see what a great wild progressive nightmare it actually is.

Michael Freeman is an Orlando journalist, playwright and author of the terrifying book “Bloody Rabbit”. Contact him at Freelineorlando@gmail.com.

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