2024-04-04 03:01:00
Unfortunately, I came of age during the time of the Halloween sexy. The annual festival of fear was becoming flashier, more candy-filled, and more American. But it was the ’90s, so it was also promoted enthusiastically the idea that young women were “sexy” versions of terrifying things. The sexy witch. The sexy devil. The sexy black cat. He… sexy Freddy Krueger – Yes, although it may seem like a lie. Personally, I thought it was a shame, because what I wanted to be was not sexy, but a girl covered in blood. A grand guignol ball queen who burned down her school, and then her entire city. I wanted to be Carrie White.
I never dressed like Stephen King’s cult antihero, which was perhaps a good thing, at least in practical terms: just think of all the chairs he would have ruined. But despite this, and despite the fact that I have never had telekinetic powers, I felt something similar to Carrie.
Published 50 years ago, on April 5, 1974, Carrie is the debut novel of the “king of terror”, the simple but twisted story of a high school girl who doesn’t fit in. The “frog among swans”, the “sacrificial goat”, its protagonist – the daughter of a single mother crazy about the Bible – is transformed into a beautiful prom queen, but it seems too good to be true. And so she proves it when the school’s main bully recruits her lazy boyfriend to bring down pig blood on the stage where Carrie is crowned, invoking in her a furious humiliation that provokes the deadly and destructive outcome of the novel.
How is it possible that it was published 50 years ago? Although it was written in a time before smartphones and social media, the novel’s specific adolescence pain is felt fresh and sharp. The first time I read it, when I was a teenager desperate to check out “adult” books from the library and devour them in search of plot, it was very different; It was not a particularly emotional experience. But as an adult she surprised and moved me.
I happened to be re-reading it the same weekend I went back to my old school to attend a concert. As I sat in the lobby where I had once stumbled inelegantly during physical education classes and theater rehearsals, where I had shifted awkwardly in my seat during assemblies, the experience was visceralintensified by Carrie. There lurked the ghosts of casual cruelty, teasing and bullying; They couldn’t pay me to go back to school.
And although in a way it is shocking Reading now King’s descriptions of his telekinetic threat – he looks around “bovinely”, “grunts and swallows”, “he looked like an ape” – also resonate. As a teenager you find yourself in a body that you still don’t know how to handle; you feel that all your members are made of lead.
Carrie It would be the book that changed everything for King. From The glow a Miserygoing by It y The dance of death, He has published more than 60 novels and sold more than 350 million books, many of which – including Carrie– have been subject to multiple adaptations. But the fact that it almost didn’t come true is one of the most famous stories in literature: At first, King threw the manuscript of the novel into the trash canbut his wife Tabitha pulled him out again and urged him to continue.
He had been working at a laundromat when he remembered a summer job as a janitor in high school that required him to clean the girls’ locker room. She imagined a shocking scene: an awkward teenager, showering without privacy, having her first menstruation and being riddled with tampons by her companions. “She reacts…she defends herself…but how?” she wrote in her memoir, While I write. For the character of Carrie, he was inspired by two girls he had met at school, both misfits and who They had died young.
The manuscript was sold when he was 26 years old and a young father. He worked as a high school teacher, a career King hoped to continue while writing. Until his publishers called to tell him that the paperback rights had been sold for $400,000. “I lost strength in my legs. I didn’t exactly fall, but just sat on the door,” she recalls in While I write. It was not only a way to write full time, but also to get out of a life where you never had enough money. Stunned, King decided to buy his wife a “wild and extravagant” gift for Mother’s Day (the best thing he found, he said, was a hair dryer).
Carrie It reads like a book written without fear, the business card of a writer with immense narrative power. With only 272 pages, is a predecessor to King’s era of block novels, and a novel of setting and image. King creates an atmosphere of claustrophobic and imminent terror, and then builds the tension until the spectacular finale. But it also marked the birth of a bolder, more modern type of horror. Here terrors lurked among everyday banalities, from fraternity jerks to authoritarian parents.
After its publication, Carrie It was not at all an immediate success. Hardcover sales were slow. However, the pocket edition accelerated, selling a million in its first year. And the reviews were good too. He New York Times considered prodigious King’s talent. “That this is his first novel is astonishing. King writes with the kind of confidence normally only associated with veteran writers,” the review said. “This mix of science fiction, occultism, high school sociology, good and bad children and genetics turns out to be an extraordinary mix.”
Reading it today, the awareness of the novel is also impressive. This is a story about a world where men hate women -Billy Nolan, the co-architect of Carrie’s humiliation, sees his girlfriend Chris Hargensen as a disposable sexual object- and where femininity is feared. It is not surprising that Margaret Atwood be a fan. In his introduction to a new edition being published for the 50th anniversary, he writes: “Under the ‘horror,’ in King there is always the real horror: the all-too-real poverty, neglect, hunger and abuse that exists in America today.”
One of the most striking things about the novel is its unusual effect of scrapbook. By interspersing the story with fragments and clippings from fictional articles about the “Carrie phenomenon,” King creates a sense of feelingprovoking the voyeur that we all have inside and who wants to know more about the horrible event.
King added these elements, he says, for two reasons: to fill out your too short novel, and “to inject a greater sense of realism” – was emulating the “Did this really happen?” of the radio broadcast of Orson Welles of War of the Worlds. One entry takes the form of the biography of Sue Snell, who sends her boyfriend Tommy to the prom with Carrie, and says: “They even made a movie about it in the end. I saw it last April. When I came out, I was sick.” . Violence in the suburbs, followed shortly by a film version? A mischievous touch of verisimilitude.
Of course, they made a movie of Carrie – and the 1976 cult film Brian DePalma loses these fragments, which are not transferred to the cinema. King thought the film had more style than the novel. In his book on the horror genre, Macabre dance, described his epic final scenes, in which a Sissy Spacek bloodied and wild-eyed, she slides through the school gym against a background of dancing flames like “a dream revolution of the socially oppressed.”
The film was a great box office success. and frequently appears on lists of great films. However, seeing it today is an experience alarming: the masculine haze of the opening shower scene, in which beautiful naked young women soap themselves, is disgusting. But the interpretations, from that of John Travolta like Billy, a moron with a brain, even Spacek’s monumental Carrie, nominated for an Oscar (Piper Laurie, who played her mother, was also nominated), they are timeless.
De Palma’s film has earned the adjective of “iconic”; was less successful remake of 2013 with Chloe Grace Moretz y Julianne Moore, which has a score of 50% in Rotten Tomatoes. But on the scale of disasters, it’s nowhere near Carrie: el musical, something that practically has the status of eighth wonder of the world in terms of failures.
Developed by the Royal Shakespeare Company In 1988, the musical seemed like a flop from the start: star Barbara Cook, who played Carrie’s mother, She left the production after almost being decapitated by the set. On Broadway he was massacred – “vapidly uninhibited” was the verdict of The New York Times– and it became one of the most expensive failures in historylosing 8 million dollars and closing after only 21 performances.
in his book Not Since Carrie: Forty Years of Broadway Musical Flops, Ken Mandelbaum described the show as something to which “all future musical flops will be compared and found wanting.” Since then has been re-released as a cult hit, including a season in 2015 at the Southwark Playhouse, but with several songs removed. “Out for Blood,” a song and dance number about killing pigs that had left audiences not knowing where to look, was removed. The song was so famous that a 10-part podcast was named after it.
During King’s 50-year career It has been debated whether he can be considered a great writer. It’s art”? Anything sold in the quantities he does will always arouse suspicion. But Carrie It is a great work: disturbing, difficult to stop reading, close to the bone. And it is still stimulating half a century later.
It is difficult to revisit it now without the extraordinary knowledge of what King became: one of the most prolific and reliable narrators. I wish I could have read it 50 years ago, knowing nothing of it, just electrified by the arrival of a debut writer with a voice that made you sit up, who seemed to have a very vivid imagination. What could he do? Who’d say.
* Of The Independent From great britain. Special for Page 12.