Carrie —she's not a monster, she's just religiously traumatized!

Let's talk about the blood-soaked, prom queen of our dreams who — spoiler alert! — burns the whole ass gymnasium down cinematic masterpiece from 1976, Carrie.

One of my favourite things about the origin story of this movie is that after Stephen King scoured the deepest, darkest, recesses of his mind to conjure up the most horrific scenario that he could —a teenage girl has her period for the first time in a public school shower, leading all of her classmates to laugh at her and pelt her with tampons! Horrors!

This episode explores the film’s portrayal of interconnected themes of religious trauma and abuse, shame, and the monstrous feminine.

Mental Health is Horrifying is hosted by Candis Green, owner of Many Moons Therapy.

..............................................................

Sources:

https://www.cinemablend.com/news/2566855/adapting-stephen-king-carrie-queen-of-prom-brian-de-palma-sissy-spacek 

A Night at the Movies: The Horrors of Stephen King https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2076787/?ref_=ext_shr_lnk 

Understanding and Treating Chronic Shame: A Relational/Neurobiological Approach by Patricia A. DeYoung https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22776119-understanding-and-treating-chronic-shame 

https://mashable.com/video/stephen-king-role-of-horror-dark-times 

Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers by Sady Doyle https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43802026-dead-blondes-and-bad-mothers 

The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis by Barbara Creed https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/395435.The_Monstrous_Feminine 

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2015/10/17/449176709/horrible-things-happen-to-nepali-girls-when-they-menstruate-15girls 

Transcript

Welcome ghouls to today’s episode of Mental Health is Horrifying. I’m your host of darkness — Candis Green— Psychotherapist and all around spooky bitch podcasting from my bat-filled cave in Toronto, Canada. On today’s episode, I’m going to be talking about the blood-soaked, prom queen of our dreams who spoiler alert burns the whole ass gymnasium down cinematic masterpiece Carrie from 1976.

Now I don't know about you but not unlike Carrie — I was NOT cool in high school. I went through a pretty intense growth spurt at around 14, causing my teenage girl body to completely flip out and leave me with a gnarly case of hyperhydrosis. I was a sweaty, gangly, anxious mess. Yup — the boys didn’t exactly come a runnin. So I get it - I get Carrie! High school is hard, being a teenage girl is harder and getting your period in front of a bunch of catty high schoolers is enough to make you erupt in a telekinetic rage, am I right?!

Today I’m going to talk about the film’s portrayal of interconnected themes of religious trauma and abuse, shame, and the monstrous feminine. 


Carrie White is a shy, 16-year old high school girl. She lives in a white house — just as white, sad, and neglected as her — with her fanatically religious mother Margaret. Carrie is unpopular at school and relentlessly bullied by her peers. In an incident of extreme cruelty, Carrie gets her period for the first time while in the showers of the girls locker rooms. Having never learned about menstruation, Carrie begins to panic and thinks she is dying. She pleads for help from one of the girls, who laugh at her as they taunt her mercilessly; flinging tampons and pads at her while chanting “plug it up!” until the gym teacher, Ms. Collins intervenes. 

It is at this point that the first signs of Carrie’s telekinetic powers emerge. While in a stressed and upset state following period-gate in the locker room, Carrie causes a light to suddenly shatter above head.

Carrie is dismissed from school for the day. After arriving home, Margaret tells Carrie that her menstruation was caused by sin, and she locks Carrie in an altar-like "prayer closet" to pray for forgiveness. At school, Collins reprimands Carrie's tormentors, punishing them with a week-long detention during gym class. She threatens that those who skip the punitive measure will be suspended for three days and barred from the upcoming prom. However, Carrie's longtime bully, Christine "Chris" Hargensen, walks out and gets excluded from the prom. 

Meanwhile, classmate Sue Snell feels guilty for participating in Carrie’s taunting, and asks her hunky hunky boyfriend, Tommy Ross, if he can take Carrie to the prom. Perhaps having a soft spot for Carrie after she called his poem “beautiful” in English class, Tommy agrees to ask Carrie to the prom; much to both her confusion and that of everyone else at school. 

But a simultaneous, more sinister plan is afoot for Carrie’s prom. Chris and her hunky boyfriend Billy decide to play a cruel prank on Carrie. They plot to rig the prom king and queen voting to ensure Carrie wins, and orchestrate for a bucket of blood acquired from a poor helpless sweet innocent pig that these jerks murdered to humiliate Carrie.


Carrie readies herself for prom, making herself a beautiful pink dress to wear while her mother cautious “they’re all gonna laugh at you”. Her mother witnesses Carrie’s telekinetic powers and states “thou shall not suffer a witch to live” before Carrie departs for the prom.

Carrie enjoys her prom experience, and is bashfully delighted when her and the hunky Tommy are (through an evil plot) declared prom King and Queen. As Carrie stands on stage with Tommy, she gleams with pride, feeling finally accepted by her peers. Sue Snell, from behind a wall, witnesses Chris and Billy under the stage preparing to dump the blood on Carrie. Ms .Collins, erroneously believing Sue to be up to no good, quickly hurries her out the door, shutting it behind her. The blood is dumped all over Carrie, humiliating her and bringing back all her feelings of rejection and shame in the face of her peers. They were indeed all laughing at her, thus unleashing Carrie’s telekinetic rage. Carrie seals the exits, unleashes fire and brimstone, burning the entire gymnasium and all those trapped inside. Carrie exits the gym and seals the doors behind her, trapping staff and classmates.

After Carrie bathes herself at home, Margaret reveals that Carrie was conceived when her husband was drunk, an act that Margaret shamefully admits she enjoyed. She comforts Carrie, and then stabs her in the back with a kitchen knife and begins chasing her through the house. Carrie levitates several sharp implements and sends them flying toward Margaret, crucifying her; then, she destroys the house and perishes herself.

Some time later, Sue, the only survivor of the prom, has a nightmare in which she goes to lay flowers on the charred remains of Carrie's home, upon which stands a "For Sale" sign vandalized in black paint with the words: "Carrie White burns in Hell!". Suddenly, Carrie's bloody arm reaches from beneath the rubble and grabs Sue's forearm. Sue wakes up screaming and writhing in terror as her mother tries to comfort her.

Carrie is directed by Brian DePalma and is based on Stephen King’s first novel of the same name published in 1974. First developed as a potential magazine submission and rescued from a fate in a wastepaper basket by King’s wife Tabitha after she recognized its promise. it was the first book that the writer got published, and while it wasn’t initially a success when it hit shelves in 1974, it eventually became a success in paperback. It was the work that kickstarted King’s remarkable legacy in print – but, of course, that’s not all. It was also the work that led to what has become a remarkable relationship between the Master of Horror and Hollywood.

Carrie is one of the few horror movies to be nominated for multiple Academy Awards. Sissy Spacek, playing Carrie, and Piper Laurie, playing Maureen, were both nominated for best actress and best supporting actress respectively. Spacek actually won best actress at the National Society of Film Critics, where Brian de Palma won the Grand Prize for directing. Also of note in this film is John Travolta in all his 70s dimpled glory as Billy.

Following its success, Carrie now has a massive legacy. It spawned a sequel in 1999 called The Rage: Carrie 2, along with a remake of the original in 2013 directed by Kimberly Pierce and starring Chloe Grace Moretz as Carrie, goddamn Julianne Moore as Margaret, and everybody’s favourite Judy Greer as sympathetic teacher character, Rita Desjardins.

As revealed by Stephen King in the memoir On Writing, the inspiration to write Carrie came from imagining a horrific scene where a teenage girl has her period for the first time in a public school shower, leading all of her classmates to laugh at her and pelt her with tampons.

The female body being portrayed as monstrous is a concept really well-explored by Barbara Creed in her book the Monstrous Feminine. This term refers to the interpretation of horror films conceptualizing women, predominantly, as victims. Creed observes how women are positioned as victims within the horror film genre, and challenges this one-dimensional understanding of women by arguing that when the feminine is fabricated as monstrous, it is commonly achieved through association with female reproductive bodily functions, or through matriarchal traits and tasks.

This concept is well-portrayed in Carrie, along in other horror movies including The Witch, The Craft, and The Exorcist. Blood, gore, pea soup, lots of gross stuff.

In this first scene of the movie where Carrie gets her period in the school showers, she is portrayed as sort of gratesque and monstrous. We oscillate from a scene where the other girls in the lockeroom are scene prancing around in 70s slow-mo in the nude to soft mood music, which is heavily contrasted with Carrie in the shower alone, suddenly aware of the massive amount of blood streaming down her leg. Her posture is sort of hunched over in an Igor-character kind of way, as she lurches out of the shower, hands covered in her own menstrual blood, desperately reaching out to her classmates to help her as they recoil from her and begin mocking her cluelessness. When she arrives at the office with Ms. Collins, we can also see the principal’s disgust and discomfort with a girl sitting in his office on her period, while Ms. Collins has blood on her shorts from Carrie clinging to her. He looks like he absolutely wants to jump out of the window at the mere mention of menstruation to the extent that he doesn’t even ask Carrie about the upset she just experienced and the mocking, but just rushes her out of his office as quickly as humanly possible. 

The onset of Carrie’s period, and in particular under such traumatic circumstances, triggers Carrie’s telekenetic powers. While Carrie becomes aware of them, she researches them at the school library and quite sweetly finds it under the category “miracles”, while her mother assures her that they are “Satan’s power”.

And Carries cluelessness about not knowing what her period is isn’t really her fault. And this is where we start seeing some of the impacts of the religious abuse Carrie has experienced throughout her life. Various members of the school staff wonder why Carrie’s mother never taught her about her period, and we as an audience are also wondering about that too! Furthermore, this is also really an indictment of the 70s public school system that she didn’t learn about it there either. COME ON SCHOOL.


So we see Carrie walk home in a sort of shame that seems to consume her. Her eyes are cast towards the ground and she escapes directly to her room. And it’s no wonder she feels this way, because especially with a fundamentalist Christian upbringing, I’m sure Carrie is well-aware that the fear of the female body and sexual maturity is straight up BIBLICAL.

In Sady Doyle’s book Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers she states “ In Christian myth, even the apocalypse is female. The book of Revelations prophesies that the end times will be ruled by a lustful queen, who carries a golden chalice “full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication.” She appears drunk on the blood of saints, covered in jewels, and riding a scarlet beast with seven heads: “And upon her forehead was a name written, mystery, babylon the great, the mother of harlots and abominations of the earth.” (which like — sounds awesome sign me up for that)

“Aristotle famously concluded that every woman was a “mutilated male.” Thomas Aquinas said that, were it not for their ability to bear sons, God would have been wrong to make women at all: “Nothing misbegotten or defective should have been in the first production of things.” Menstrual blood emitted lethal miasma; a man who had sex with a woman on her period would waste away and die. Female sexuality was insatiable; if given free reign, women would seduce the Devil himself, and use their resulting satanic powers to enslave mortal men. Even in utero, the female body was vampiric. You could tell that a woman was having a daughter if she became uglier over the course of the pregnancy. A girl always stole her mother’s beauty.”

Carrie is abused for entering puberty. Margaret slaps her to the ground after receiving a call to the school about the incident. Being completely unconcerned with the traumatizing incident Carrie experienced at school at the hands of her peers, her mother instead berates her and begins reading Bible scripture to her concerning sin, weakness, and the first sin being intercourse. Reading a passage about Eve she says “if she had remained sinless, the curse of blood would have never come upon her”. 

Margaret locks Carrie in the prayer-closet, kicking and screaming, in completely hysterics, and she’s in this closet outfitted with a gnarly looking zombie Jesus figure that Carrie is to repent to. Which mirrors a practice this still exists today in many parts of the world, where girls are not permitted to participate in schools, family life, or even enter the home while on their periods and are banished to sheds, believing that they will bring curses, deformity and illness to people and animals while menstruating. Shame, in this context, is heaped upon the female body. It is characterized as other, monstrous, disgusting, and even dangerous. 

Carrie’s maturing body is the gateway to all of Carrie’s sin. As her mother says (and I won’t attempt this in her Southern-sounding accent) “first comes the blood, then comes the boys.” When Carrie puts on her beautiful pink prom dress the she made herself, her mother gazes upon her breasts and says “I can see your dirty pillows” — which is perhaps my second favourite term for boobs behind “yabbos” coined by Max in Hocus Pocus in 1993.


Religious abuse is characterized as abuse that is carried out under the guise or so-called protection of religious principles, causing psychological harm. This may include the misuse of religion for personal gain, or to ideological ends.

For victims of religious abuse, parental and authority figures may represent a God-like figure to their children or followers, creating patterns of shame, validation-seeking, and dependence. 

The scene that really breaks my heart is when we see Carrie emerge after several hours locked in the prayer closet after being pushed for getting her period. Carrie seems to have composed herself, calmed down, and she sheepishly approaches her mother at her sewing table as she is working on something, blissfully humming a tune. Her mother doesn’t look to her at all, but carries on with her work. Carrie approaches her and gives her a kiss on the cheek, hoping to now be back in her mother’s good graces after repenting for her sins. Being so isolated from her peers and the rest of the world, Carrie really has no other source of attachment other than her mother. 

Enacting the role of a child who has done something wrong, who was disobident, and bad, and now wants their parent to love them again, is unfortunately something that is commonly observed among children who have experienced religious abuse or even just emotionally abusive, inconsistent, or volatile parents like Margaret. For the child, it can feel like exile to be cut off from the parent and denied love. And based on this validation-seeking behaviour from Carrie, we can be sure that this is not the first time this dynamic has played out between mother and daughter. 

Carrie’s mother Margaret wields her religion in this film like a weapon. She believes that all extensions of human sexuality originate from the devil — including puberty and even childbirth. For her, Carrie is the physical manifestation of all her shame and sinning. 

No scene in the movie displays Margarets contempt for human sexuality, including her own, like her confession to Carrie following her return home from the murder prom —

*record and insert clip of the movie here*

Religious abuse of this kind makes the world smaller for a teenager who is trying to figure out who they are in relation to the world, if any step they take outside the confines of religion are sinful. 

Which makes me incredibly sad for Carrie.

*transition sound - fire, burning - maybe clip from Carrie?*

Revenge fantasy / Woman as Apocalypse:

Alright friends — welcome to the prom from hell! Carrie White will be ushering in the apocalypse this enchanted evening. 

But before the end of the world — it’s a beautiful evening! The prom scene has this dream-like quality to it at the outset. The lighting is really soft — sort of the way Barbara Walters was always lit — there’s silver stars hanging from the ceiling, there’s sentimental music playing, and Carrie and her date look like the perfect pair. Tommy is being really sweet to Carrie and is reassuring her that she belongs her. And you can see Carrie’s confidence growing, as she receives some positive comments of acceptance from her peers. Finally! This is what she always wanted!

But Carrie’s insecurities are of course still there. She questions Tommy about why she is there with him and he tells her that it’s because she liked his poem in English class. And he seems GENUINELY taken by her! 

As Tommy and Carrie begin casting their votes for Prom King and Queen, Carrie wonders aloud if it’s right to vote for themselves. And in a wonderful piece of foreshadowing, Tommy says “to the devil with false modesty” and Carrie responds “to the devil!”


Of course, Chris and her goons have rigged the voting to ensure Tommy and Carrie win so they can dump blood all over her and humiliate her.

And then it happens. Tommy and Carrie get up on that stage, and an entire bucket of pig’s blood is dumped all over her; immediately breaking the illusion of this dream-like evening.
And now comes the Apocalypse; carried out by Woman.

First thing’s first — Sinners will be punished. Chris is a sinner for her disobedience of authority; for using sex to convince her hunky hunky boyfriend to humiliate Carrie as revenge; a true Jezebel. Even Ms. Collins is a sinner. At first, she was a guardian angel, or supportive maternal figure to Carrie; looking out for her, helping her to see herself as capable and loveable. But in Carrie’s mind, Ms. Collins is laughing at her too when she is humiliated as the prom queen, having committed the ultimate sin for Carrie — betrayal. And isn’t that the worst — when your mother warns you of something and (they’re all gonna laugh at you) and you’re like maaahhhhhhmmm and then it does happen? Ugh the worst.

The only one who is seemingly spared from the apocalypse is the one who sufficiently expressed her guilt and repented — Sue Snell. The guilt she felt for participating in Carrie’s locker room humiliation ate her up and as a result, she gave up her own prom experience and hunky hunky boyfriend for Carrie. She tried to halt Carrie’s prom queen humiliation, but Ms. Collins wrongfully assumed she was up to some shenanigans and hustled her out; unknowingly sparing her from the apocalypse about to unfold. In the end, though, Sue’s guilt follows her. During the final scene of the movie, we experience Sue dreaming about visiting’s Carrie’s makeshift grave, and suddenly being grabbed by Carrie White’s bloody arm from beneath the rubble. Sue wakes up screaming, unable to shake the dream. Because in the end, as Margaret White warned us, sin never dies.

The fake out ending in this movie by Brian de Palma, by the way,  paved the way for future horror movie jump scare endings — like in Friday the 13th in 1980.

Continuing her apocalyptic rage, after being attacked by her mother upon her return from the prom from hell, Carrie levitates several sharp implements and sends them flying toward Margaret, crucifying her; then, she destroys the house and perishes.

Of course no one should ever actually act out any form of violence against others, but if we look at finding a safe space or outlet to express one’s rage, this can actually be an incredibly therapeutic activity. 

People are often shaded for liking horror movies, and told they are perverse, or gross, or somehow wrong for participating in a genre that is so violent and dark. But as Stephen King says, “horror is a pace to lay down your fears for a couple of hours” and “people do kind of gravitate towards horror when times are tough”
“When you finish… you've had a place to put your fears for a little while. You've been able to say, 'These problems are much worse than my problems.”

The horror genre itself is a mirror to society. Its works - whether they be books, films, or otherwise - reflect political, mental, and cultural themes and fears present within the zeitgeist. 
Denying feelings that one is having, including rage, can burry them in shame, leading them to fester and “come out sideways”, I like to say. They will find a way out somehow, whether you like or not. Like maybe accidentally on purpose burning down the school gymnasium with your telekinetic powers. 

Shame thrives in darkness and isolation.  So finding a healthy creative outlet to express your feelings, however unsavoury you might feel they are, has incredible therapeutic potential. 

This can take many forms. Certainly, simply talking about feelings that may feel forbidden can be liberating. Simply voicing them to someone like a friend or a therapist lets them out into the light, and the affect of someone accepting and understanding where they are coming rom them can be incredibly transformative. 

You can draw about them, you can dance about them, you can punch pillows about them, you can write a song, you can dream about them.

Just because you are having these feelings does not mean you are a bad person. You can be a witness, and acknowledge that the feelings exist and send them some empathy. Just because you are having a feeling, or a thought - sometimes labelled as an intrusive thought - does not mean that you are a bad person or that you necessarily have any intention of acting on that thought. In fact, giving that thought or feeling non-judgemental space to be explored is the best way to work through it. 

It’s like when you think you see a monster in the dark at night. When you keep the lights off, that monster thrives in the dark. It threatens to consume you at any moment. But as soon as you turn on the lights and confront the monster, you realize it’s just a pile of clothes sitting on the chair in the corner. Not so scary after all. 


Carrie carries her mother’s shame; a shame that never belonged to her in the first place. By the time we meet a teenage Carrie, her mother is already a notorious outcast in the town for her extreme religious beliefs and harsh behaviour from even when she was a teenager herself. Carrie’s teachers, who have been teaching at the school for decades, rejoice that they did not have to teach her mother. Neighbours experience a sense of dread when they see Margaret White knocking at their door to spread the word of God. The town where Carrie lives seems to carry a pre-ordained disdain for the daughter of Margaret White; holding Carrie responsible for the sins of her mother.

Knowing that Margaret was a terror even in her high school years, we can only wonder what her family life was like growing up. 

Carrie is metaphorically coated in her shame at the prom. The pig’s blood mirrors the shame of her own menstruations, her own budding sexuality, her warm feelings towards Tommy, and of being her mother’s daughter.

Carrie had no outlet to share how she was feeling. She was not safe at home and in her relationship with her mother, she was alienated and bullied by her peers at school, and I’m going to go ahead and assume her mother wouldn’t have been keen on Carrie talking to a therapist because of Satanic concerns which, I mean, if she was talking about me fair.

And that my ghouls is the story of Carrie White. Thank you for journey into the depths with me today and I hope to find you in the darkness again soon.

Be sure to check the show notes for the resources I used today to put this episode together. 

If you are interested in working with me, be sure to visit my website manymoonstherapy.com or you can also howl at the moon and I will hear your call.

Bright blessings.