This is the 50th anniversary year for master horror writer Stephen King’s career-launching novel, “Carrie.”
The book’s golden anniversary edition, published in April, features an introduction by Margaret Atwood, author of “The Handmaid’s Tale.” The New York Times, Boston Globe and other publications noted the anniversary with stories, essays, celebrity testimonials and, in the Globe, a sprawling exclusive with King and his circle.
“Carrie” is the story of a friendless misfit who’s bullied by her high school peers and nearly everyone else in a fictional New England town. A shy girl who dresses badly, Carrie White is an easy target for this collective cruelty. Her naiveté and instinctual reserve largely can be attributed to her sin and vengeance-obsessed mother.
Covered in pig's blood, title character (Sissy Spacek) begins inflicting her revenge in the Brian De Palma-directed 'Carrie.'
Anyone who’s read the book or seen the movie, as millions have, knows how the story ends. When Carrie unleashes her telekinetic rage following the most humiliating moments of her young life, there’s nowhere to run.
“Carrie” mayhem will run red on the big screen again on Wednesday, Oct. 9, when the Manship Theatre shows the 1976 film adaptation of “Carrie.” Directed by Brian De Palma and starring Sissy Spacek, Piper Laurie, Amy Irving, Nancy Allen and John Travolta, it’s the first of the more than 40 screen adaptations of King’s works.
“Carrie” began as a short story intended for one of the men’s magazines, such as Dude, Cavalier and Swank, that King wrote for during his early publishing years. After the frustrated future king of horror threw the unfinished story’s pages in the trash, his wife, Tabitha, retrieved and read them. Intrigued, she urged her husband to finish the story. And because its principal characters are women, she volunteered to give her husband insight into the female psyche. Another important suggestion was to expand the story into a novel.
Doubleday Books accepted “Carrie” for publication in March 1973. The $2,500 advance for the book was cause for celebration in the financially struggling King household. Published when King was 26 years old, “Carrie” sold only 13,000 copies in its original hardback edition. Nonetheless, New American Library bought the paperback rights for $400,000, half of which went to King, freeing him from teaching freshman English at a local high school.
“Now I could just write stories,” the author told the Boston Globe this year.
King’s inspirations for “Carrie” included a Life magazine piece about telekinesis and his memories of two girls he’d known while growing up in Durham, Maine. One girl’s mother gave her daughter only one set of clothes to wear every day, which prompted scorn from her schoolmates. “Then, at Christmas,” King told the Globe, “she got new clothes — a pretty skirt and sweater — but the meanness didn’t go away. It got worse. You could see her fade and shrivel.”
The other girl’s mother erected a large and gruesomely graphic crucifix in her family’s living room. King found the gnarled, bloody body of Christ on the cross, as well as the woman’s questions about whether or not he had been saved, frightening. He’d later model Carrie and her unholy terror of a mother on these real-life characters.
“Carrie,” the movie, opened in November 1976. Produced for a slight $1.8 million, it was an unexpected hit, earning $30 million at the U.S. box office and, a rarity for horror, Oscar nominations for Spacek and Laurie.
John Travolta as Billy and Nancy Allen as Chris, hiding under the stage at the prom, wait to carry out their plan to humiliate Carrie.
Unlike Stanley Kubrick’s extensive revision of King’s third novel, “The Shining,” De Palma’s faithful rendition of “Carrie” pleased King.
“He handled the material deftly and artistically and got a fine performance out of Sissy Spacek,” King said. “In many ways, the movie is more stylish than my book, which I still think is a gripping read, but is impeded by a certain heaviness, a Sturm und Drang quality that’s absent in the film.”
The movie’s popularity spurred massive paperback sales, bringing the novel to the attention of religious groups that urged schools and libraries to ban the book. For many years, “Carrie” was the most challenged book in the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom database.
In her introduction to the 50th anniversary edition of “Carrie,” Atwood links the story’s tragic title character to the quasi-supernaturally empowered fictional females who arise concurrently with women’s rights movements. “Carrie,” Atwood writes, “was written in the early 1970s, when the second-wave women’s movement was at full throttle.”
King’s horror writing, Atwood adds, “is always the real horror: the all-too-actual poverty and neglect and hunger and abuse that exists in America today. … The clock, the sofa, the religious paintings on the walls — all the daily objects that Carrie explodes during her rampage — these are drawn from life, as is the everyday sadism of the high school kids that makes ‘Carrie’ feel as frighteningly relevant as ever.”
‘Carrie’
7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 9
Manship Theatre, 100 Lafayette St.
$10.50, film only; $58, dinner and movie