MGM and Screen Gems recently released a pair of photographs from the remake of the 1976 dramatic horror, Carrie.
The original film, based on Stephen King’s breakout novel of the same name, tells the story of an emotionally abused girl, Carrie, who has a mysterious and supernatural gift. She’s been raised by a woman who is fanatically religious and unable to give her daughter any real sympathy or a proper mother/daughter relationship.
After the girl is surprised at school by her first period, she is relentlessly teased by her classmates, which comes to a head when one of the girls dumps a barrel of pig’s blood over Carrie on prom night. Carrie then proceeds to flip out and kill nearly everyone indiscriminant of whether they were the aggressors of her pain.
Obviously, this isn’t the first remake of the film. There was another attempt made a decade ago with a television budget and c-list actors which went mostly unnoticed (or, at least, unremembered), but this one is a more serious attempt to actually recapture the sensation and feeling the original film conveyed.
The first photo is of the iconic character, this time played by Chloë Grace Moretz, seemingly walking away from the scene of destruction at the high school, still disbelievingly covered in blood:
As much as I like Sissy Spacek, the original Carrie Star, she was not able to really pull off the character once the final action began. She portrayed the poor girl as having simply shut down emotionally, and wandering wide-eyed as she killed. All we have in evidence is this one photo, but it looks like Moretz has successfully divorced her performance from Spacek, and has taken the role in a new direction, more reactive and conscious. She’s also much younger than Spacek was, and so more believably a young high school student.
The other photo is of Julianne Moore in the role of Margaret, Carries obsessed, knife-wielding mother. This role will also be played a bit differently, judging from Moore’s approach to the character. “This woman has clearly had a psychotic break, perhaps several,” Moore told EW when asked about the character’s motivations. “But what’s sad about it for me is that she’s clearly sick and here’s this poor child in the thrall of this person who is seriously ill. And on top of that, they have this mother-daughter relationship. So we want to make that relationship as meaningful as possible, even though it is horrible and destructive.”
With today’s talent and budget, this film seems like it’s going to be a vast improvement over the original. Whether it will supplant the original in the hall of horror classics is yet to be seen. Fans are often not very willing to give over to a new interpretation.
Carrie hits theaters on March 13th, 2013.
