'Carrie' Remake Inspires Nostalgia For Original Film

Carrie, starring Chloe Grace Moretz, which opened last weekend to mixed reviews, prompting comparisons and general nostalgia for the original Sissy Spacek film.

Brian De Palma adapted Stephen King’s Carrie to the big screen in 1976, which director Kimberly Peirce sought to modernize with her 2013 picture. While rotary phones are replaced by iPhones and social media appears as a new bullying tool in the Moretz vehicle, the essential story is the same. Retro horror fans in particular might want a quick refresser of the bloody classic, which nostalgia website Do You Remember provided in a series of GIFs.

Carrie and her devoutly religious mother, played by Julianne Moore this time around, still don’t exactly see eye to eye.

There is a traumatizing shower that includes tampon projectiles.

There will be blood and there will be fire – though considerably more of both.

2013 Carrie isn’t fairing as well with film critics as its predecessor, scoring a 51% fresh rating on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. The most common complaint is that the film isn’t the 1976 version – whether the opinion is that it’s too derivative, or a departure in all the worst ways.

“The new Carrie isn’t atrocious — just flat and uninspired and compromised by the kind of mindless teen-movie “humanism” that De Palma so punkishly spat on. (It’s atrocious by comparison.),” wrote Vulture critic David Edelstein. “[Screenwriter Lawrence D. Cohen] makes Carrie’s religious wackadoodle mom a self-cutter, and he has the girls who jeer and throw tampons at Carrie in the girls’ locker room take video of her cowering, sobbing form and post it online."

“There are very few reasons to do a remake of a movie that was pretty good to begin with. Trying to squeeze a couple of more dollars out of the property isn't one of them,” wrote Stephen Whitty for The Star-Ledger. “In the end, this is nothing but a fancy bit of corporate Hollywood graverobbing — slipping into the copyright cemetery, digging up a generous loved one, and calmly stripping her of every bit of gold and silver they can pawn.”

1976 Carrie, which ranks No. 16 on Entertainment Weekly’s list of the 20 Scariest Movies of all time, had received glowing reviews. Roger Ebert, who gave the horror flick his thumbs up, wrote at the time, “Brian De Palma's Carrie is an absolutely spellbinding horror movie, with a shock at the end that's the best thing along those lines since the shark leaped aboard in Jaws."

The reimagined Carrie, also starring Gabriella Wilde, Alex Russell and Judy Greer, is currently in wide release.

– Chelsea Regan

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