Carrie: the growing pains of a horror classic Of all the many great decisions Palma and screenwriter Lawrence D. Cohen made in their adaptation, treating King's anti-heroine with a heart-piercing compassion was surely the most important. De Palma, up to that point, had main nine features, well-received on the cult circuit and in some cases critically (Pauline Kael was an early adopter, and 1973"s Siamese-twin shocker Sisters had won him strong reviews). But he had yet to break through with tangible mainstream success, perhaps because his movies tended to seem cold and gimmicky, a little self-satisfied. De Palma may not have proved himself bankable yet, but a production budget of $1.8m still amounted to his biggest so far - a little more than the same year's Rocky ($1m), much less than Logan's Run ($9m). Even after he delivered his finished cut to United Artists, the studio weren't sure they had much of a hit on their hands. As Neil Mitchell recounts in his sharp new book on Carrie for the Devil's Advocates series, until very close to the film's release, UA were toying with retitling it Pray for Carrie and releasing it as part of a B-movie double feature. Spacek wasn't De Palma's first choice for the leading role. Even though she had broken through spectacularly in Terrence Malick's Badlands (1973), Hollywood hadn't given her that much attention for it. As the wife of Jack Fisk, a brilliant production designer getting his first breaks with Malick and De Palma, Spacek had actually helped out as a set decorator on The Phantom of the Paradise (1974), and was encouraged by De Palma to test for the role of vicious Chris Hargensen, not Carrie. Funnily enough, auditions for Carrie were held jointly with those for Star Wars, which George Lucas was putting together at the same time. Amy Irving nearly got the part of Princess Leia, but took a substantial consolation prize as Sue Snell, the most penitent of Carrie's bullying classmates. Carrie starring Carrie Fisher nearly happened, too, which might have produced a rather different, schadenfreude-laced movie: if you can ever imagine applauding the pig's blood as it tips over our beaming prom queen, Fisher might have got us there. Nancy Allen, who attacked the part of Chris with perfect bubblegum indifference, married De Palma a few years later, and would go on to star in his Home Movies (1980), Dressed to Kill (1980) and Blow Out (1981) - reunited, in the last case, with John Travolta, a fast-rising star De Palma was lucky to get as her dim boyfriend Billy Nolan, just a year before Saturday Night Fever. Experiences on the set weren't all rosy. De Palma was building a reputation for slightly heartless perfectionism, which many of this cast could attest to. Not only did he keep Spacek isolated from her co-stars - a standard tactic, making it all the easier for them to gang up on her - but he elicited emotional reactions with some fairly underhand means. When gym teacher Miss Collins - terrific Betty Buckley, in a role significantly expanded from the book's - hauls the girls over the coals for their bullying, De Palma had her hurl personal abuse at Amy Irving to get her genuinely upset. That slap Miss Collins gives Chris on the sports pitch is a real one, which she was made to deliver repeatedly until Allen was on the verge of tears. Poor PJ Soles, the one with a red baseball cap, suffered a ruptured eardrum when her character is knocked out by a high-pressure fire hose during the prom cataclysm. Even so, most of the cast can be relied upon these days to big the film up as a formative acting experience - or in the case of Piper Laurie, a revivifying one. The then 44-year-old actress had taken a long hiatus in Hollywood since her previous, Oscar-nominated turn as Paul Newman's disabled girlfriend in The Hustler (1961). Exploring the plum role of Margaret White, Carrie's religious nutcase of a mother, fired her up to re-enter the movie business. Laurie had a lot of input in her role, right-down to the orgasmic groans she lets out when Carrie crucifies her with kitchen implements. De Palma also had time to storyboard his movie quite comprehensively, and the visual sophistication of its design is still fairly astounding. The rapturous, slow-motion shot through the girls" locker room to where Carrie is showering achieves a dreamlike eroticism, then mirrored later with the even more ecstatic scene of her prom coronation. Her whirling dance with William Katt's Tommy is one of the few 360-degree shots in movies that seems emotionally organic, rather than merely show-offy. Bloody revenge: Sissy Spacek, John Travolta and Nancy Allen in Carrie (Rex) When all hell breaks loose, after that bucket of blood has tipped (it was actually corn syrup), the sequence uses a panoply of effects from kaleidoscopes (to suggest the mocking breakdown of Carrie's perceptions) to extensive split-screen (which allows her grim-faced close-ups of telekinetic rage to be juxtaposed with the carnage she's causing). Delirious and over-the-top, the sequence builds suspense mercilessly until its middle point, then explodes - and it remains a high point in the crowded field of technically ingenious De Palma set pieces. United Artists needn't have worried. Bolstered by rave reviews, especially from Kael and Roger Ebert, the movie was a word of mouth sensation which had the teen demographic baying for more. It grossed $33m, and even managed Oscar nominations for Spacek and Laurie - a great rarity for such genre material, and testament to how creative their characterisations really were. Meanwhile, the famous 'gotcha' ending - Sue Snell's nightmare of approaching Carrie's grave with a bouquet - paved the way for a whole cycle of horror films in which not even the surviving characters are allowed to feel safe at the end. Halloween (1978) was born here. Half the cast were catapulted to stardom. And just as Jaws kept millions rooted to their deckchairs, no senior prom would ever climax again without a few nervous looks at the rafters. Carrie is released on November 29