We still aren’t quite sure what to think about Kimberly Pierce’s upcoming remake of Brian De Palma’s Carrie, as based on Stephen King’s first published novel - especially because it doesn’t appear to be striving to differentiate itself from the original. When Screen Gems shifted its release date from March back to October, it wasn’t clear whether this was a sign of trouble or a marketing decision to put the film closer to the spookiest holiday of the year. As it happens, neither of those explanations were 100% accurate, as actress Chloe Moretz has told Fangoria that the push back was so they could make the film scarier. This, of course, assumes that the film is scary to begin with. And they’ll have to use more than excess amounts of pig blood to make that true.
"We actually prolonged the film, to be honest,” said Moretz, who plays the titular telekinetic. “We did some reshoots [in Toronto this past May], and added three extra scenes with Julianne [Moore, playing Carrie’s mother Margaret] and I to make the movie even deeper and darker." Reshoots normally mean a film is playing weaker than the filmmakers’ expectations, but Moretz says this isn’t so.
"We prolonged a couple of scenes that needed to have an extra moment or an extra beat just to make it even deeper," she told the magazine. "It wasn’t about cutting anything out or trying to edit around things; it was about adding more to make the movie scarier and more intense." Of course, this is all coming from Moretz, who probably heard Pierce say something similar, so it’s possible her views are guided.
The real truth, though, is that neither De Palma’s Carrie nor King’s novel were as much scary as as they were really fucking disturbing (except for that last scene of the movie, which was pretty damned frightening). The story is about a mistreated young woman’s sexual maturity resulting in telekinetic powers. Her zealot of a mother (whom I still can’t see Moore playing) and her classmates treat her like a freak, and so she unleashes on them. It’s one of King’s shortest works, and it’s filled with non-filmable portions like full news articles. If Pierce is filming something that’s even scarier and darker than what we’ve seen before, then it’s definitely coming from somewhere other than the source material.
Carrie will rain blood down on theaters everywhere on October 18th. Watch the trailer below.
