This Halloween, the Film Series showed Brian De Palma’s “Carrie” (1976), which deals with adolescent identity crisis in lurid horror movie terms; it leans heavily toward camp, with its hyper-saturated color schemes and baroque symbolic imagery, but the wackiness comes from a place of visceral fear and loathing. De Palma is fascinated with the most deeply repressed feelings of sensuality and longing that come with adolescence, but, like his titular protagonist, a social outsider brought up in fear and shame by a religious-fanatic mother, he views “normal” adolescents with suspicion at best. The few kids that are nice to Carrie are “just being nice;” the rest are monsters. The film’s opening scene, which focuses creepily on Carrie’s rapturously sensual locker-room shower, becomes hideously ugly as the apparently normal, socially well-adjusted girls around Carrie ruthlessly mock her when she becomes frightened by her own menstruation. Eesh.
I saw another horror movie on Halloween called “The Haunting of Molly Hartley.” You probably didn’t. It didn’t screen for critics and got awful reviews. Thirty years from now, it will probably not be displayed as a classic. It tackles many of the same themes as “Carrie,” but with much less stylistic assuredness. Still, I found it engaging, and I think dismissing the film for that lack of assuredness misses the point. “Molly Hartley” is a fragmented, confusingly subjective psycho-narrative in the guise of a slick teen movie; it draws on images, ideas, and questions that have always obsessed the horror genre and puts them in a blender. The resulting splatter seems merely careless in places, but the overall effect is fascinating.
Molly Hartley (Haley Bennett), like Carrie, has mommy issues; her mother recently tried to kill her and was locked up in an asylum. Molly’s intensely protective father (Jake Weber) has decided on a “fresh start” in a new town, along with a fancy new private school. Unlike Carrie, Molly is socially and sexually desired. When she walks into her first class, there’s a hush; when the local rich hunk’s girlfriend stares at her, another student whispers, “Jealous.” Molly is hot stuff, but she is also cold and distant, a little tired of being desirable. Sissy Spacek’s Carrie is endearing because of her odd yearning and her scared-animal social behavior; we don’t identify in the same way with Molly, a girl who knows how to carry herself. Carrie takes creepy, illicit pleasure in showers; the one scene in which Molly undresses is pointedly nonchalant (and non-sexual).
The problem is that Molly keeps having hallucinations about her crazy mother. These send her into helpless panic attacks; through these visions, she learns of a curse that will take control upon her 18th birthday as the result of a sinful bargain made long ago by her parents. As in “Carrie,” this doom is closely linked to religious morality and a reaction against a “soulless” modern world. Is this psychotic delusion, or a moral prophecy from beyond the boundaries of complacent secularism? In “The Exorcist,” which poses a similar dilemma, we pretty much have to accept demonic possession as reality early o—n contradiction to the denials of scientist—n order to buy the rest of the movie’s events. In “Carrie,” Carrie’s mother, a representative of moral fundamentalism, is a batshit-crazy, sex-hating, man-eating Piper Laurie (Ohhh man… Piper Laurie.). “Molly Hartley” ignores fundamentalism completely by immersing us in Molly’s subjectivity. The characters surrounding Molly do little to help us figure her out; they tend to act like flat teen-movie stereotypes, even as they morph into demonic figures.
“Molly Hartley,” in contrast to the effectively grotesque characterizations in “Carrie,” never really “solves” its enigmatic characters. As it goes on, they only become more confusing and fragmented; everyone still wants Molly Hartley, but for frightening, unfathomable purposes. In evoking the deteriorating logic of Molly’s world, director Mickey Liddell’s style is extremely jittery, inserting sudden loud noises in incongruous places- for instance, when mail is dropped through a door slot. Most of the bad reviews I’ve read have singled out that odd moment and used it as evidence that the film is just groping for cheap frights. Of course, it’s debatable whether the stylistic choice works, but I’m confused as to why critics are so quick to assume that there is no stylistic intention at work at all here. The two big condemnations the movie has gotten from critics are that it’s “tame” (i.e., a mish-mash of familiar teen-movie and horror-movie elements) and that it’s “confused” (i.e., it sets up a lot of themes and character threads that are not brought to resolution). The movie interests me because of the way it brings those qualities together- the way it filters clichés through a fragmented, deeply unresolved worldview. It becomes something genuinely thought-provoking that, like it or not, belongs distinctly to the genre of modern horror.
“Carrie” is a better and more important film than “The Haunting of Molly Hartley.” It has tremendous patience—it pursues each uneasy feeling to its bleak, logical conclusion. I felt the film working on me in long, slow shivers. The famous last scare is the final flourish on the part of a director who has you exactly where he wants you and intends to make sure you realize it. The ending of “Molly Hartley” barely even makes sense, but I am tempted to argue that it is equally amazing. At a climactic moment, we fade to black, then “wake up” in a context that consciously ignores the horror-movie hysteria that has come before and confuses us as to just who we’ve been siding with this whole time. I was frustrated and confused as the credits rolled to cheery pop music, but I was also strangely exhilarated. “Carrie” is a film that knows where it’s going. “The Haunting of Molly Hartley” may not know exactly, but it sure as hell goes somewhere.
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