The Sins of the Mother
A joint discussion of De Palma’s Carrie and Ducornau’s Raw
2023 marked the 50th anniversary of the most iconic supernatural horror film ever made. A good time, then, to think about the material surrounding gender, the female body and religious repression that The Exorcist dealt with so perfectly. After watching Brian de Palma’s Carrie (1976) and Julia Ducornau’s Raw (2016) in quick succession this past Horroctober, it became clear that these two films add a great deal to a cinematic discussion that The Exorcist brought to the cultural surface.
The neat forty years between de Palma and Ducornau’s horror masterpieces provoked a side-by-side reading, one that revealed both conscious echoes and many deeper-running currents of connection. Cross-examination of the stories of Carrie White and Justine proved to be a highly fertile task. Ducornau herself has said that she “go[es] on the same territory” as Carrie, but that her film is very different. There is more to be gleaned from the comparison than what she suggests. What follows is a discussion of both films’ connecting themes — motherhood, sexual awakening, and the female bodily experience. Oh, and of course, a lot of blood.
The influence of Carrie, as with The Exorcist, is hard to overstate. Friedkin’s 1973 film is concerned with a prepubescent girl assailed by a force completely beyond her control, and the attempts of an organising religious force to save her. As the ‘70s grew up, so did the subjects of supernatural horror; three years after The Exorcist, Stephen King’s first published novel was adapted for the screen, and his teenage horror heroine brought to life by Sissy Spacek, then in her mid-twenties. Carrie is best known for its celebrity-status third act, in which the titular character, bedecked in a virginal white dress, is drenched in pigs’ blood by vengeful classmates at the school prom, unleashing her on a murderous telekinetic rampage.
It is perhaps the most famous cinematic scene of violent revenge from an ‘innocent’ young woman, spawning countless imitations and references (not least in Raw, as we shall see later). To this day, any image of a girl in white covered in blood will inevitably bring Carrie to mind. Poppy’s music video for X is a neat recent musical example. The film has also been remade twice, in 2002 and 2013, both times with some minor social updates, but retaining the story beat for beat.
Carrie walks home alone at night. Sissy Spacek in Carrie (1976) dir. Brian de Palma.
Carrie is worth studying not just because of the prom sequence, but also in the ways it deals with a multitude of themes that are often at their most resonant within the horror genre. From its outset the film grapples with religious repression, high-school angst, bullying, and a traumatic coming-of-age. It is a vital addition to the cinematic rendition of dangerous femininity, the weaponisation of rejection, and telekinesis as the manifestation of a repressed power. These aspects add to Carrie’s cultural status as less of a ripple effect and more of a tidal wave. Stranger Things’ Eleven wouldn’t exist without Carrie.
Slasher Morality
The late seventies saw the birth — or perhaps solidification — of the ‘slasher genre’ in Carpenter’s Halloween (1979). Sonny Newman makes efficient points about Michael Myers being “the manifestation of an oppressive violence festering beneath the surface of suburban morality and sexual politics”. In a different manner, Carrie shows the same kind of nascent concern for the suburban repression of sexuality and overt punishment of sexually active teens. It’s no coincidence that Chris and Billy — a hilarious early turn from John Travolta as a pre-Grease schlocky high-schooler — are the most clearly sexually active young couple in the film, and are given the most dramatic demise when Carrie crashes their car. An added streak of wickedness is lent to Chris in the scene where she convinces Billy to help with the pig-blood prank by going down on him in his car. (In King’s novel, Billy is more of a force of nature, and even imagines pulling the prank on Chris instead of Carrie in a more general misogynistic fantasy).
Carrie’s simultaneity with the rise of the slasher genre is made even more apparent by its ending, to which the close of Friday the 13th (1980) feels like a very strong callback. In one of the greatest jumpscares of all time, the surviving Sue Snell visits the site of Carrie’s destroyed house and lays flowers by a gravestone, only to be grasped by a bloody undead hand from under the ground. (Kudos to Spacek here, who insisted on using her own hand for the scene, requiring her to be buried alive.) This all turns out to be a nightmare, just as Alice, the final girl of Friday the 13th, wakes up from seeing the rotted body of Jason lunge at her from underwater.
Both De Palma’s film and King’s novel, then, are released in a political climate of the perceived degradation of social values during the ’70s. Carrie’s mother Margaret is the extreme embodiment of an ‘organising’ religious force, bent on repressing female desire with a sadomasochistic reading of human nature — displaying a disgust for all things sexual, including the natural development of the female body, in both the menstrual cycle and breasts (which she calls ‘dirtypillows’).
She provides the deepest aspects of Carrie’s trauma and her subsequent breaking out from social tyranny. Whether Carrie actually escapes these structures will be revisited in comparison with Raw.
From Carrie to Raw
Arriving in 2016, exactly 40 years after the film rendition of Stephen King’s first published novel — and naturally in a very different political context — Raw sent a shock through the film world, and instantly established Julia Ducornau as a leading voice of extreme cinema. Raw expands the meaning of carnal desires, and examines its heroine Justine as a young woman simultaneously emerging into her sexuality, and embarking on a forbidden craving for human flesh that turns out to run in the family. A lifelong vegetarian, things begin to go awry when she enters veterinary college and is forced to eat a rabbit kidney as part of the degrading hazing rituals.
But is it organic? Garance Marillier in Raw (2016) dir. Julia Ducornau
Often cited is Ducornau’s story that she accidentally watched The Texas Chainsaw Massacre as a young child (a film incidentally released in 1974, the same year as the publication of King’s Carrie), which inspired her love for horror films. The incorporation of cannibalism into Raw is another obvious connection, though the theme can be traced to other places (relevant here is Claire Denis’ 2001 Trouble Every Day).
Ducornau chooses to ground her drama in a brutalist student campus, in which violent excess occurs both underground and in the open air. (Ursula Van De Leeuw has written an endlessly quotable article on Raw: “The harsh rigidity of the school environment is thus alleviated by the feasting that takes place within its subterranean depths.”)
Marillier is a captivating presence as Justine, the same age as her character (18) at Raw’s release (Spacek was 26 when Carrie came out). Both carry with them in their respective characters a virginal innocence, though we see Justine entering a much more explicitly sexual part of life.
Carrie and Justine
Comparing Raw to Carrie isn’t exactly breaking ground. Many others have picked up on the overt reference to the prom scene in Justine’s initiation ceremony. But few have seemed to understand there is a deeper connection going on. Sam Adams, writing for Moviemaker in 2017, argued that Raw “isn’t Carrie, where a girl’s transition to womanhood makes her a monster. Justine’s dual lusts for flesh are related, but they’re not commensurate, and the risk of monstrousness lies not in feeling the desire but in giving in to it”.
But isn’t this exactly what happens in Carrie? De Palma generally encourages a sympathetic reading of the character (to chime with @petalchild and @sleeplessreader in elle literacy’s comment section — more on her video later). She becomes monstrous in the transition to womanhood only because key aspects of maturation have been completely demonised by her mother — and become further sites of trauma by the abuse and cruelty she receives from her classmates. The ‘return of the repressed’ has severe consequences for her as it does for Justine— Ducornau is talking about the same thing when she said “I don’t believe that anyone grows up by repressing things”.
True, Carrie isn’t ‘forced’ into doing what she does at prom. But, just as for Justine in Raw, it is the environment around Carrie that brings out a very negative version of what she could be. Veterinary college proves to be a violent, hierarchical place for Justine, full of bizarre rituals and a splash of sexual coercion (to go by the paint scene at the least). No wonder it’s even more difficult for her to adjust to her newfound desires in that kind of scenario, just as Carrie has to deal with the dual nightmare of high-school life and her mother’s crazed religious abuse.
Embodied horror and the inciting incident
Justine and Carrie’s stories both carry with them a drawing out of internal versus external. Traumatic incidents bring out something inside for Carrie and Justine in two processes that have fascinating parallels.
Growing up is traumatic. Menstruating for the first time is, for many people, traumatic, perhaps the archetype for a bodily change that can feel completely alien. Carrie experiences this head-on as the inciting incident in her narrative — having her period in the shower combined with her classmates’ vicious reaction leads to her first (on-screen) telekinetic moment.
Carrie’s opening shower scene. From Carrie (1976) dir. Brian de Palma.
The opening of Carrie plays out the externalisation of an internal process. First, she begins to bleed and does not understand her own body, crying out for help. Then she experiences a brutal outside reaction from her peers, a reaction which in turn is the cause of her first paranormal outburst in breaking a lightbulb without touching it. Hence Carrie’s journey starts with an inner bodily process but is properly ignited (and worsened) by external forces.
Justine’s experience is precisely the opposite sequence. Her arrival at veterinary school (naturally a transition into adult life in leaving her parents’ home) begins with bizarre and dehumanising hazing rituals. It is the externally pressurising context that sees her ingest animal flesh for the first time, which in turn kicks off an inner transformation and the awakening of a hidden, deeply repressed desire. As such the prom-denouement of Carrie’s story is the parallel image for Justine’s own inciting incident of being drenched in animal blood and forced to eat a rabbit kidney. Justine in the white lab coat (the opening image of this piece) is a deliberate homage to Carrie.
Ducornau has spoken very consciously on this process. She has called female-directed horror “a horror that comes from the inside…there is a violence that is very specific to female film-makers… that is inside, not a violence you have to fight, a violence you have to handle within yourself. This inside-outside thing makes the whole difference.”
Carrie is, of course, a male-directed horror film, which makes it (at least for Ducornau) a comparative rarity. Its focus is not on an outside stalker-threat, and more on the process Carrie goes through in attempting to harness her powers and gain confidence.
Blood and water
The process of confidence-building in a young person requires detaching from the limitations of their family unit. The journeys that Carrie and Justine both go on are very much in spite of their parents’ instructions and warnings; both young women separate themselves from distinct kinds of abstinence that their mothers enforce.
Justine’s mother attempts to ensure that she remains vegetarian for life, teaching an ‘abstinence’ from eating meat. This is out of the desire for damage control, as we discover later that Justine’s cannibalism runs in the family. Carrie’s mother is a fundamentalist Christian who teaches an extreme, punitive version of abstinence to Carrie, claiming even that getting a period is a sign of female original sin. As such both mothers impose a certain kind of dogmatic way of life, though Justine’s is a completely secular context with barely any mention of religion in the film (save the deliciously twisted Orties track that Justine sings to herself in the mirror — “J'm'en fou du 69 / Je veux juste du 666”…). The scene sees Justine taking charge of her own savage femininity as she begins to understand herself as a sexual being. Carrie also begins to experience a positive (though more socially coded) version of her own femininity in front of her mirror, when getting ready for the prom.
A kind of gothic horror is enforced further in Raw by the thumping organ soundtrack at the close of the film, when Justine’s father reveals his status as a kind of sacrificial lamb to his wife’s cannibal urges. We could think here of Margaret White’s death: when she is killed by Carrier, she takes on the pose of the figurine of Jesus in the prayer closet. Carrie is replicating a religiously-enforced trauma and reenacting it on the person who has forced that imagery on her throughout her life.
Hail Margaret, full of grace… Piper Laurie and Sissy Spacek in Carrie (1976) dir. Brian de Palma
As such, despite being in very different political contexts, Carrie and Raw explore the dynamic between family and a religious kind of horror and generational trauma — trauma that takes the form of physical wounds in both cases. Some of the most celebrated modern horror concerns itself with similar dynamics — Hereditary comes to mind here.
So, Carrie and Raw are united in both their literal treatment of blood as grounds for horror and catharsis, as well as the metaphorical realm of blood as family ties. The same is true for water. Both films have highly significant shower scenes. It’s impossible not to think of Psycho (1960) even when using that phrase, a film that sent a shockwave in its portrayal of the bathroom and shower as the most personal of spaces invaded by horror and violence. Carrie’s only safe space of the shower in her opening scene, destroyed by her menstruation and classmates’ reaction, naturally recalls Hitchcock’s groundbreaking scene in both form and content. The lingering shot of the shower head in Carrie brings sexual overtones and foreshadows Carrie’s use of the fire hose in the prom hall as a purifying stream, part of her pouring justice on those she perceives as having wronged her. (Worth mentioning also is the very Psycho-esque musical motif of the shrieking violin that often accompanies Carrie’s telekinesis). The prom-hall rampage contains an eerie shot of the power-hose controlled by Carrie as if it is a snake under the sway of a charmer: she is turning the purifying on to her torturers.
Justine takes a shower after being covered in blue paint and pressed into a room with a guy coated in yellow — the others are left speechless after it’s revealed that she has taken a chunk out of the guy’s lip. Coated by buckets of paint by her peers — another callback to Carrie’s prom scene, you could say.
Out, damned paint: Garance Marillier in Raw (2016) dir. Julia Ducornau
So Carrie and Justine both experience moments of attempting to wash themselves clean of outward marks that prove hard to get rid of, à la Lady Macbeth’s damned spot. The cleansing power of water is as important a part of Carrie’s opening as it is near the close of the film, when Carrie is seen methodically bathing herself clean of the bloody aftermath. Both young women have to deal with how they have been ‘marked’ by those around them. This notion is an invasive part of Carrie's thoughts in King’s novel — she often describes being surrounded by a ‘red circle’ that separates her from everyone else.
Social animals
Independence also requires a certain level of individuality — something both Carrie and Justine have in spades. Their shared social isolation serves as one of the grounds for the reification of the difference between humans and non-human animals. Jonathan Romney is right to compare the two films on the basis that Raw’s power “stems partly from the disconnect between Justine’s feral inner fury and her ostensible vulnerability”.
The transhumanist crowd might label Carrie as ‘more human’ than anyone else in her story because of her telekinesis — something we get more information about in King’s novel, which includes fictional newspaper cuttings and academic reports on the story of Carrie’s abilities. The novel also goes into more depths describing Carrie’s mental state, often lingering on her internalisation of being called a ‘pig’, as well as choice bovine similes to describe Carrie’s general state of unawareness earlier in the story. Her classmates make their opinion of Carrie as less-than-human a physical reality by coating her with animal blood. And they pay for this dehumanisation with their lives.
The pig’s status as a symbol for being all-devouring (despite the reality of pigs as discerning creatures) takes us neatly back to Justine, who has to reassess her identity as a vegetarian after her drive to eat flesh is uncovered. Raw deals with the human-animal distinction very explicitly in some moments. We are privy to Justine in ethical vegetarian mode, arguing that the sense experience of female animals does not differ qualitatively from those of women. Her father declares that “an animal who has tasted human flesh is not safe”, meaning their dog, since Alexia has lied to him about their dog eating her finger to protect Justine. Ducornau goes so far as to say that Justine’s “whole arc” is about the distinction: “[b]y becoming a so-called monster, she’s going to learn how to discern the difference between what is right and what is wrong.”
Carrie and Justine are faced, then, with a similar question: what are they going to do with the new information they find out about themselves and their bodies? And how does it relate to their humanity? Carrie tries (and fails) to control her supernatural powers. Justine’s fate is left much more ambiguous. The closing scene of Raw shows Justine’s father revealing the various scars received as part of allowing her mother to take what we can assume are ‘controlled bites’ of him. In the final line, he says “I’m sure you’ll find a solution, honey” to Justine. Dealing with the fallout of a critical reveal — aka an anagnorisis — will come back later in a discussion on ancient tragedy.
‘Tis but a scratch. Laurent Lucas in Raw (2016) dir. Julia Ducornau
Female monstrosity and the return of the repressed
Cannibalism and animalism rhyme for a reason. For centuries the consumption of human flesh has been tied to the notion of human beings at either their most desperate or their most animalistic. For our discussion, the idea of the young-woman-as-animal takes us directly into some of the most well-trodden tropes of horror cinema, specifically the ‘monstrous woman’. Already mentioned is the crucial role menstruation plays in Carrie’s story; her coming into physical womanhood coincides with the honing of her telikinesis. In comparison, Justine’s sexual awakening coincides with the discovery of her cannibalism. The process sets her apart in all the sexual contact she has, from biting in the paint scene to reaching apparent orgasm by sinking her teeth into her own arm when having sex with Adrien.
elle literacy’s excellent video on “Monstrous Menstruations” adds crucial material to this discussion. In her video, elle outlines various cinematic illustrations of the Othering of female protagonists in horror, from Cat People (1942) to Ginger Snaps (2000). Such monstrous illustrations, to use Robin Wood’s phrase, represent the ‘return of the repressed’ — that is, the tendency in horror to portray monsters as a kind of feared and buried force.
elle describes how “Carrie is subject to two types of bodily repression” — first from her mother, second in how she is ‘taught’ to be pretty by her teacher Rita. Carrie’s revenge is the result of this brutal repression, coupled with an extreme version of social ostracism. According to elle, the film represents her death as necessary for community to move on. But Sue Snell’s dream complicates this — and King’s novel goes further into the psychological trauma of the community years after the prom.
How does Raw fit into this discussion? Ducornau set out to make a deliberately genre-crossing film; while Raw is not straightforwardly a horror film, it already elides well, as discussed, with the notion of socially repressed desires. Cannibalism is often portrayed as the ultimate monstrosity, but also the most extreme expression of desire and the fear of being devoured. As Ducornau says, there are many types of “interpersonal devouring” — whether it’s about our attention, our love, or our labour. Justine’s initial refusal to eat the rabbit kidney threatens to set her apart in the social context of her college almost as much as her actual cannibalism — she’s not fitting in with the way that others around her consume.
In all the examples given in her video, elle points out that there is an eventual safe containment of female monstrosity. The picture is not so simple in Raw — will Justine be able to contain her cannibalism, and “find a way” as her father puts it, or will things end badly? Ursula Van De Leeuw’s excellent article on transgression and Raw discusses the extent to which Justine manages to ‘break free’ from the limitations imposed on her by her family.
Van De Leeuw explores the connection between Raw and Bataille’s ideas on transgression. Justine goes from rebelling against her family by eating meat to realising that this rebellion was inevitable: “What once separated Justine from the familial, the consumption of meat, is in fact returned with increased force to the patriarchal condition of repressed female sexuality.” In this light, Justine’s coming of age is a kind of “organised transgression”.
The film’s ending question, as in the case of Carrie, becomes: what can and can’t we escape from? Carrie dies in an ultimate act of self-repression. Will Justine’s fate be that different? She’ll learn to ‘manage’, but can never truly break free. Both of these films are horror films precisely because of how they question what we are and aren’t determined to do.
Modern Tragedies
An Ancient Greek krater (mixing jug) depicting Medea flying away after murdering her children.
Monstrousness and monstrous women go back much further than the modern horror cinema canon. They form a crucial part of some of the oldest pieces of psychologically complex drama out there. Especially relevant here is ancient Greek tragedy, not least because Ducornau has described Raw as a “modern ancient tragedy”, because ancient Greek tragedy “implies all kind of catharsis — through laughter, tears, and fright.” She has made the connection in line with Aristotelian theory about why tragedy is important as a healthy release of socially unacceptable drives in a ‘safe’ theatrical setting.
And it’s a good connection to make. The most compelling ancient tragedy centres on the destruction or irrevocable transformation of the family unit. The stories of Oedipus and Orestes, with their own related tragic ‘cycles’ of three plays, are testament to this. Raw’s ending sees Justine having to grapple with a totally new way of understanding her family after the values and habits instilled in her by her parents are fundamentally challenged.
In much ancient tragedy, there is a specific kind of female horror surrounding the idea of the inside of the house. Essentially, being inside, in the domestic domain of women, is not safe for the men of ancient tragedy. Oedipus’ palace is the site of his incest with his mother; Agamemnon is killed in his bath by his wife Clytemnestra. Carrie and Raw deal with the horror of the ‘internal female space’ in the site of the body — Carrie’s telekinesis and Justine’s cannibalism are markers of their social outsider status. Carrie was too traumatised to survive, and literally buries herself under her house, much as Antigone is buried alive by Creon for deviating from social norms in her story.
Carrie’s family situation is dire from the get-go. In the ancient tragedy comparison, Euripides’ Medea looms large. Margaret White’s urge to annihilate her daughter at the close of her story is tied up with the revelation that Carrie was conceived when Margaret’s husband drunkenly assaulted her. As such Margaret seeks to destroy Carrie, who is, for her, the living embodiment of her trauma and her ‘base’ desires.
In Euripides’ version of the story, Medea murders her own children, mainly to take revenge on her husband for leaving her and marrying the king of Corinth’s daughter Glauce. She sees herself as having nothing left to lose, and the murder as the ultimate way of spiting him and confounding “the whole house of Jason”.
The richest comparison to be made here, though, is with Euripides’ Bacchae. A tragedy very much about the dangers of repression, it sees the disgruntled young king of Thebes, Pentheus, angrily rejecting the divinity of Bacchus and becoming obsessed with the new religious rites unknown to him. Pentheus is literally ripped apart by his mother and aunts in a frenzy caused by Bacchus, and his mother brings his head to his grandfather Cadmus, believing it to be a trophy from killing a lion.
You’re tearing me apart, Lisa — Pentheus’ dismemberment by his aunts and mother, in a Roman fresco from a villa in Pompeii
Pentheus’ story has a dual relevance surrounding individual repression and the notion of state religious repression that the king attempts to enforce on the new Bacchic rites. Carrie in her own story has her womanhood and sexuality brutally oppressed both by her mother — the representation of a maniacally punitive ‘Christian’ morality — and by her classmates, who take every opportunity to degrade her and turn her into an outsider. Justine’s mother seeks to repress her urges by dictating strict vegetarianism in the household, and trying to ensure that Justine will stick to this diet when she is at college. Audiences of the Bacchae, Carrie and Raw are reminded once again that nothing good ever comes of repression.
The Bacchae can be seen both as an intense psychological portrayal of repression, and of a certain kind of sexual and gender confusion on Pentheus’ part (he cross-dresses in order to sneak into the Bacchic rites, and seems to enjoy the whole thing — induced by Bacchus, or from himself?). We can draw many parallels on this level to Raw, in the sense that Ducornau is so concerned with the idea that repression inhibits growth. The play’s ending, with its animalisation of the family and the horror of realisation, is much like Raw’s ending.
Justine has made a crucial discovery about her mother and must learn to deal with her own cannibalism — just as Pentheus’ mother and aunts must live with what they have done after they have come to, or as Oedipus’ children must move forward with their lives after they themselves discover they are the product of incest.
Conclusion
The Exorcist shared its 50th anniversary in 2023 with Don’t Look Now, another legendary horror drama and study of grief. Part of both films’ legacy has been to widen the discussion of horror as an effective vehicle or ‘boot camp’ for exploring uncomfortable emotions and life transitions. Carrie and Raw contribute profoundly to this legacy, speaking to each other across the decades and adding new depths to the understanding of horror as the perfect cinematic ground for examining the limits of transgression. What can and can’t we escape? And what do we do with the hidden parts of ourselves that we are bound to discover?
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