The Carrie Remake Will Probably Bully You Into Seeing It

When news broke that the powers-that-be in Hollywood were remaking Carrie, maybe you greeted the news with a good-natured, “Huh, this could be okay,” as you trolled around the internet for a trailer. Maybe you were outraged that Hollywood seems bent on making your collection of 70s and 80s horror movies entirely obsolete. Maybe still you were miffed that Carrie was getting another treatment yet no one, with all due respect to Rob Lowe, seems capable of making a ‘Salem’s Lot movie that isn’t terrible. You seem pretty conflicted, actually, which is fine because Carrie is what people in the biz would call “morally ambiguous.”

As it happens, the new iteration of Carrie should only make you feel grateful that director Kimberly Peirce will be taking the time, fake blood, and effort to bring the telekinetic Carrie into the 21st century, a world in which no high schooler has seen or read Carrie and therefore has no idea that by dumping pig’s blood on their awkward classmate, they will set off a chain of gory events culminating in death, panic, and Stephen King winning the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Movie remakes just happen now, so debating their merits is pointless — if you like going to the movies and will continue to go no matter what kind of pig slop producers pump into multiplexes, you’re going to line up at the trough with everyone else. At least Carrie, what with all the recent media attention paid to bullying, will be sort of timely, and at least we’ll get to see what a female director does with material about a teenage girl being mercilessly humiliated by her peers.

Speaking at New York’s Comic Con on Saturday, Peirce made sure to mention that Carrie will be a very modern movie. It will also be extremely gory. Thanks to Wired‘s Angela Watercutter, we have a rough blood-bucket estimate (if your into that sort of thing): 1,000 gallons will be spilled, sprayed, sloshed, soaked, splattered, and drown in during the new Carrie, an amount sure to horrify anyone who thought Piranha 3-D was over-the-top. With Chloë Grace Moretz reprising the role Sissy Spacek made famous in 1976, and Julianne Moore playing an abusive, half-crazed (okay, full-crazed) mother, the new Carrie should at least be entertaining, even if it seems already to have the horror high-gloss of a quickly regretted On Demand purchase.

After palliating gore-enthusiasts with a blood estimate, Peirce (who struck critical gold with Boys Don’t Cry in 1999) fielded questions about how she would modernize Carrie, and her phrase of choice seemed to be “social media,” since that’s really the only technological innovation we communication-starved creatures of the 21st century have to brag about (seriously — where are the floaty cars and laser guns?). Carrie will open in the spring of 2013, right around (I’m guessing) prom season, because marketers can be clever like that, and might prove even more clever if, instead of promoting the movie with boring trailers, they embarked on a meta-Twitter campaign, tweeting mean criticisms about the movie, like, “Hollywood’s ruining my childhood” or “Remakes are for suckers — don’t see this movie!”