Carrie Color Red

“Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” says Margret White in the movie Carrie directed by De Palma. The witch in question is Carrie White, played by Sissy Spacek, a repressed teenager with telekinetic powers. The film is filled with motifs of blood, fire, religion, and the color red and the themes of sexual repression and bullying.

Specifically the scene in which Carrie is locked in the cupboard by her mother after having her first menstrual period. At timestamp 16:27 the shot shows Carrie in the cupboard, sitting at the altar, lighting the candle next to the spooky sculpture of Jesus on the cross with glowing eyes. The shot is a medium close up of Carrie from straight on with everything in focus. Her fearful face is lit mainly from our

left by a red or pink light, apparently from the candle she is lighting. Oddly, the two crucifixes we can see are lit from another light, from behind and above as if it is God’s light, it is soft, weak, and white and gives Carrie a very gentle halo effect.
Within the film and specifically the light on Carrie in this shot, the color red is associated with evil, most clearly this is shown when Margret White says “Red.

I might have known it would be red” and other times like when Carrie is covered in blood. The significance of the color red is not to be confused with the significant of blood in the film, which is oft repeated like when Carrie gets her first menstrual period and, of course, when she has pig blood dumped upon her, specifically this shot has blood pouring out from the statue of Jesus’s wounds. All of these appearances of blood are reflective of “The Curse of Blood” as stated by Margret White which “had remained sinless, this curse of blood would never have come on her!” Although this sin, specifically sexual sin, seems only to exist in the mind of Margret White and the viewer is shown no evidence of Carrie’s sin. Throughout the movie the theme of religion is present in eerie ways. Every image of Jesus shown is not pleasant or loving but rather demonic. This meshes well with the twisted brand of religion sold by Mrs. White where one must truly fear God’s wrath. The motif of fire is shown by the candle that Carrie lights on the altar, but it is more easily identifiable in its other occurrences like the fire that Carrie sets at the school prom and the multitude of candles that are lit when Carrie comes home from the

prom.
The themes of sexual repression and bullying are intertwined in Carrie and often exhibit themselves simultaneously to the viewer. In this scene, Carrie’s mother has just bullied and sexually repressed her. She denies Carrie’s true womanhood and demonizes it, calling it a curse caused by sin. Then she proceeds to lock her daughter in a cupboard which is bullying to the greatest extent. Throughout the former half of the movie, we see Carrie in positions of submissiveness and passiveness, she is so accustomed to the bullying of her mother and peers that she is constantly automatically succumbs to it by habit. She has come to expect nothing more than bullying from the world, that’s why, in the end, she takes control and consequently becomes a bully herself, hurting even those who have been kind to her.