“With the period comes the power,” says Kimberly Peirce.
Menstruation as movie motto is pretty out-there, but such is the chutzpah of director Peirce (“Boys Don’t Cry”), who dared to remake “Carrie,” a horror classic that’s never fared well in previous update attempts — first a legendary Broadway musical flop in 1988, then a resurrection of the musical last year, and a little-seen 2002 TV movie.
With this new version, opening Friday and starring Chloë Grace Moretz as Carrie and Julianne Moore as her terrifying mother, Peirce aims to de-camp a tale known mostly for its images of a blood-soaked and wide-eyed Sissy Spacek, from Brian De Palma’s 1976 original.
The movies are based on Stephen King’s very first novel, about Carrie White, a tormented teenager who discovers she has telekinetic powers. The book has actually never seemed more topical than in the age of “It gets better.” (Spoiler alert: For Carrie — and those who bully her — it doesn’t.)
“It’s undeniably modern and relevant,” Peirce tells The Post. “I read the book a couple of times back-to-back, and I fell in love with this amazing protagonist, who’s a misfit and an outcast.”
In viewing this “Carrie” as both a dark “superhero origin story” and a bullying cautionary tale as much as a horror movie, Peirce brought a very different sensibility to iconic scenes, such as the early one in which Carrie gets her first period in the school showers after gym class.
In the opening of De Palma’s film, the shower is shot as a steamy panorama of naked and near-naked female forms: “Everybody was trying to get their bodies in tiptop shape for that scene,” recalls Betty Buckley, who played the gym teacher in the original. “Some people decided to go completely naked, some didn’t. It wasn’t meant to be exploitative — it’s a beautiful scene.”
In Peirce’s version, the focus is mostly on Moretz alone. “It’s vital you identify with Carrie, that you understand her as a human being: The point of view, when she’s seeking solace in the shower, away from the popular girls and their talk and their beauty. So you [need] to get that she had been humiliated. And with Chloë, it was building up a level of surrender — it feels so good to be under that shower that when the period comes, it’s a horror to her.”
The director also found a different way into the psychology of the girls who turn on Carrie, pelting her with tampons and yelling “Plug it up!” after she grabs at them asking for help.
“In rehearsal, I asked the girls to think about what it would be like if somebody got period blood on you,” says Peirce. “It would be gross, I don’t care how much of a feminist you are.”
She wanted the audience to understand the other side — the mean girls’ side — as well. “We identify with the girls who are bullying her,” she says. “We’re not blind to why they’re doing it. [Carrie] is odd. She is a misfit. She is weak.
“At first, they’re just girls having fun. Then their better nature goes out the window, and they start acting like animals. Like a pack.”
It was one of the scenes that allowed Peirce to truly modernize the story, as the girls whip out their cellphones and take video of Carrie cowering on the shower floor — then post it to Facebook.
Modern technology aside, the director says that she “went back to King’s characterization of Carrie, her mother, and the girls, and to Carrie’s response to being bullied.” Unlike De Palma’s version, which begins with the aforementioned shower scene, Peirce starts with a moment that’s in the book but wasn’t included in the 1976 movie: Her mother, Margaret, giving birth to Carrie and nearly murdering her as a baby, in a bloody and highly dramatic sequence.
But even as Peirce planned to be more faithful to the novel — including keeping the gym teacher’s original name, Miss Desjardin (played by Judy Greer) — the author was distancing himself from the project. When it was first announced in 2011, King weighed in, saying: “The real question is why, when the original was so good? I mean, not ‘Casablanca’ or anything, but a really good horror-suspense film, much better than the book.”
The author’s sentiments were echoed by members of the original cast: “[The 1976 movie] is one of the great American classic horror films,” Buckley says.
Though actress Piper Laurie, who played Margaret in the original, now agrees, she initially wanted nothing to do with the movie.
“I didn’t care for the script,” recalls Laurie, who was a veteran among the cast of mostly newcomers (including John Travolta). “But my husband at the time said De Palma has a comedic approach to what he does, and on the basis of that, I went in to meet with him.”
Laurie says her performance was colored by that belief: “I never thought of it as a horror movie. I thought of it as a lyrical black comedy.
“In the scene where I’m trying to get [Carrie] not to go out [with a boy], I’m saying, ‘He’s not going to come,’ and I did a thing where I was pulling myself across the room by my own hair. And Brian stopped me and said, ‘Piper, you can’t do that — you’re going to get a laugh!’ ”
And Peirce was certainly not going for comedy in her direction to Moretz and Moore in their scenes together. “We were shooting the closet scene — where Margaret is dragging Carrie to the closet to pray — and out of deference to Julianne, Chloë kind of gave in too easy. I was like, ‘You gotta stay the hell out of that closet! This is life or death!’ ”
Moore echoes Peirce’s more humanistic take: “At its core, ‘Carrie’ is about adolescent rebellion,” she has said. “It is certainly extreme, but at a certain point in everyone’s life, they grow up and away from who they are as a child.”
Still, one big question remains: Will this update fly with Carrie White’s creator? “We haven’t heard from Stephen King,” Peirce says. “But I hope he loves it.”