Remaking "Carrie" means there aren't going to be a whole lot of surprises. And rather than running from that, the writer of the NBC TV movie update of the 1976 horror film embraced it.
Almost all of the narrative is retold after the fact, with a police detective (David Keith) interviewing survivors and trying to piece together the events that resulted in dozens of deaths. The three-hour telefilm airs tonight at 7 p.m. on Ch. 5.
"Whether you've seen it or not, you kind of have a pop-cultural awareness of the property," said executive producer/writer Bryan Fuller. "So we thought, instead of pretending there's not going to be a prom night and there's not going to be a bucket of blood dropped and there's not going to be mayhem, we'd embrace that and say — yes, something really big and horrible happened and just kind of, like, feed it out to the audience.
"It goes back to that old Hitchcock interview . . . where he's talking about what's more interesting — boom, the bomb goes off and everybody's surprised, or letting the audience know that there's a bomb under the table an hour before it goes off and let them squirm."
So once again we have Carrie White (Angela Bettis taking on the role for which Sissy Spacek was nominated for an Oscar), a painfully shy, repressed high school girl raised by her religious fanatic mother (Patricia Clark replacing Oscar nominee Piper Laurie). Carrie is already the subject of vicious teenage teasing when, in the showers after gym class, she begins her first menstrual period and, having been so sheltered she doesn't know what's happening, fears she is dying.
Which results in a much more cruel round of torture, leading up to that bucket of blood, Carrie's inborn telekinetic abilities going out of control and all that mayhem.
And, in a lot of ways, the new "Carrie" is a pretty good remake. Even if the reason for remaking it isn't immediately apparent.
"It's certainly very daunting. The original is a classic," said Fuller.
And, at the risk of giving too much away about the new ending (STOP READING NOW IF YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW), give it a little more life. They're hoping to turn this into a weekly series. Which means that this time, Carrie doesn't die. Not that that's really giving much away. ("If anybody saw a preview, they're going to know the end," Fuller said.)
"There's all sorts of ways to make it into a series. I just felt if you're going to do a series based on a Stephen King book called 'Carrie,' Carrie better be in it," Fuller said. "One of the things that we all felt really bad about was that you have this woman who is victimized her entire life and then the moment things start to come through for her, she's victimized once again. And then she becomes a murderer and then you kill her. And that just seemed really cruel.
"We thought, you can't turn this person who's so sweet into a murderer and then kill her. We wanted to give her another chance. We wanted to see her blossom and triumph over this instead of losing a gift."
Um, yes, but — whether she intends to or not — Carrie kills a lot of people. Can you build a weekly series around such a character?
"I think what's interesting is, you let the character off the hook by killing her," Fuller said. "She doesn't have to deal with the guilt or the remorse or the responsibility if she's dead. But if she's alive, all that stuff is going to be doing a tap dance on her head for her entire life. And how she deals with all those emotions, I think, makes for a much more interesting series."
Whether that happens will depend entirely on how many people tune in on Monday night.
E-MAIL: pierce@desnews.com