Horror Is on the Syllabus

I have spent most of my adult life in English classrooms, and probably an equally unreasonable amount of my life watching horror movies. So when the two collide, I’m in my happy place. Give me a teenager behind a desk, an English teacher talking about poetry or fate, and a psychopath lurking somewhere outside the window, and I’m paying attention. For this literature-loving horror film buff, scenes like these are irresistible. I can—and do—analyze them to death. No pun…

Two of my favorite examples occur in two of the defining horror films of the 1970s: Brian De Palma’s Carrie and John Carpenter’s Halloween. Both films pause their gathering dread long enough to put their teenage heroine in English class. I love these scenes because they do so much while appearing to do so little. For a few minutes, we get to breathe. We leave the locker room, the White house, the eerily empty streets of Haddonfield. We enter a place we understand. There are desks and books and teachers asking questions. The rhythms are reassuringly familiar.

But the movies haven’t really stopped at all. While we are catching our breath, De Palma and Carpenter are quietly preparing us for what comes next. The violence has been temporarily suspended, but the storytelling hasn’t. These classroom scenes advance the plot, deepen our understanding of Carrie White and Laurie Strode, and establish the ideas that will eventually consume both films. Before the horror continues physically, we are being prepared for it intellectually. And what each girl notices in English class tells us almost everything we need to know about her. Carrie recognizes beauty. Laurie recognizes danger.

In Carrie, the moment begins innocently enough. Tommy Ross reads a poem aloud in English class, and Mr. Fromm asks the students what they think. Nobody has much to say. Then Carrie White, of all people, offers a response. She thinks the poem is beautiful. It is such a small moment that it would be easy to overlook it in a movie remembered for telekinesis, religious fanaticism, menstrual blood, pig’s blood and one spectacularly disastrous prom. But I find the scene increasingly heartbreaking, perhaps especially because I have spent so many years in classrooms. Carrie participates. She puts herself out there. She offers an honest response to a piece of writing. For a girl who has learned that being noticed usually leads to humiliation, simply speaking in that room requires more courage than anyone around her understands.

And then her English teacher mocks her. Mr. Fromm seizes on Carrie’s use of the word “beautiful,” exaggerating it and essentially turning her response into another opportunity for the class to laugh at her. Carrie retreats. The moment is played lightly enough that we could almost miss what has happened, but I don’t think we should. Carrie White has just been bullied by her teacher. As an educator, that bothers me almost as much as anything else in the movie. Carrie has done exactly what we spend years trying to coax students into doing. She has engaged with a text. She has responded personally. She has taken a risk by sharing her interpretation in front of her peers. And instead of taking that response and pushing her thinking—What makes it beautiful, Carrie? What line affected you? What did the poet do that made you feel that way?—Mr. Fromm turns her vulnerability into entertainment.

That detail matters enormously because Carrie is a movie about the cumulative nature of cruelty. We remember the spectacular cruelties: the girls pelting Carrie with tampons in the locker room, Margaret White forcing her daughter into a prayer closet, the bucket waiting above the prom stage. But Carrie isn’t destroyed by one terrible act. She is worn down by a world that repeatedly tells her she is ridiculous. Even the adults who should provide some protection participate in it. Even her English teacher.

What makes the moment especially painful is that Carrie isn’t trying to impress anyone. She isn’t flirting with Tommy. She isn’t performing for the class. She hears something beautiful and responds to it. That tells us something essential about Carrie White long before she becomes the blood-soaked figure embedded in our cultural memory. Beneath all that horror is an extraordinarily sensitive girl. She wants pretty things. She wants tenderness. She wants to wear a dress and go to a dance. She wants her mother to tell her she looks nice. She wants, for one evening, to participate in the ordinary rituals of being a teenage girl. Carrie wants the world to be beautiful. The tragedy is that the world keeps answering her with ugliness.

And here is where that seemingly inconsequential English lesson begins doing real narrative work. Tommy notices what happens. When Mr. Fromm humiliates Carrie, Tommy pushes back. Later, when Carrie cannot understand why someone like Tommy Ross would possibly want to take her to the prom, the poem comes back. She liked his poem. It becomes part of their tentative connection. The prom invitation, then, doesn’t simply materialize because Sue Snell feels guilty and loans Carrie her boyfriend. De Palma has already planted something between Tommy and Carrie in English class. Carrie sees something in Tommy—or at least in the poem she believes is his—and Tommy, perhaps for the first time, really sees Carrie.

For a few minutes, Carrie has allowed us to breathe. But look at how much the movie has accomplished while we were sitting quietly at our desks. We understand Carrie better. We understand Tommy better. The path toward the prom has been nudged forward. Most importantly, the film has given us another piece of the argument it is making about cruelty. Carrie offers something genuine to the world, and the world laughs.

Then there is Laurie Strode….Two years later, Halloween gives us another teenage girl, another English classroom and another apparent respite from the horror. But Laurie is not Carrie. If Carrie has learned to make herself invisible, Laurie is comfortable in this environment. She is the honor-roll girl, the responsible babysitter, the student carrying an armful of books home while her friends talk about boys. She is observant, academically capable and dependable. Laurie Strode is exactly the kind of student an English teacher can catch looking out the window, call on anyway, and reasonably expect to know the answer. Which is exactly what happens.

While Laurie’s teacher is discussing fate, she looks out the window and sees Michael Myers standing across the street. As an English teacher and a Halloween fanatic, I could happily spend an entire class period on this scene alone. Of all the topics John Carpenter could have put on the board that day, he chooses fate. The teacher is discussing whether fate is an unavoidable force while Laurie is literally staring at the Shape who has inexplicably entered her life. She is called on because she is distracted, but Laurie still knows the material. Of course she does. This is Laurie Strode. She can distinguish between different literary conceptions of fate even while something deeply unsettling is happening outside the window. Fate is standing across the street.

And Carpenter trusts us enough not to underline it. The classroom is calm. The teacher keeps talking. Students sit at their desks. Daylight pours through the windows. There is no chase, no knife, no screaming, no famous Carpenter score telling us to panic. Nothing overtly frightening is happening. Yet Michael is there. The movie has given us a chance to breathe while simultaneously making it harder to breathe. And once again, the classroom tells us who our heroine is. Carrie recognizes beauty. Laurie recognizes danger.

Laurie’s great gift throughout Halloween isn’t physical strength or some previously undisclosed ability to fight. She has no idea who Michael Myers is or why he has chosen her. What she possesses is attentiveness. Laurie notices. She sees the man outside the school. She notices him behind the hedge. She registers the strange presence her friends can dismiss. Long before Laurie has to physically survive Michael Myers, Carpenter establishes the quality that will help her do it. Laurie reads the signs.

And I can’t help loving that this happens in English class, because what do we English teachers spend our lives asking students to do? Read the signs. Notice the repeated image. Pay attention to the word choice. Consider what has changed. Look for the pattern. Make an inference. Find the evidence. Ask what this detail might foreshadow. Wonder why the author put that particular thing in that particular place. Horror asks exactly the same things of its audience. Why is that door open? Why did the music change? Why is the camera lingering on that window? Why did the dog stop barking? What was that sound upstairs? Where did that person go? What was that shape behind the curtain? A good horror audience is always doing close reading. And so is Laurie Strode.

That is why I think the classroom scene does something more sophisticated than simply establishing Laurie as “the smart girl.” Her intelligence isn’t just another marker separating the virginal Final Girl from her more sexually adventurous friends. Carpenter establishes a particular kind of intelligence in Laurie: she observes, interprets and recognizes patterns. She notices when something doesn’t belong. But Halloween introduces a much darker possibility than the one we English teachers generally like to offer our students. Sometimes reading the signs correctly doesn’t save you. Laurie understands the lesson about fate. She recognizes the stranger across the street. She senses that something is wrong before almost anyone else does. And Michael still comes.

This is where the English classrooms of Carrie and Halloween begin to speak to each other in a way I find fascinating. Both girls perceive something that others fail to appreciate. Carrie sees beauty where everyone else sees an opportunity for ridicule. Laurie sees danger where everyone else sees an ordinary October day. Both girls are perceptive. Both girls are correct. And neither perception can fully protect her from what is coming.

Carrie’s sensitivity actually makes her more vulnerable. The girl capable of being deeply moved by a poem is also capable of being deeply wounded by laughter. Her openness to beauty is connected to her openness to pain. When Carrie walks into the prom and looks around at the lights, the decorations, the dress she made herself and the boy beside her, the moment matters because we already know how desperately she wants to believe in beauty. For one brief evening, the world finally seems to be giving it to her.

We, of course, know what is waiting above her head. Laurie’s perception works differently. Her sensitivity makes her vigilant. She recognizes that the ordinary world of Haddonfield has somehow shifted. The street looks the same. The houses look the same. School continues. Her friends chatter. Children prepare to go trick-or-treating. Yet Laurie has seen something the others haven’t, and once she has seen it, she cannot unsee it.

One girl is looking for beauty. The other is watching for danger. And both find exactly what their films have prepared them to find. This is why those quiet classroom scenes are so important to me. They allow the movies—and us—to slow down before the horror accelerates. They are breaths between shocks, but they aren’t empty breaths. They are thinking spaces. De Palma and Carpenter sit us down, hand us the text and essentially say: Pay attention. You are going to need this later.

In Carrie, the ostensible subject is poetry, but the real lesson is vulnerability. What happens when a sensitive person offers something sincere to the world and the world laughs? In Halloween, the ostensible subject is fate, but the real lesson is inevitability. What happens when you recognize the thing coming for you and recognition cannot make it stop? There is even something wonderfully ironic about the teachers themselves. Mr. Fromm is teaching his students how to interpret a poem while completely misreading the girl sitting in front of him. Laurie’s teacher is explaining the nature of fate while fate stands outside the classroom window. The teachers think they are teaching literature. The movies are teaching us how to watch them.

And perhaps that is why, for this literature-loving horror film buff, these scenes are irresistible. They bring together two things I have spent much of my life thinking about: what stories mean and how people read them. Horror depends upon reading. The genre trains us to notice what doesn’t belong, to search for patterns, to anticipate consequences and to understand that seemingly insignificant details may matter enormously later. In other words, horror turns all of us into English students.

The best horror films also know when to let us breathe. They understand that relentless terror eventually becomes noise. Sometimes the most effective thing a filmmaker can do is put down the knife, turn on the classroom lights and let somebody talk about a poem. The audience relaxes. Our pulse slows. But our minds are still working. In fact, that may be precisely when the movie slips its most important ideas past us.

Carrie pays attention to a poem and recognizes beauty. Laurie pays attention to the world and recognizes danger. Neither girl is wrong. Perhaps that is the most unsettling lesson on the syllabus. In horror, as in literature, recognizing the truth doesn’t necessarily mean you can change it. Sometimes you read every sign correctly. Sometimes you understand exactly what the story is telling you.

And sometimes the bucket still falls, and the Boogeyman still crosses the street.