A Tribute to Norma in ‘Carrie,’ a True Gay Icon for Horror Cinema

Horror movies have always been hugely popular with gay audiences, for reasons that make a lot of sense when you think about it. There’s the appeal of the outsider (sometimes that’s the “final girl” protagonist, sometimes it’s the monster); the attraction to outré, taboo-breaking thrills; sometimes even just the base desire to see heteronormativity taken down a peg (take that, canoodling camp counselors). It gets real easy to draw parallels between horror-movie characters and a subtextual gayness. We just spent the whole summer turning the Babadook gay because it seemed funny, but that meme was based on something real: horror characters speak to outsiders in a way other characters might not.

Carrie, the 1976 Brian De Palma adaptation of the Stephen King novel, is a great example of this. Carrie’s entire story could be read as a gay allegory. Carrie White is isolated and ostracized at her school, bullied at home by her hyper-religious mother, and frightened of her own sexuality. And there’s something different about her. Special. Something she has to hide. Like the X-Men, one of pop culture’s great gay metaphors, Carrie has a superhuman ability that she can’t quite control, but it makes her superior to the other kids.

But as great a metaphor for gay youth as Carrie White is, she’s not the film’s most indelible gay icon. Neither, improbably, is Chris Hargensen, the queen-bee high-school villain with immaculately feathered hair played by Nancy Allen. Gay audiences tend to flock to the meanest girl in the movie (Regina George; Miranda Priestley; the aforementioned Babadook), but Chris isn’t the gay icon here. Nor is it Oscar-nominated Piper Laurie shrieking about “dirty pillows.” Nor is it over-invested lady gym teacher Miss Collins, despite the fact that she’s played by future Tony Award-winning Broadway legend Betty Buckley. Nope. The true gay icon is there right from the very beginning, seemingly the focus of De Palma’s zooming camera, before it pivots to our title character …

There she is, in a red hat that, if you look closely, has a rainbow on it. Okay?? Our true gay icon is Norma.

I wasn’t prepared to give Norma her due until my most recent viewing of Carrie, at a Halloween-week scary-movie party a few years go, populated almost exclusively by gay men. After a typically raucous screening of Scream (the gay icon of Scream is Gale Weathers, but you knew that), we transitioned to Carrie, a horror classic that some of us has seen but all of us at least knew about. We were not prepared for Norma.

As you can see from the above gif, Norma is unmissable from the start, with her red hat setting her apart from the rest of her classmates. There are no drag queens in Carrie, but Norma represents the aesthetic of a queen anyway: dress to stand out. Norma’s red hat (with matching red gym shorts!) were a signature look that meant that even while getting progressively drunker and chattier, the gays in attendance never failed to clock her in a scene. Not while the girls were forced to do punitive jumping jacks (punishment for pelting Carrie with tampons in the gym shower)…

Not while getting her hair did for the prom …

I do not need to go fetch Susan Sontag to tell you why the above image is camp greatness, and that’s not even getting into Edie McClurg, the future secretary from Ferris Beuller’s Day Off, as fellow mean girl Helen.

So what made Norma such a magnetic character for our captive audience of lit-up homos? The fashion sense was definitely part of it. The red hat was so brazen! Social norms be damned, Norma was going to wear that hat, damn it. She was branding herself decades before Instagram allowed every halfway-handsome gay to turn his relationship into a #goals hashtag.

Actress P.J. Soles didn’t know it at the time, but she was on her way to becoming a cult favorite among horror fans, for her roles as Norma in Carrie and then, two years later, the original Halloween, where she played Laurie’s sex-positive best friend who ends up getting memorably slain by Michael Myers dressed up as a ghost. Soles told Vulture back in 2013 that the iconic red hat was a happy accident of her own making:

I went into this room and it was George Lucas and Brian De Palma at one desk, and Brian looks at me and then looks at George and he says, ‘I’ll put her on my list.’ I said, ‘Okay,’ and as I turned to go — I was wearing my red baseball hat because I was covering my face from the sun having come from New York to bright and sunny California — and he said, ‘At the next audition, wear the hat.’ And I said, ‘My red baseball hat?’ He says, ‘Yeah, wear the hat.’ It was weird, he liked the hat. I was wearing overalls and a striped T-shirt — I was looking very tomboyish — and this hat with the pins on it. And then the subsequent three auditions, every time I would go, he’d say, ‘Next time bring your hat.’

As far as queer readings of Carrie go, if you follow what’s happening on the periphery, there’s a shadow reading of the film that boils down to a battle of wills between Norma and Miss Collins, the gym teacher. Miss Collins is determined to punish the girls for their shitty treatment of Carrie, and while it makes sense that she would target ringleader Chris — banishing her from prom and unwittingly driving her to concoct the pig’s blood revenge on Carrie that would ultimately doom the whole town — she also never failed to call our Norma, who to be best of our knowledge, was merely one of several followers who were mean to Carrie.

Miss Collins, why are you so obsessed with Norma?? Far be it from us to indulge in the stereotype of the sapphic gym teacher, but something is happening here.

As much as the story focused on Carrie and her mother and her telekinesis, we all started anticipating Norma’s next appearance. Would she show up to add a little intrigue to an otherwise dull interrogation of Carrie’s prospective prom date?

(Notice how Norma subtly undermines Miss Collins in this scene. The shadow warfare continues!)

As the prom approaches, the main narrative of the movie is ratcheting up the tension. Will Carrie go to the dance with Tommy Ross? Above the increasingly hysterical objections of her mother? Will Chris’s evil plot to humiliate her go down? And how will Carrie and her barely-controlled powers react?

Meanwhile, our gay gathering was on pins and needles wondering one thing: would Norma wear her red hat to prom? The cut to the gymnasium, with De Palma once again craning his camera through the crowd, feels almost intentional. Searching. Is he looking for Norma too? As it seemed like he was in the movie’s opening shot? It was like Where’s Waldo at first, as we all darted our eyes around the screen, scanning for Norma.

Can you spot her?

How about now?

HEY GURL HEY!

This dedication to individual expression! This defiance of prom norms! This moment of sartorial #RESISTANCE! In this moment, Norma is all of us.

As with any horror-movie villain, you could argue that Norma deserves her fate. After all, it’s she who manipulates the votes for prom king and queen in order to get Carrie up on stage for Chris’s pig’s-blood assault. Of course, you could also say that this was merely Norma disrupting the heteronormative notion of prom kings and queens, exposing it for the bloody fraud it is. A less charitable sort could also point out that it’s Norma who is the first and loudest to laugh at Carrie’s misfortune. It’s Norma who ends up fulfilling Margaret White’s dark prophecy (“they’re all gonna laugh at you!”). But as anyone who’s gay can recognize in Norma the impulse to laugh at an absurd world.

Norma meets her end via the business end of a fire hose, sent crashing into an overturned table, her signature red hat sent flailing by the water. She had it coming, sure. But she sure made her mark.

Carrie White’s rampage would last well into the night, and she’d live on in Sue Snell’s nightmares for far longer. But there’s a community out there who should not let Norma be forgotten. Her bullying is not to be condoned. But as a fashion icon, queen of sass, and attention-grabber extraordinaire, Norma has earned the right to be not only a horror icon, but a gay icon as well. Shine on, you red-hatted diamond.

 

 

 

 

Where to stream Carrie