Why Chris­tine con­tains hor­ror cinema’s great­est femme fatale

John Car­pen­ter agreed to direct 1983’s Chris­tine at a time when plen­ty of oth­er direc­tors were will­ing to board the lucra­tive Stephen King adap­ta­tion train. He wasn’t so hot on the idea of mak­ing a film about a killer car, but Car­rie, Salem’s Lot and Stan­ley Kubrick’s The Shin­ing had all fared respectably, and the Amer­i­can author’s bloat­ed nov­els – this was King’s ​‘lines of cocaine with a six-pack chas­er’ peri­od – were at peak pop­u­lar­i­ty. The same year saw the release of David Cronenberg’s The Dead Zone and Lewis Teague’s Cujo. To para­phrase hor­ror his­to­ri­an Car­los Clarens, there sure was mon­ey to be made in them there thrills.

Com­ing off the back of his expen­sive remake of The Thing – at the time crit­i­cal­ly reviled, bare­ly scrap­ing its bud­get back – Car­pen­ter need­ed a sure thing and a movie based on a Stephen King nov­el seemed just that. In Hol­ly­wood, of course, you’re only as good as your last movie, as the famous say­ing goes. Today, The Thing is revered as a mas­ter­piece of genre cin­e­ma, in large part due to the still-spec­tac­u­lar spe­cial effects work by Rob Bot­tin: hell­ish sculp­tures of gloopy, slimy, twist­ing tor­tured flesh, limbs and innards. In 1982 Rolling Stone mag­a­zine told its read­ers that the remake couldn’t ​“hold a can­dle to Howard Hawks’s trail-blaz­ing 1951 clas­sic The Thing from Anoth­er World.” A movie few peo­ple remem­ber today, despite it fea­tur­ing an alien with a car­rot for a head.

While Car­pen­ter has spo­ken in the past about ​“screw­ing up” Chris­tine and described it as his least favourite work, the film has since received plen­ty of reap­praisal and ranks among the best King adap­ta­tions. While very much a hor­ror sto­ry about the Amer­i­can fetishi­sa­tion of auto­mo­biles and con­sumerist mate­ri­al­ism, to mod­ern eyes it reads more like a prophet­ic vision detail­ing the rise of geek pow­er and how such once-pitied fig­ures turned out to be just as sus­cep­ti­ble to cor­rup­tion and mean-spirit­ed­ness as all the rest. Find­ing out a for­mer bul­ly has been mur­dered, ​“the kid was cut in half Arnie, they had to scrape his legs up with a shov­el,” Arnie replies: ​“Well isn’t that what you’re sup­posed to do with shit?”

Arnie Cun­ning­ham (Kei­th Gor­don) goes from being Rock­bridge High’s pre­em­i­nent dorkus mal­orkus to hep­cat with the coolest whip in town. He rebels, starts swear­ing like a troop­er, push­es his folks around (grab­bing his father by the neck, Arnie spits ​“Keep your mitts off me, moth­er­fuck­er”) and drops his pals. The character’s pro­gres­sion is basi­cal­ly Eugene from Grease into James Dean in Rebel With­out a Cause with a sprin­kle of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The link to Nicholas Ray’s icon­ic own teen-rage clas­sic is direct­ly ref­er­enced in Arnie sport­ing a red suede jacket.

But what makes Carpenter’s film even more pow­er­ful is its elec­tri­fy­ing rework­ing of the femme fatale fig­ure of Roman­tic imag­i­na­tion. Put sim­ply: Chris­tine, the red-and-white 1958 Ply­mouth Fury, is one of the great seduc­tress-mon­sters in big screen his­to­ry, join­ing the likes of Joan Ben­nett in Scar­let Street, Ann Sav­age in Detour, Bar­bara Stan­wyck in Dou­ble Indem­ni­ty and Jes­si­ca Rab­bit in Who Framed Roger Rab­bit. For Chris­tine is John Keats’ ​‘La belle dame san mer­ci’, all shiny and chrome.

The scene in which she mag­i­cal­ly returns to orig­i­nal form, as if straight off the pro­duc­tion line, after Arnie’s school bul­lies trash her with base­ball bats – ​“One of them took a shit on the dash­board of my car” – is a thrilling seduc­tion. The chill­ing synth music (a Car­pen­ter spe­cial­i­ty), use of off-screen sound (met­al crunch­ing), Arnie walk­ing towards the cam­era and away from the car, then the absolute­ly note per­fect zoom-in to his enthralled, expec­tant face – like some­body who knows they’re about to get laid.

“Okay, show me,” Arnie utters as Christine’s head­lights burst into full beam – the lens flare shin­ing with super­nat­ur­al ele­gance – the score sud­den­ly chang­ing to a more bluesy-style mood, accom­pa­nied by a puls­ing bassline and woozy sax­o­phone melody. A mag­ic moment of auto­mo­bile erot­i­ca enough to give even JG Bal­lard the horn, Chris­tine per­forms a demon­ic-mechan­i­cal striptease, her bewitch­ing beau­ty and dis­play of pow­er hyp­no­tis­ing the poor kid.

Arnie will­ing­ly hands over his heart and soul, and feels empow­ered by Christine’s beguil­ing influ­ence and mys­tique. The unsus­pect­ing fly in the black widow’s web tells con­cerned best bud­dy Den­nis (John Stock­well) all about the work­ings of their grand pair­ing – his first true love – and how such pas­sion has ​“a vora­cious appetite. It eats every­thing. Friend­ship. Fam­i­ly. It kills me how much it eats. But I’ll tell you some­thing else. You feed it right, and it can be a beau­ti­ful thing.”