Thoughts on Christine

     On Criterion, I watched Christine, a 1983 supernatural horror film directed by John Carpenter and written by Bill Phillips, based on Stephen King's novel of the same name. The film starred Keith Gordon as Arnie Cunningham, a nerdy high school senior who purchases a 1958 Plymouth car for $250 and becomes obsessed with it, naming it Christine, as the car is possessed by an evil spirit and kills anyone who she sees as a threat to her and Arnie.

    The film opens with the car being produced in a Detroit auto plant in 1957 (with the anachronistic choice of George Thorogood's "Bad to the Bone" playing over the prologue), and maiming one worker by slamming its hood on his fingers, and killing another worker because he dropped cigar ash on its seat.    

    In 1978 California, teenage Arnie is bullied on his first day of school by Buddy (William Ostrander) and his gang, and Arnie's best friend Dennis (John Stockwell) intervenes and saves him, and Buddy is later expelled for threatening them with a switchblade. After school, Arnie and Buddy are driving home when Arnie sees the car, now in a beat-up state, and wants to buy it from an elderly, rough around the edges man (Roberts Blossom), the brother of the previous owner, who recently died. Despite Dennis' protests, Arnie buys the car, and his parents are mad that he at 17 made a big move like that without consulting them, and he blows up at them over wanting to keep him a sheltered nerd. He takes Christine to a garage to restore her, where the garage owner Will Darnell (Robert Prosky) gives him a part-time job in exchange for letting him have access to his junk pile to fix Christine.

    Arnie is in love with his car, and his newfound confidence gets him a date with the new girl, Leigh (Alexandra Paul), who Dennis and his friends are immediately smitten by, and Dennis' friends make lewd sexual comments about her on first sight. Leigh and Arnie begin dating seriously, and Dennis, distracted by seeing them kissing by Christine while he's playing a football game, gets tackled so severely that he ends up in the hospital for a month and it ends his football career.

    Christine and Arnie have a co-dependent abusive relationship, where Christine is insanely jealous and possessive of Arnie and will kill people by running them over/pinning them to a wall or asphyxiating someone while keeping the doors locked, and Arnie becomes combative and verbally abusive to his parents, Dennis, and Leigh, emboldened with toxic masculinity after being a bullied nerd for so long.

    I liked how effective the characterization of the car was in the movie, how Christine would only play 1950s rock songs that expressed its emotions in a scene ("We Belong Together"; "Bony Maronie"; "Come on, Let's Go"), bringing an eerie, creepy feel to the songs, and the special effects when Christine regenerates herself after being destroyed were fantastic, through hydraulics crumpling the car and puckering in, then the film played in reverse to show the car "fixing" herself. I especially liked a sequence where, after Christine starts a fire at a gas station and kills two people while gunning to kill the main bully, the car is fully engulfed in flames and being driven by stunt veteran Terry Leonard, who had doubled for Harrison Ford in Raiders of the Lost Ark around that time.

    I liked this movie a lot, mostly for the special effects and the personification of the car as the villain, as well as the depiction of the bullied nerd becoming a horrible person and his best friend and girlfriend becoming the heroes of the film. It's a really interesting and haunting film of the 1980s.