Did you catch yesterday’s teaser trailer?

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Are you ready for ‘Carrie?’

Screen Gems brought two remakes to Comic-Con and they are unspooling in front of your eyes this week. It’s ‘Carrie’ and ‘The Evil Dead,’ perhaps the only time these two movies will be competing for ad time against each other.

But don’t confuse these projects in the slightest. ‘The Evil Dead’ is a bro’s game where as ‘Carrie’ is surprisingly female-oriented (it shouldn’t be surprising, but considering the first film is De Palma based on a book by non-vaginal Stephen King, it ended up that way). Finally, we don’t have to turn to our men to chant ‘plug it up!’ as director Kimberly Pierce (‘Boys Don’t Cry’) takes the helm and Julianne Moore steps into the role of Maragret, Carrie’s less-than mentally stable mother.

You already get the idea from the teaser that the destruction of this film is going to take place beyond the expected prom, but just how different is this ‘Carrie’ from what we thought it was?

Talking to Moretz, this looks to be a book-based psycho-drama that might have a few more twists in it than we were expecting.

Have you seen the original ‘Carrie?’

Chloe Moretz: Yes, I saw the original film when I was about thirteen or fourteen and I actually love the original film. I think it’s beautiful, beautiful, it was very theatrical and very big, you know? It was a theatrical big movie, and I love it for that and then I hadn’t read the book until I booked the part and that’s when I read the original novel. That’s when I absolutely fell in love with it.

I went every day on set, every scene I have, I’d compare the scene in the book to the scene in the script and I wrote down all my notes on the script and any ideas I had for the character and then I’d look at what Stephen did cause, you know, what he had written down what he had done, then I melded the two together and created this great collaboration between the book and my performance.

You’ve worked before in ‘Kick-Ass’ which is sort of this genre of film so what draws you to horror or darker material?

CM: You know, what really attracts me to darker material is the fact that, you know, I don’t like playing really light characters in the sense I don’t like playing characters that are like me, because I really have a good life and a really supportive mother and a good family and that type of stuff is just kind of boring for me. I’d like to play characters that really strech me and make me feel something I’ve never felt before or express something I’ve never expressed before. It’s made me work with with actors that make me be on the tip of my game and just going at it, you know?

And that’s really what makes me want to do something the most, it’s not really about the genre. It just happens to fall into the darker region, then, you know, a Rom Com. But it comes from wanting to do something that’s stretching me.

What struck you about the character and the Stephen King book?

CM: What I found so amazing were the dimensions of the character. She’s not just – in the book – she’s not just some angry character with no reason to be mad and just wants to hurt people for the skae of hurting them. Carrie is the person who is put down by everyone else around her, even by the person she loves the most who is her mother. She loves her mother the most and she looks up to her mother more than anything else in the world, but she’s also the person that tells her “No.” She tells her “you’re never going to amount to anything,” but really you realize that Maragaret has her own issues from her past and what she had done to her. Why she kept Carrie, the guilt she has, you know?

So ,that’s why in this movie, obviously we don’t go as far back into Margaret’s childhood as the book does, we don’t go back that far but you really get a sense of what happened and what has happened to make her treat her daughter like this. And how Carrie understands this stuff. Like the scene where they’re hugging and she’s telling Carrie everything that happened to her and she’s like: “Mom, I don’t want to hear this, I don’t want to hear this” and Maragret’s like: “No, you need to know, you need to know.” And with a scene like that, the script only tells you so much and I wanted to read the book because the script won’t take you back as far as the book takes you and I wanted to add another layer to that.

In the film she’s constantly sort of wide-eyed, where as in the book-

CM: She’s madder.

Yeah. Where does your character land?

CM: She’s in the middle. You know, my character…honestly, what I wanted to show to the character is that she wasn’t naieve, she wasn’t stupid. She understood everything that was going on around her to the point where she over-comprehended what people were saying to her. People would just say: “Yeah, whatever, you’re ugly” and she processes that more than they understand. In everyday life, if someone says you’re not as good as that actor in that movie, you’re like: “Oh, um…ok.” It might not effect them as much as it does you, and you might take that in and process that in a differne way. And that’s what happens with Carrie. Everything bad that’s put out at her, she takes it in more than other people even realize and through that she goes stronger and harder and at the prom, she breaks down. That’s why – everything she’s kept together, everything from her mother and her peers, her teachers, everyone around her, it unfolds. The telekinesis takes whatever motion is inside her at the moment and multiples it by a thousand.

The previous things you’ve worked on have had male directors. Do you feel like having a female director on this project sends it in a different direction you wouldn’t have had if it’d been a male?

CM: Completely. Having a female director directing Carrie brought such a maternal aspect to the movie that I don’t think youc ould have another way. Working with Kim…

…When you mention the word “period” to a man, they cringe. With a woman, it’s just a part of life, it’s a part of who you are, it just happens. And that’s why on this movie, I’ve been able to connect with Kim and the things she’s been through in her life. She’s shared a lot of her secrets with me, and I was able to share my secrets with her. We created such an amazing bond, a maternal bond together that I felt so safe and so comfortable to do whatever I had to do to make this movie to the fullest a i could make it because she put me in a position where I had never felt so secure…and insecure at the same time, you know? That’s why -

It’s such an insecure character, I had to take everything that I’ve built up myself with the opportunities I’ve been given and, you know, where I am now…I had to take everything I have now and put it away and I had to take the insecurities that I feel and I repress and I’ve taken away and I had to bring them out of myself. That’s why when you watch this movie, you see something I’ve never done before on screen. I’ve never been able to put that out or felt safe enough to put that out ever. But on this movie, Kim and Julianne allowed me to.