bRyan De Palma's incredibly terrifying 1976 horror masterpiece, adapted from Stephen King's novel and mixing the tropes and tricks of Hitchcock's Psycho, has now been reissued. It's an extraordinary exploitative surprise that evokes (or at least is manufactured) emotional sympathy for a bullied teenager with learning disabilities and telekinetic powers. It is a horror classic. It's a horror movie with a scary ghost as the final girl.
Sissy Spacek gives a wonderful performance as Carrie, a shy high school student and daughter of Margaret (Piper Laurie), whose fanatical religious piety and fear of sex (and Carrie's fear of having sex) develop when Carrie is now betrayed and abandoned. Many years ago he was left without a father. Poor, innocent Carrie hasn't started her period yet, and when it happens to her in the rain after a volleyball game, she freaks out and the mean girls throw away their tampons and yell, “Plug in!” They insult her by singing that. Gym teacher Miss Collins (Betty Buckley) angrily smokes a cigarette, wears PE shorts in the principal's office, and decides to give these bullies an exemplary punishment. This takes the form of a sadistic workout session, when bully queen bee Chris (Nancy Allen) is angry and decides to take satanic revenge on Carrie at the prom.
Many parts of Carrey now seem like 48 years of Palma, a master at making that subtlety cinematic. The overtly scandalous soft-porn aesthetic of the first girls' locker room scene gives us a soapy shower in which Spacek is almost maddeningly at odds with his character. However, without that ridiculously provocative sequence, the “Period” moment would not have been so transgressive, so crass, so tactless. It's silly, it's male gaze, sure, and yet it's marred by its casually overt violence and vulnerability. One can feel nothing but genuine protective concern for a female character who later proves she doesn't need anyone's protection.
And that dazzling, prolonged dance sequence in which Carrie transforms from ugly duckling to swan into something else entirely, the meaning and context of which changes with subsequent viewings. Even if you've seen poor planning in previous scenes, the first time you see it, the condemnation shocks you. But the second time, the scene is, from beginning to end, an unbearable proof of pure evil: minute by minute it goes by, while Carrie little by little relaxes and begins to enjoy the wonderful boy who took her on this date. Then, as he unleashes telekinetic fury, De Palma cuts the scene to pieces with a split screen: a death metal frenzy of carnage.
Carrie is about all the things she doesn't know: domestic misogyny and self-loathing, and the cruel drama involved in high school popularity. It's not overtly about school shootings, but it shows you the horrible, wish-fulfillment ecstasy of such heinous acts like no other movie I've ever seen. De Palma is the only director who could have done it.
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