Brian De Palma’s insouciantly horrible masterpiece from 1976, adapted from the novel by Stephen King, and mixing in tropes and tricks from Hitchcock’s Psycho, is now rereleased. This is the extraordinary exploitation shocker that also conveyed – or anyway fabricated – an impassioned sympathy for a bullied teenage girl with telekinetic powers. It was a horror classic that didn’t conform to the narrative beats of the genre; it was a scary movie in which the terrifying demon was also the final girl.
Sissy Spacek gives an amazing performance as Carrie, a shy high school student and put-upon daughter of Margaret (Piper Laurie), whose fanatical religious devotion and fear of sex – and fear of Carrie having sex – stems from having been seduced and abandoned by Carrie’s now absent father many years previously. Poor, innocent Carrie still has not started her period, and when this happens in the showers after a volleyball game, she panics uncomprehendingly and the mean girls humiliate her by throwing tampons and chanting: “Plug it up!” Gym teacher Miss Collins (Betty Buckley) is outraged and – angrily smoking a cigarette and still wearing her PE shorts in the principal’s office – decides to hand out exemplary punishments to this crowd of bullies. This takes the form of a mortifying workout session which so enrages the queen-bee bully Chris (Nancy Allen) that she resolves to take a satanically wicked revenge on Carrie at the prom.
