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.
So much of Carrie now looks, 48 years on, unsubtle to say the least – and yet De Palma is a master of making that lack of subtlety work cinematically. The frankly outrageous soft-porn aesthetic of the initial girls’ locker room scene gives us Spacek almost languorously soaping herself in the shower, in a way that is madly inconsistent with her character. And yet without that absurdly provocative sequence, the “period” moment wouldn’t have been so transgressive, so nasty, so tactless. This is crass, this is the male gaze, sure – and yet it is subverted by its casually explicit violence and vulnerability. It’s impossible to feel anything other than genuine protective concern for a female character who is later to show that she doesn’t need anyone’s protection.
And that staggering, drawn-out prom sequence, in which Carrie evolves from ugly duckling to swan to something else entirely – its meaning and atmosphere changes on a subsequent viewing. The first time you watch it, the denouement is a shock, despite the fact that in previous scenes you’ve seen the nasty planning that has gone into it. But the second time, the scene is, end to end, an unbearable ordeal of pure evil: minute after minute goes by while Carrie progressively relaxes and begins to enjoy herself with the wonderful boy who’s taken her on this date. And then, when she unleashes her gonzo uproar of telekinetic rage, De Palma fragments the spectacle with a split-screen: a crazy death metal of carnage.
Carrie is about all the things it didn’t know it was about: internalised misogyny and self-hate, and the theatre of cruelty involved in high school popularity. It isn’t explicitly about school shootings and yet it shows you, like no other film I have ever seen, the horrifying wish-fulfilment ecstasy of such horrific acts. De Palma is the only director who could have done it.
• Carrie is in UK and Irish cinemas from 18 October
