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Director: Brian De Palma
Screenwriter: Lawrence D. Cohen

By Roderick Heath

The novel Carrie, published in 1974, vaulted a struggling young English teacher with a few short stories to his credit named Stephen King to sudden fortune and fame. Director Brian De Palma, looking for a project after his would-be breakout project Phantom of the Paradise (1974) had proved only a minor cult success, was recommended the novel by a friend who also knew King. After reading the book De Palma found the rights were unsold and snapped them up. Something of the material’s weird magic rubbed off. De Palma’s film of Carrie became his first big hit and marked his emergence as a fully mature filmmaker in his major phase, and boosted several members of its cast, including star Sissy Spacek and supporting actors Nancy Allen, Amy Irving, and John Travolta, to it-kid status. The film’s success also sparked a swiftly metastasizing industry adapting King’s work for the movies, which only helped reinforce his position as one of the preeminent genre wordsmiths of the last fifty years. King himself had only reluctantly committed to writing the novel after the first scene came to him a squall of phobic thinking when, working part-time as a janitor in a school with his brother and cleaning some girls’ locker room showers, was fixated by the image of some poor girl terrified by her period suddenly arriving whilst showering and being ferociously mocked by her classmates, a scene of a kind King had witnessed often in high school.

The taboo-grazing blood rite King had psychically conjured upon proved to be the ticket to directly tapping into the modern audience’s new hunger for a kind of direct engagement with things once kept off in the margins of metaphor in artistic report, in both the intimate engagement with a young woman’s body as an unstable and sometimes alien thing to herself, and the direct portrayal of the raw pack animal behaviour young people often inflict on each-other in the process of growing up, and the occasions where such behaviour gains a dreadful retaliation. The cementing of suburban youth culture in the 1950s made the dramas of adolescence increasingly profound as part of the average person’s life. Carrie’s appeal is, then, plainly emblazoned in its core imagery and concept, a tale recognisable from just about everyone’s youth in the games of social status amongst teenagers and fantasies of revenge stoked in the face of rejection. King’s ambivalence about his subject and characters was mediated to a degree by his choice of writing it as a modern version of an epistolary novel, that is, one that affects to relate a story through second-hand sources like letters, diary entries, and newspaper articles, holding the key personalities at a certain distance. Once boiled down by screenwriter Lawrence D. Cohen to something more immediate and reconstructed by De Palma into a succession of potent images, King’s story clearly had the directness and velocity of a modern myth.

For De Palma, the former no-budget semi-experimental ironist springing out of the Greenwich Village hipster scene, Carrie was a dynamic embrace of commercial populism, and yet still charged with a transgressive energy in style and story. After scoring cult successes with his early works like Greetings (1968) and Hi, Mom! (1972) on the counterculture-informed midnight movie circuit, De Palma cobbled together the money to make Sisters (1972), a blend of new age Alfred Hitchcock revisionism, Italian giallo movie riff, and New Yorker’s inside joke that put him on the path to mainstream attention, only be foiled by Phantom of the Paradise’s failure with its wilfully odd attempt to blend Grand Guignol pathos and ink-black satirical comedy. The ironic thing there is that Carrie basically presents the same mixture, complete with another tormented victim-monster at the centre like Phantom’s Winslow Leach, broken on the world’s wheel but also transformed into a force that starts laying waste to the iniquitous. This time however De Palma swapped giddy absurdum for tight-wound drama. De Palma’s infamous tendency to twist the knife deep and hard with his pitiable antiheroes found an ideal stage to play out on in King’s story. De Palma’s cultural and political cynicism likewise found a more personal realm to play out in, latching onto King’s reportage of a country in painfully dynamic social flux where medieval religiosity can sit cheek-by-jowl with the kind of blunt modern sensibility both King and De Palma personified in their individual ways.

As well as the worm-turns essence of the storyline De Palma was likely also attracted to a central character who plays as a distaff take on Psycho’s (1960) Norman Bates, with Margaret a still-living Mrs Bates, and her house as an islet of American Gothic: the homage is made more explicit in naming both the high school and the nearby slaughterhouse after Bates. And yet Carrie also sees De Palma defining himself askew from mere emulation of Hitchcock, indulging visual techniques antipathetic to the master. Carrie also had good fortune to be released after the enormous success of William Peter Blatty’s novel The Exorcist and its 1973 film, a zeitgeist-defining that identified the corporeal form of an adolescent girl as the ideal vessel for satanic hellraising in a fragmented and faithless modern world. As a story Carrie both rode that wave and also dismantled it, accusing repressive and neurotically obsessive religiosity as part of the conspiracy of torment that results in calamity, counterpointed by a new variety of milquetoast, disinterested, hands-off attitude by the representatives of adult authority in the hothouse environment of the average contemporary American high school which offers no harsh chastisement but no solace either. The first glimpse of Carrie White (Spacek) is on the volleyball court of Bates High School, failing to smack back a ball when it sails her way, earning the disdain and abuse of her classmates. De Palma follows with a long, languorous credit sequence, with his slow-motion camera and Vaseline-glazed misty imagery, glides across a school playing field and slides through changing rooms for female high schoolers as they wash and get dressed.

De Palma immediately pokes fun at multiple targets, playing out the voyeuristic teenage boy fantasy of getting an eyeful in a girls’ locker room and the kind of movies that had exploded around the same time built making bank with such fantasies. At the same time he plays at sentimentalising it, Pino Donaggio’s lush strings scoring rendering the scene like some lyrical depiction of the blooming glory of young womanhood. Cross-reference the more idealised, clean, arty version found in the early scenes of Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975). The caressing slow-motion tracking shot zeroes in on Carrie showering alone, lost in the warmth of the shower and the sensual pleasure of touching herself, the image of the protean adolescent ripe for plucking, until she experiences the raw terror of suddenly finding her nethers leaking blood, an inevitable and completely natural moment of burgeoning that is nonetheless a profound shock to Carrie as she’s never been told about it by her fanatically religious and abusive mother Margaret (Piper Laurie). Carrie’s terrified pleas for help reap only ruthless joy from her fellows who pelt her with sanitary products to the malicious chorus of chant, “Plug it up! Plug it up!”, which evokes the “One of us!” chant from Freaks (1932) but with inverted meaning: the exalted state of conformist normality can only be so exalted by finding a sacrificial lamb. Or perhaps the better Biblical reference point is the Gadarene swine, to contain the concentrated essence of wickedness to be released at some appropriate juncture.

This rite of blood and shunning is interrupted by gym teacher Miss Collins (Betty Buckley) intervenes with vehement anger, promising to punish the girls for their behaviour and helping Carrie out of her cowering humiliation and shame. But, as Collins herself confesses to the school principal Morton (Stefan Gierasch), she experienced a similar kind of exasperation to the girls at the spectacle of Carrie’s absurdity. Morton, confirming complete cluelessness and timidity when faced with such female trouble, lets Collins handle the girls, and Collins forces the class to exercise to the point of exhaustion on pain of being banned from attending the upcoming prom. When one of the girls, the wilful and entitled Chris Hargensen (Allen), refuses to play along, Collins smacks her and bans her, scaring the rest back in line. Chris plots revenge aimed not at Collins but at Carrie, and Chris’s former friend Sue Snell (Irving) accidentally hands her the perfect way to achieve it when she decides to try and cheer Carrie up by asking her own, popular jock boyfriend Tommy Ross (William Katt) to take Carrie to the prom instead of her. Tommy is initially dismayed by the prospect, but is eventually convinced, in part because he and Carrie recently shared a moment in English class, under the auspices of the patronising and disdainful teacher Mr Fromm (Sydney Lassick), where she pronounced one of his writing projects Fromm reads aloud with an acerbic lilt as “beautiful” and he quietly insulted Fromm for mocking Carrie’s moment of self-expression.

Carrie herself can only wander homewards after her excruciating ushering into adulthood. But another new trait has arrived along with her period, first manifesting in a moment of confusion during her panic when she screams as Collins tries to bring her out of her hysteria and a light globe overhead abruptly busts, and becoming more defined as she glares at a younger boy who calls her the teasing name “Creepy Carrie!” and seems to make him fall from his bike by force of will. Later Carrie investigates in the school library and realises she has telekinetic abilities. But returning to her home Carrie finds herself still entirely at the moment of her zealous, domineering, cape-swanning mother, who spends her days soliciting donations for some vague denominational cause and ranting about the influence of Satan, an imprint she sees now as fatefully taken hold of her daughter after long repressing it. “Why didn’t you tell me momma?” Carrie questions in tearful agonistes whilst her mother wallops her with a religious pamphlet and exiles her to a closet specially kept as a place of imprisonment and musing under the baleful glaze of a glowing-eyed crucified Jesus. Eventually, after the frantic, gruelling spectacle of parental abuse and Carrie’s anguish is expended she’s released and allowed to go to bed.

Carrie feels curiously distinct from the pack of 1970s American Horror cinema despite sharing key concerns with so much of it – a supernaturally-gifted child destroyer a la The Exorcist and The Omen (1976), and a setting befitting a genre becoming obsessed with both depicting and sating teenagers, which could still deliver movies as diverse as Massacre at Central High (1976), Communion (1976), and Halloween (1978), and a tendency Carrie’s success likely quickened. Carrie’s distinction stems from the opportune convergence of De Palma, his cast, and King’s story. De Palma made the $1.8 million budget, solid for a ‘70s genre film but still very modest, stretch a hell of a long way, and applies operatic reaches style that’s the complete opposite to the low-budget, DIY atmosphere of many films of the time. That stringency was exemplified by the so-real-you-can-smell-it intensity of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), although both films become fixated by a spectacle of witnessing horror, communicated through flash edits zeroing in on the eyes of a young woman’s – the arrested cosmic terror of Sally Hardesty gives way to the arresting cosmic wrath of Carrie White. Both movies also connect the griminess of working-class life as represented by industrialised farming, a zone where bloodshed is at once carefully controlled and rendered on a vast scale, and human degradation, tethered in the singular, queasy connection of Carrie’s menstruation and a fateful bucket of pig’s blood. The narrative’s slow burn towards a singular, orgiastic eruption of violence and character-driven drama in the meantime are also distinctive at a moment when the genre was becoming increasingly geared towards serving up shock machines populated by living mannequins. This informed the film’s embracing as a mainstream success, with Oscar nominations for Spacek and Laurie, a rare achievement for a Horror film.

Spacek herself, genuinely remarkable in the role, lobbied intensely for it after having worked under De Palma as a costumer on Phantom of the Paradise. Spacek had already established a unique ability on Terrence Malick’s Badlands (1974) to seem at once earthy and alien, open and recessive, and this talent is key to Carrie’s success, particular in the climax where her blood-caked, glaze-eyed visage shifts from human to demonic in the blink of an eye. De Palma depicts the multiple forms of abuse and misuse Carrie receives with a blatant verve that manages to walk a very fine line between savage intensity and campy extremity. Margaret White’s religious paraphernalia and fire-and-brimstone speechifying, brilliantly expostulated through Laurie’s well-pitched performance, is imbued with a faint touch of black humour (like flashes of lightning accompanying some of her grimmer pronouncements, almost like we’ve segued into a Mel Brooks film) that keeps the experience from being too nasty and convincing, but still evoking pain. Carrie herself, unlike the gawky, sullen character in King’s book, is allowed a sympathetic pathos reminiscent of a Dickens heroine, vulnerable and damaged but retaining of dignity and grit that begins to assert itself as her secret power grows, even if soon enough Little Dorrit goes Godzilla on their asses.

De Palma’s tendency to be mean to his protagonists in his 1970s and ‘80s heyday, a tendency that many onlookers found off-putting, wasn’t an incidental perversity but core to his essential worldview, beholding everyone as engaged in a battle to the death, whether they know it or not, with powers reigning over them and/or within them. Carrie gave him the perfect focal point for this recurring drama as she fights on both fronts and loses on both. Carrie’s stab at liberation is potent, as she begins to wield her telekinetic ability to hold her mother at bay and takes up Tommy’s invitation, met at first with incredulity, as a vessel that, no matter what motives are behind it, she can ride to some new shore. But there’s a weak point in that armour of emancipation which, when breached, has consequences beyond reckoning. One irony in De Palma’s treatment of King’s story, one the writer himself noted, was in seeing it as an account of a matriarchy, a world of women controlled by women existing semi-separately to the one shared by the genders, where the ferocity aimed at eccentricity can make the peevishness of boys look limp by comparison, and where feminine power exists in multiple forms, good and bad and smudged.

Collins’ embodiment of a positive force is complicated by her also being an avatar of an everyday world that can’t help but be exasperated by Carrie as an emissary from a slightly different one. Carrie’s need for her mother to show her something resembling unconditional love simmers right up until she’s obliged to kill her. De Palma raises the curtain on two different kinds of female manipulation, one essentially positive, as Sue talks Tommy into taking Carrie to the prom, and one negative, as Chris wields a mixture of unease-inducing derision and sexual appeal to push her boyfriend Billy (Travolta) into helping her plan to destroy Carrie. And Billy signs on with giggly-dumb charm, readily exchanging hanging out and driving around for bashing a pig to death, much to Chris’s flagrant erotic excitement, conveyed as De Palma cuts repeatedly from Billy’s hammer swings to Chris’s chanting delight. The linkage of cruelty to sexuality isn’t just the usual edge of sadism attributed to villains either: this is a portrayal of social order enforcement at a basic level, the core breeding class ensuring their perpetuation by guarding privilege and punishing outliers. Whatever gloss the ‘70s youth culture bestows on them doesn’t disguise their part in an ancient order. Collins’ collective punishment of the girls only has the effect of stirring more determined action from the hive.

Margaret White on the other hand tries to subsist within a bubble preserving another atavistic order, playing at detachment from all fashion, a bubble of faux-renaissance paintings of the Last Supper on the walls, candlelit dinners, and terrible wrath. Margaret of course comes to believe her daughter’s manifesting gift comes like her monthly from Satan, despite Carrie’s insistence that it comes only from herself, much in the same way as she retorts to her mother decrying her “dirty pillows” on display in her prom dress, “They’re called breasts, momma, and every woman has them.” Margaret’s raving climactic soliloquy to Carrie recounts her relationship with her long-since absconded husband, who respected her demand for chastity in their union until one night he came home drunk and molested her, to her eventual enjoyment, a lapse into humanity Margaret becomes convinced she’s being punished for through her cursed child. The example of mania her mother provides is one Carrie tries to move past but ultimately entraps her: the moment she’s presented with a source of rage and the power to do something with it she reacts in exactly the same way. Meanwhile Carrie’s timorous reaction to Tommy’s invitation gets to Collins who angrily confronts him and Sue, assuming they’re up to more mischief, but eventually, warily accepts their reasoning. Tommy goes to see Carrie at her home to repeat his invitation, and finally gets her to accept, and Carrie begins embracing her chance to bloom with determination.

Carrie’s story advances with the rigour and inevitability of Greek tragedy, a likeness that only becomes stronger as it encompasses an offended heroine whose story counts down in distorted gradations of unified time and setting, and a stage that becomes an amphitheatre of carnage and breakdown, and where the mechanics of what’s happening unfold with predestined smoothness. Intrigues simultaneously reach out to Carrie to rescue her and destroy her, charted with mischievous detail and coming together in the prom. Hitchcock, never of course far out of range of De Palma’s points of reference, is nodded to in the suburban gothic of the White house and in the name of the High School. De Palma’s aesthetic for the film is as hot as Stanley Kubrick’s for The Shining (1981) would be cold, via Mario Tosi’s cinematography. De Palma’s deeply sarcastic romanticism continues with Carrie’s walk home early in the film along sun-dappled streets replete with shady trees and red roses that mimic and mock her menstrual blood, and mirrors this imagery towards the end as a sanctified and white-clad Sue makes the same walk towards the White house, or where it used to be. Strong anticipation here for the aesthetic David Lynch would apply to Blue Velvet (1986) of a stylised, utopian, too-good-to-be-true suburban life.

Collins’ forced exercise regimen for the girls’ punishment becomes a little aria of camera wit, tracking along at thigh-height with the teacher as the girls are put through their strenuous paces, rendered ridiculous as they bob in and out of the frame with increasingly frayed expressions. This is in itself a more deadpan and playful riposte to the precursor scene where Margaret lords over Carrie where De Palma conveys the application of authority more ominously from on high, as Margaret slaps her daughter’s face with a booklet with a chapter title, ‘The Sins of Woman’ and, with a similar rhythmic intensity to the exercising girls, tries to make Carrie repeat her chant of “The first sin was intercourse,” which also echoes the girls’ chant of “Plug it up!” By contrast, De Palma sees Tommy and his pals hitting the town to be fitted for prom tuxedos, vaguely recalling the lads about town in Greetings, except that De Palma starts fast-forwarding through their yammering, a good joke in its own right that engages in a playful way with De Palma’s delight in the texture of film itself, and also a curt thematic underlining: the boys aren’t the show in this movie. The detention exercise scene also provides a definitive character moment with Chris’s attempted rebellion turning distraught after Collins slaps her, and her appeal to her friends – “She can’t get away with this if we all stick together!” – gains only timorous shakes of the head from most and, from a revolted Sue, one “Shut up Chris, just shut up.”

Irving, who would be promoted to the role of gifted-accursed psychic in The Fury (1978), De Palma’s thematic sequel, has an interesting role as Sue, whose journey is in a way the actual core of Carrie although she’s not the focal point, as Sue represents a kind of assailed middle ground in the story, someone who grows up a little faster than her schoolmates but remains dangerously naïve in aspects. Glimpsed at first eagerly joining the pack attacking Carrie, she’s pulled aside by Collins when she first comes on the scene and angrily berated for her behaviour, and looks bewildered, as if pulled out of sleepwalking. Sue’s desire to do Carrie a good turn – “We don’t care how we look,” she tells Collins when the teacher confronts her and Tommy – is a noble gesture with troubling caveats, in obliging her boyfriend to make that gesture on her behalf, but not imagining there’s personal risk in it, and in accidentally handing Chris the perfect venue for her own cruelty. Sue’s working on Tommy resolves when he finally says he’ll do it whilst she’s doing homework and he’s watching a James Garner Western on TV, a deft little joke that suggests Tommy enjoys playing the white knight. Irving’s on-screen mother Eleanor was played by her real one, Priscilla Pointer. Eleanor’s early encounter with Margaret, who comes to her house soliciting donations, sees the way adult transaction counterpoint those of teenagers, Eleanor trying her best to fend off Margaret’s proselytising with awkward courtesy before flatly bribing her to go away, a gesture Margaret accepts but not without making sure the offender feels the frost her righteous gaze.

De Palma also taps the paraphernalia of Margaret’s religiosity for exceedingly dark humour and even darker psychology, setting up a motif that has its brilliantly sick pay-off by film’s end. Margaret’s exiling of Carrie into the prayer cupboard sees her share space with a statue of St Sebastian, riddled with arrows, upturned eyes painted with phosphorescent paint to better depict ecstatic agony. Good education for a life of martyrdom. Carrie already has Tommy in her sights as a fair idol, a newspaper clipping of his footballing exploits stuck to the side of her bedroom mirror, a mirror whose gaze she cracks in a moment of anxiety but manages to reforge mentally in time to avoid her mother’s attention. Katt is also tremendous as the genuinely good-natured Tommy, who eventually finds not just pride but real affection in playing Carrie’s beau for the night as he comes to comprehend there’s an interesting, potentially lovely person on his arm. He deftly knocks aside her not-at-all-illusioned stabs at releasing him from duty by assuring her he asked her out “because you liked my poem,” although he admits later he didn’t write it. Meanwhile Chris draws in other friends into her conspiracy, including Freddy (Michael Talbott), who left school before graduation and works now in the local slaughterhouse, and her friend Norma (P.J. Soles), who volunteer to be on the committee overseeing the election of the Prom King and Queen, intending to stuff the ballot for Carrie. Chris gets Freddy to help her and Billy kill a pig and collect its blood in a bucket, which they rig up in the rafters of the high school gym, where the prom will be take place, to pour the contents down on Carrie as a sadistic coup-de-theatre.

Carrie works beautifully as a metaphor for the sheer goddamn pain of growing up as a human animal. Where in the book Carrie had her powers from childhood here it’s explicitly connected with her new maturation, connecting them as devices of creation and destruction. For Margaret the ‘Sin of Woman” is not just to experience lust but to propagate at all. Spacek herself defined her understanding of Carrie as a “secret poet” who has no gift at expression and assertion until some strange kink of fate gifts her this powerful talent, as if her stifled will has forced some latent part of herself to grow like muscle. Or perhaps it’s a test provided from on high, or on low, connected to rather than breaking from her upbringing, and what Carrie then does with it can be seen a radical extrapolation of the Christian concept of free will. The more immediately troubling facet of Carrie’s prognosis lies in its understanding the pressure cooker nature of modern teenage life and the age of the school massacre, the school a social zone designed to force young people to become independent entities but instead all too often producing both dronish cliques and outcasts and rebels, experiences that most make part of their permanent identity for good or ill. King noted in his book On Writing that both of the girls he based Carrie on from his experience died young, one by suicide, their pain turned inward and septic, but Carrie the book and film sees a time when that kind of sickness will be turned outward and become the stuff of mass media causes celebre.

Notably, in The Fury when De Palma picked up the same basic plot motif of psychic powers as a metaphor for adolescent genesis and the fine line between creative and destructive potential, he turned the tables in making the popular, sporty kids stricken with the same power, with Robin Sandza the ultimate coddled man-child jock, and Gillian Bellaver a more focused and virtuous version of Carrie, finally blowing the false parent/authority figure to smithereens. Carrie certainly cemented precepts Horror cinema would extend for years afterwards, but also seems from today’s perspective to have left a deeper influence on popular storytelling to come, many of which would invert the film’s tragic apocalypse into heroic narratives. Works like the Harry Potter series and a vast swathe of superhero movies take up its wish-fulfilment thread whilst avoiding its bleak contemplation of social and psychological determinism. The wave of high school movies, whilst having more realistic narratives, like Pretty In Pink (1985) and Mean Girls (2003) might also be counted as its children. The film’s underpinning similarities to George Lucas’ Star Wars (1977) as an adolescent fantasy about control and annihilation, despite the very different tonal and genre frames, is given extra piquancy by how many members of Carrie’s cast also tried to get in on the Lucas film.

In any event, Carrie’s climactic prom sequence is one of those cinematic set-pieces it’s hard not to relish in anticipation even as in involves terrible things, simply for the sheer verve of the filmmaking and storytelling force. The sequence divides in three miniature chapters, each keyed to a different emotional experience and a different style, beginning with a depiction of rising exultation, a midsection of simultaneous anointing and portent, and a climax that erupts in anarchy. These chapters also have metaphysical overtones connected with Carrie’s experience: heaven, purgatory, hell. Heaven, because Carrie’s entrance to the prom and her experiences seem like her deepest wishes coming true, as she connects with people for the first time, finding actual friends in Tommy, Collins and some other girls, with Sue watching on like a fairy godmother who’s made this particular pumpkin into a princess. Purgatory where the slow motion photography stretches time into a dream zone where triumph – Tommy and Carrie delighted to find they’ve been elected and ascend to claim their dues – and calamity – Sue and Billy hiding behind the scenery with their fingers on the rope – coexist, and finally the inferno released along with the torrent of blood.

De Palma had already established himself as a powerful visual stylist, but the techniques and structural elements he would bring into play here formed his arsenal henceforth and defined him as a mature talent, winnowed down a series of suite-like moves. One constant De Palma stylistic motif provides the crux of the movie, spinning his camera with increasingly speed whilst also zoomed in, delivering a resultant feeling of dizzied rhapsody around Carrie and Tommy as they dance, a swooning islet of pure teenage romanticism that’s sufficient in itself. The central slow-motion passage performs a similar feat of immersive style but to quite different effect, swooning headiness giving way to dreamlike ponderousness that exacerbates with malicious humour and charts coinciding actions with precision – Sue, having agreed to keep away from the prom to avoid any hint of unpleasantness for Carrie, sneaks in to revel in the scene she cares about like a good director, only to notice the trembling rope linked to the bucket above, and, following it, almost breaks in upon Chris and Billy in their hidey-hole. Only for her intervention to be forestalled by Collins, who thinks she’s going to make trouble, grabbing Sue and showing her out of the gym without listening to her explanation. De Palma dives in for a close-up of Chris licking her lips in sensual relish of her triumph, her face a gleaming mask of almost sexual satisfaction in her moment of revenge. And down comes the rain of red, red blood, splattering on Carrie, and with the bucket dangling and falling, hitting Tommy on the head and killing him.

The precise diagramming of the various story and character threads here and accompanying, interlaced ironies makes for a just about perfect unit of filmmaking, and that’s before Carrie avenges herself by wielding her powers in blind madness, psychically controlling doors and firehoses to herd and pummel the crowd, unleashing fire and flood. Here, De Palma’s virulent showmanship is also Carrie’s, apparent as she forces all the doors of the gym shut and then turns on a red fill light, all the better to perform devilish work. De Palma presents Carrie’s delirious perspective with wheeling kaleidoscopic images as her mother’s enjoining, “They’re all gonna laugh at you!” repeats in her head whilst she imagines the entire crowd, rather than the handful of creeps the more neutral camera reveals, laughing and jeering at her perfect humiliation. De Palma then turns to split-screen shots, which he had played with on Sisters but here found a more aggressive use for, to present the violent action in a flux of cause and effect, picking out both diverse events and different angles on the same moment. Carrie herself becomes cinematically bifurcated as she is mentally. At the centre of all this is Spacek-as-Carrie sweeping all before her, mouth twisted in an awful deathly grin when the blood first falls on her, reminiscent of silent film Horror images like The Man Who Laughs’ (1928) carved grin or The Phantom of the Opera (1926) wearing his Red Death mask, caught somewhere between lunatic hilarity and plain lunacy, before her face turns impassive and her eyes wide and aglow with berserker wrath as she rains down death.

There’s another sting in the little detail that the two people most responsible for her downfall, Chris and Billy, sneak out before she unleashes the mayhem. Instead Carrie’s indiscriminate hate falls on both creeps like Freddy and Norma but also on many absolutely innocent people, even Collins, who, realising what’s happening, cries at Carrie to stop it only to be crushed by a piece of stage scenery. Fromm is fried by whipping electrical wires and the backcloth catches fire, a rippling wave of fire rising behind Carrie’s red-smeared silhouette, become a creature akin to the awesome Chernibog in Fantasia (1940) commanding an army of imps dancing in the flames. Steven Spielberg might have kept it in mind just a little for the climax Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981); Quentin Tarantino certainly did for Inglourious Basterds (2009). De Palma pulls off a most difficult feat in forcing the audience to identify with Carrie, even love her, and then behold the spectacle of her maniacal anger, about as a pure an episode of Grand Guignol there is in cinema. Carrie, still lurching in wraithlike detachment, exists the blazing gym and wanders down the road, where Chris and Billy spot her as Chris drives Billy’s car with a glint of her own maniacal delight in her eyes, whilst Billy drools and giggles. De Palma’s editing here, taking the inward-stepping jump cuts to the dead man’s eyes in The Birds (1963) to a hyperbolic zone, skips in towards Spacek’s glowing eyes in lightning-fast jump-cuts that explicitly connect the glaze-gazed power of Carrie’s looking as she turns at almost the last second and casually swats the car aside with her power, then makes it explode.

Carrie’s return home nonetheless sees the avenging angel becoming a pathetic child again, washing off the blood that cakes her and searching for her mother, who has set up guttering candles throughout the house but seems to be hiding herself, eventually proving to be hovering behind the door to Carrie’s bedroom. Margaret recounts Carrie’s conception and then stabs her daughter with a kitchen knife, and stalks her through the house with a blissful grin on her face. Carrie defends herself by launching kitchen implements at Margaret until she’s been turned into a simulacrum of the St Sebastain statute, the lolling moans and grins of Margaret condensing martyred rapture and Sadean penetration into a singular new state. Carrie beholds the perverse pieta she’s sculpted – offered by De Palma and Motti in a slowly unveiling pullback that exactly hits the equator between black comedy coup and character pathos. Carrie’s subconscious takes over, consuming the house in fire and disintegration whilst she makes one last, desperate attempt to retreat with her mother’s corpse into the prayer closet. De Palma moves into assure she’s at least granted the mercy of dying from her mother’s wound rather than being crushed and burned to death.

All this is the kind of tragic narrative that can really only be served up in the Horror genre as entertainment rather than some as solemn cultural chore, Carrie sharing DNA with Lon Chaney Jnr’s afflicted Wolf Man or Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein’s Monster, born into a cruel world and departing from it in relief. The very end proves a deliciously merciless De Palma fake-out of a kind he would return to repeatedly in variations. After a brief vignette of Eleanor looking after a traumatised and tranquilised Sue, we see Sue walking down the pavement and entering the yard of the decimated White house, a neat rectangle of ground where the building was filled with grey stones, a suggestively cruciform For Sale sign planted amidst with “Carrie White Burns In Hell” crudely scrawled across it. Sue is envisioned in angelic white, a mourner paying tribute to a failed friend and kind of suppliant offering obeisance to a vengeful goddess, only for a bloodied hand to reach out of the ground and grip her arm. De Palma’s stylisation for this scene carefully announces it’s a dream, with Donaggio’s scoring presenting a lilting, Ennio Morricone-esque lyricism that suggests a fantasy of peacemaking, only for it to turn starkly and suddenly into a nightmare where the grip of such wounding horror never really lets go. De Palma cuts to black on the image of a distraught Sue being calmed by her mother, a vision which does, at least, finally restore the classical mother-child relationship to something like what it’s usually supposed to be.