This week, a new iteration of this classic will be hitting streaming… so it seemed as good a time as any to revisit this classic. Doubly so when I realized it was also its 50th anniversary.
By now, everyone knows the story of Carrie. It’s been parodied, riffed on, remade, and ripped off plenty in the past 50 years. The original, though, still holds up in a lot of ways. (Granted, there are a number of things that don’t quite fit modern sensibilities, but it is a product of its time.)
I’d forgotten just how quickly the plot zips by. There’s really no fat to trim in this, except maybe that one scene Tommy and his friends getting their tuxes for the prom… but even that is a nice little bit of character work and levity before everything goes so horribly bad for everyone.
There are two monsters in this movie and Carrie White isn’t one of them. If either one of those monsters hadn’t existed, there could have been a happy ending (or, at least, one with a lot less death and destruction).
First and foremost is Margaret White, Carrie’s mother. Her particular flavor of religious fanaticism and her projection of her own personal trauma onto her daughter set that poor girl up to be an outcast, at best. And then her continued refusal to actually listen to her daughter, let alone accept her–going so far near the end as to outright say “I should have killed myself when I knew I was pregnant”–is a special kind of emotional abuse that never ends well. At least not without years of therapy for the kid.
Because Carrie was an easy target, the second monster (the first we’re introduced to in the film), Chris Hargenson, is one of the original mean girls of modern cinema. She is, in a word, vile. Cruel for cruelty’s sake, manipulative to the extreme, and completely without conscience or regret. We get to see her rile everyone in that first locker room scene up, tease and manipulate her boyfriend, bully teachers, and just generally be the worst.
Sue and Tommy actually try to be better. And I’m convinced that, if there hadn’t been any blood spilled at the prom, Carrie and Tommy would have likely dated, and Sue would have accepted that and still been friends with both.
Unfortunately for just about everyone at the prom, that’s not how the story goes.
Because we get that scene. The one we all know. Where things go from amazingly dreamlike to utterly nightmarish in the tip of a single bucket.
It’s an easy scene to parody, because it’s so intense and wild. But if you’ve actually connected with any of these characters in any way–especially if you relate to Carrie in even the smallest way from personal experience of being bullied–you know there’s nothing funny about what happens when the good person finally breaks bad. Here, there’s the extra added hitch of the telekinetic powers.
The sudden use of split screen (a trademark choice in de Palma’s films) works wonderfully, allowing the focus to stay with Carrie while also showing the destruction and panic being unleashed.
Without this story–first the book and then this film–Stephen King likely wouldn’t be the household name he is and we’d be lacking all the delicious horror that he’s created and inspired since. And if this film hadn’t been as amazing a hit as it was, we might not have gotten everything else great from de Palma.
I genuinely love this story on multiple levels and I’m very curious to see how the new series builds on it for the modern era in an extended format. (Thankfully, I have no small amount of faith in Mike Flanagan, who’s already proven he “gets” King’s work and can do amazing things with both trauma and redemption.)
- Carrie (1976) – October 5, 2026
- The Love Witch – October 4, 2026
- Black Chariot (2026) – October 3, 2026
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