Carrie (1976)

There's a moment in Carrie where everything you've hoped for Carrie White and everything you've dreaded collide at exactly the same instant. She's standing on that stage, crowned, smiling, and for just a second you think maybe it's going to be alright. Then the bucket tips. And you know, even as the horror unfolds, that this was always where it was heading. That's the genius of it. Brian De Palma knows you're watching a tragedy dressed up as a horror film, and he makes you feel every inch of it.

De Palma directs with an operatic boldness that suits the material perfectly. The split-screen, the slow-motion, the swelling score — it could all tip into excess, but it doesn't, because the emotional truth underneath keeps everything anchored. This is a film about a girl who is failed by absolutely everyone around her: her mother, her classmates, her teachers, the whole rotten social machinery of adolescence. The supernatural element isn't the point. It's the pressure valve.

Sissy Spacek is remarkable as Carrie White. There's a fragility to her that never once feels like a put-on. You believe in her shyness, her confusion, her desperate flicker of hope when kindness briefly finds her. And then you believe, terrifyingly, in her fury. It's a complete performance, one of those rare ones where you forget you're watching acting at all. Piper Laurie matches her at every turn as Carrie's mother, a woman so consumed by warped religious fervour that she's become something genuinely grotesque. The domestic scenes between them are almost as disturbing as anything in the prom sequence. Almost.

Because that prom scene. Good lord. It's one of the most precisely constructed sequences in horror cinema, and it still hits like a freight train nearly fifty years on. The practical effects, the pig's blood cascading down, the chaos that follows, hold up not just technically but emotionally. You're not watching a spectacle. You're watching a reckoning. De Palma understands that horror is most devastating when it's also heartbreaking, and here the two are inseparable.

It's worth noting that De Palma has a real gift for this kind of visceral, stylised filmmaking. I've followed his work across a few films now, including The Untouchables and Scarface, and while those films have a very different energy, you can trace the same instinct running through all of them: the showman's eye, the willingness to go big, the interest in people pushed to their absolute limit. Carrie might be where that instinct finds its purest, most affecting form.

The film's ideas about repression, cruelty and faith aren't subtle, but they don't need to be. King's story works because it takes the very real, very ordinary horrors of being a teenager — being mocked, being invisible, being trapped at home with someone who frightens you — and literalises them into something spectacular. The message isn't complicated: this is what happens when no one listens. When cruelty goes unchecked. When a person is pushed and pushed and pushed with nowhere to go.

If I have a reservation, it's a small one. Some of the secondary characters exist mainly as types rather than people, and a few of the nastier students are so cartoonishly cruel that they soften the film's otherwise sharp edges. It's a minor complaint against a film that earns its reputation many times over.

Three and a half stars. A cornerstone of 1970s horror, influential, disturbing, and genuinely sad. Not a slasher, not a monster movie, something stranger and more affecting than either. It bleeds power, and it always will.

Rating: ★★★½  | Year: 1976  | Watched: 2025-12-01

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Related on Movies With Macca

More from Brian De Palma: The Untouchables (1987) · Scarface (1983) · Carlito's Way (1993)
More from the 1970s: Fantastic Planet (1973) · Here and Elsewhere (1976) · Italianamerican (1974) · Punishment Park (1971)
More horror: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) · Viy (1967) · Nightmare City (1980) · Angst (1983)
More thriller: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) · Angst (1983) · The Long Walk (2025) · Punishment Park (1971)