Just How Sweet is Revenge

Rating: Null/10 (13 August 2009)

Above all, this is a revenge movie. In fact, revenge movies have long been a staple of masculine entertainment. Charles Bronson, for example, made a lucrative career out of macho revenge where the culprits get blown away with big time splatters. However, this is a revenge movie of a different stripe, one that appeals to a great number of us who look back on high school as a kind of horror film in its own right. If the subtext weren't so poignant, Carrie would amount to just another splatter film. But it's that powerful subtext of the victim contracting special powers to avenge humiliation that taps into the hidden daydream of so many, young or old.
In the movie, Carrie not only suffers at school, but home offers no refuge either. Mom's idea of sex-ed or life of any kind is to read the Bible and pray. No wonder the mousy Carrie hugs the walls hoping no one notices or worse, follows her home. The movie thus taps into the powerful emotions of an innocent kid trapped by circumstance with no apparent way out—an emotion, I expect, we've all felt at some time or another. Of course, Carrie does get a way out, but one that only happens in storybooks. Her misfortune is that this is a Stephen King storybook.
Of course, Carrie's enraged bloodletting doesn't distinguish between the innocent and the guilty, so in that sense, she turns into a monster of a special sort. Wisely, the film makes that daring move from Cinderella-on-the-stage to murderous-monster-on-a-rampage, such that our initial delight in her ability to strike back must confront the indiscriminate slaughter her preternatural ability brings about. Thus, once the mayhem starts, the audience is plunged into a world of mixed feelings, without time to sort things out. Making the malicious Norma suffer seems poetically just, but what about the compassionate Miss Collins, apparently cut in half by a swinging bench! Thus, the casual cruelty of the locker room turns abruptly into the Prom Night from Hell, and we get a perplexing morality tale to think about.
DePalma films all this stylishly, but with all the subtlety of a hammer blow to the head. Apparently, he belongs to the school that believes that if a little of something is good, then a lot more must be a lot better. Fortunately for both him and us, the material lends itself to his particular brand of visual excess. Carrie may not manage the artistic level of Val Lewton-type horror (I Walked with a Zombie {1943} or Seventh Victim {1943}), but it does, I think, tap into some of our deeper, hidden feelings. And that I believe is one secret of the movie's success.