Taking the Wrong Girl to the Prom

Rating: 7/10 (13 November 2005)

This is what it boiled down to, isn't it? Taking the wrong girl at the wrong time to the wrong place. By today's standards, this is a classy approach to depicting horror on screen. It builds on the theme of alienation, taken to the Nth degree by circumstances surrounding the sad short life of Carrie White (Spacek). I think it actually improves on some of the points raised in Stephen King's novel. The scorn Carrie endures from her classmates is apparent from the first minute of the film (and who can forget the traumatic shower scene?), but the adults are all presented as clueless dullards, as well. It's a highly disturbing scene when Carrie is attacked by the other girls for her sexual ignorance, but the subtext of sexual repression extends to the scene after the shower, where the school principal gets distracted by the close proximity of the attractive female coach (Buckley), causing him to repeatedly get Carrie's name wrong. Carrie's anguished reaction triggers the early use of her potentially deadly telekinetic powers (powers surfacing after her first period).
Everyone's actions, including those of the sympathetic coach, are really geared around being self-serving. The coach is intent on punishing Carrie's classmates with a form of torture, possibly out of guilt for behaving the same way when she was in high school. She makes herself feel better by enforcing this punishment on younger versions of herself. The one good girl (Irving) also decides to help Carrie out of guilt, to make herself feel better. No one really thinks about Carrie herself and this proves to be to everyone's downfall. They happened to pick the wrong girl to mess with - very bad luck all around. The first two acts, a build up to the climactic prom sequence, are just a preparation. We wait for things to go to hell at the prom and they do. The sequence is not very frightening by today's standards. Mostly, you see a water hose go out of control, and director dePalma employs split screens to diffuse the action. Then the two main culprits (Allen & Travolta) are attended to and this revenge (or justice) is also lacklustre.
But then we're back at Carrie's house and with her truly creepy mom (Laurie). Ms.White is what actually made the film a shudder to watch, a very unsettling depiction of religious madness. The true climax is Carrie's final confrontation with her mother and it'll stay with the viewer for awhile, whether they like it or not. Then the real shock, the epilogue dream with Irving. If I had to pick the one scariest jolt in all filmdom, it's this. Even watching it repeatedly, knowing what's coming, still makes the hairs on my neck stand up uncontrollably.