The Original Stephen King Movie

Rating: 7/10 (8 May 2005)

Carrie White, a shy and repressed teenager with a fanatically religious mother, discovers she has the power to move and control objects with her mind. Some cruel classmates hatch a plot to humiliate her in front of everyone at the High School Prom, but Carrie's response is not quite what they bargained for ...
Carrie is one of several great seminal seventies horror movies and has been extremely influential - the high-school-teenagers-in-peril setting has been a (sometimes regrettable) staple of the genre ever since, and the unsettling shock ending has been copied countless times. The movie is perhaps most important as the launchpad of the careers of DePalma and author Stephen King; the former had already made several films but none were very successful financially, and the latter had several unpublished manuscripts before Carrie proved to be very popular as both a book and a film. The plot is pretty straightforward but the idea of linking Carrie's adolescent development to an explosion in her telekinetic powers as a metaphor for raging teenage hormones is sensational. Equally fabulous is DePalma's cinematic treatment, brimming over with stunning effects - deep focus, low angles, overheads, filters, amazing use of split-screen and especially the most brilliantly stylised use of slow-motion. The bucket-of-blood prom sequence for me is not only an incredibly evocative and suspenseful scene, but also a masterclass in how to really use editing and photography effectively. Equally invaluable are the memorable performances of Spacek and Laurie (both of whom were nominated for - and should have won - Oscars), who capture the tormented qualities of their characters perfectly. The reality they bring to the melodrama, combined with the film's technical pedigree, is what makes it so much better than its many subsequent imitators. The rest of the young cast are good, notably bad boy Travolta and DePalma's future wife Allen as the thoroughly nasty Chris Hargenson. Carrie is a class act - it's not a very pleasant movie, but it's an extremely well made, well acted and scary one.