Horror in broad daylight

Rating: 9/10 (8 October 2016)

Many horror films belong in the night, where murder and "punishment" roam free, films where daylight is just precious lost hours building up to what will soon unfold when the sun sets.
Carrie, until its momentous final scenes, is bathed in California sunshine, warm in temperature but not in temperament, as we are slowly shown the many different factors that will cause Carrie to break. The prom and the aftermath are night shots, eerie and deadly, but the last moments return to the sunlight, and to the false comfort of the day.
This is another Hollywood product where everyone looks just a bit too old to be a teenager, but it doesn't really matter - in a way the slight lack of believability just adds to the surreal nature, and the material still hits home.
For a film that is about bullying and the consequences of cruelty, De Palma remembers to include a number of moments of kindness and support, chiefly from Betty Buckley (whose performance tends to be one of the most underrated aspects of the film) as the fair-minded gym teacher who tries her best to help Carrie, and William Katt, the dreamboat, the top man at school who slowly goes from part of the taunting and humiliation of Carrie to falling in love with her. It's Buckley and Katt who unwittingly bring out what Carrie becomes, because they make her think life doesn't have to always be terrible. They upset the balance of her school and home life just as much as the nasty bullies do.
Carrie is often described as a revenge film, and I think one of the reasons the modern remakes have faded into oblivion is because they focus too much on the revenge aspect. In a post-Buffy world, there is more of a posturing about some type of BAMF getting payback amidst the angsty soundtrack and arch one-liners. The tragedy of Carrie is that she doesn't get revenge - she causes wholesale carnage. She doesn't spare good people, as she does in some other version of this material. She kills everyone because she is no longer able to differentiate between friend and enemy. She essentially "dies" when that bucket of pig's blood falls on her. It is a startling reminder of the cost of bullying, of what happens to people who are ground into the dust by day after day of unrelenting abuse. Only when she returns home does she briefly go back to what she was, just long enough for her chief abuser to kill her and end the cycle in the only way it could be ended.
One of the benefits of modern life having no set trends or styles is that it allows us all to reassess what it means to be "dated" and to question why something is passe just because of old clothes or hair. This film, much like Carrie herself and what made her who she was, will live on forever.