Brian De Palma's finest hour.

Rating: 10/10 (24 July 2009)

Sissy Spacek's star-turning performance in 'Carrie' is one of the finest portrayals by an actress ever in a horror film. The film, adapted from a novel by Stephen King, revolves mainly around adolescence and religion, adolescence in the sense of a outsider girl on a high school with telepathic abilities who "just wants to be normal", and religion in the sense of her Christian über-fundamentalist mother who's been teaching her inside-out about life and all its possibilities. The film does not (like surprisingly many Stephen King adaptations) go for the full-on shock effect of murder, blood and nerve-wrecking excitement, still, with all these ingredients very much intact, director Brian De Palma (who's on a victory-run of invention) presents the film with a high-school backdrop full of bubbly life, and the themes of lost family and love, and the alienation of teenager-life, is always at the main focus. 'Carrie''s disturbing undertones and shocking scenes are still full of terrifying life, and as any great horror, it brings that tingling feeling of nastiness, wrong and suspense.