Evil Creates Evil

Rating: 9/10 (3 November 2010)

Wow. Just wow. I saw this yesterday and I can't stop thinking about this movie. It's probably the second best horror film I've seen second to Aliens, although I'd say the label "horror" isn't quite appropriate. I think it's certainly scary to some extent though.
I won't repeat the plot since plenty of reviews do already.
This is a beautiful movie. The music just works (in my own opinion, I've heard differing views on the matter). The visual direction is excellent.
The beauty of the movie is just an auxiliary however; what really matters is the effective story, acting and characters. One really notices that there's a strong source in Stephen King's novel.
We are through some elements of foreshadowing mercilessly led down a path to hell, quite literally. On the other hand, the individual events can be very unpredictable (the menstrual blood as the first example). It's the perfect combination to make a movie interesting, in my opinion.
Carrie herself is incredibly realistic, and is more genuine than most, both as a result of very good acting and a solid script. Her character is complex - we feel sorry for her a good part of the movie, but at one moment while walking home after the prom stained with blood, she seems more like a demon returning to its lair after harvesting souls. We are forced into re-evaluating our opinions on her after the overly brutal slaughter.
Carrie's mother, in sharp contrast, is an over-acted archetype of a religious zealot. This contrast and the relationship with Carrie is of huge importance. She is what we love to hate, and for a good part of the movie she seems unconditionally evil and wrong. But nothing is as easy as it appears to be...
Further supporting characters are also archetypes, but it achieves the purpose of reinforcing Carrie's character. We find more characters in the "love to hate"-category here in the girls that bully Carrie and cause the sequence of events leading up to the prom slaughter. However, do they really deserve death for what they did? No, and that places us in a moral dilemma where we were rooting for Carrie, but where she severely overreacts beyond any reasonable level.
In fact, I'm going as far as saying that in one way, it truly is the devil coming back from the prom and that Carrie's mother in a twisted sense is more right than we want to admit, and it terrifies us. I also interpret the events that follow as further tokens supporting my theory: Ultimately, the house falls apart as punishment of unrepentable deeds.
I'm not the kind of person who usually tries to find hidden meanings in movies. This movie however... Let's just say it is not only a revenge fantasy as some have claimed. It is a tale of how evil creates evil. It is a display of how not being able to back down and not pushing it further leads to out of control disaster.