The last word on high school

Rating: 9/10 (1 August 2000)

If you're looking for the definitive statement on the experience of high school and being a teenager, forget about "The Breakfast Club". "Carrie" goes deeper and more effectively into the subject than any shallow John Hughes treatment could ever hope to.
Of course, it's all served up with a large dose of allegory. Regrettably, few of us ever had the capacity for revenge that Carrie White does. But the truth is here: the mindless cruelty of fellow students, the first attempts to establish independence from parents. This horror film has more reality to it than any ten "realistic" teen films.
Additionally, it's in this early DePalma film that we first see his obsession with Hitchcock take shape. Much of the camera work and editing is reminiscent of "Psycho". Even the music score, though credited to a composer as original, is easily recognizable as a cobbling-together of Bernard Herman's "Psycho" score, particularly the music from the shower scene, which is used whenever Carrie's power manifests itself.
The ending is legendary by now, and makes "Carrie" one of the
most imitated films ever made, though few imitators have done their version with so much style and intelligence.