Cast: Sissy Spacek, John Travolta

Director: Brian De Palma

Screenplay: Lawrence Cohen

Running time: 1 hr 41 mins

Genre: Horror/Thriller



CRITIQUE:

Anyone branding Carrie a ‘horror film’ is committing a dodgy mistake. Brian De Palma’s cinematic adaptation of Stephen King’s classic debut novel is so exquisitely rendered to the screen that it launched a thousand high-school-set teenage slasher films, typically epitomised by dumb blondes getting chased by a masked murderer. But in Carrie, there is no carnage, no bloodshed of human blood – but a bloodbath of a different sort, the massacre of a student-filled auditorium. Yet audience sympathy does not lie on them but rather on its blood-soaked prom queen protagonist, who is actually Shiva the Destroyer, setting the prom night literally ablaze. This is where De Palma succeeds because he’s not set to shape a horror film, but a psychologically disturbing portrait of teenage brutality and religious fanaticism, and alongside creating an ode to social misfits.


The film shoulders some elements that could easily stray into the territory of silliness, i.e. teenagers, high school, prom night, but De Palma’s craft borders on the artistic, the beautifully-shot set-pieces of a familiar puberty setting. That slow-mo capture of nude girls running around a steamy shower room is visually nuanced, one you wouldn’t expect in a high school movie! And that flawlessly realised prom night sequence, building drama and tension with a use of a heartbreaking score and slow motion. Where it could have resulted as amusing, the effect is riveting, a well-mounted tension in the shades of Hitchcock, with the addition of De Palma’s now famous split-screen storytelling of vengeance, capturing the magnificent Sissy Spacek in her raging glory.


VERDICT:

An essential horror film, one that’s now steeped in pop culture parody but Carrie still retains its shocking impact and its exceptional handling of Hitchcockian suspense. One of the finest and darkest ‘high school’ films ever made.



RATING: A