Carrie

Carrie is a film about cruelty in which the telekinesis is almost beside the point, and De Palma knew it.

The structure is a trap built in full view. Carrie White is humiliated in a shower in the first five minutes, in front of a camera that is leering at her classmates and then suddenly not; from there the film spends ninety minutes assembling a kindness — a good teacher, a decent boy, a girl with a guilty conscience, a dress, a crown — and the audience spends all of it knowing what the bucket above the stage is for. The dread is not that something will go wrong. It is that something is going right.

Sissy Spacek plays Carrie with her shoulders up around her ears for an hour and then, for about four minutes at the prom, as a happy seventeen-year-old, and those four minutes are the most upsetting thing in the film. Piper Laurie's Margaret White is the other half: not a caricature but a woman in genuine religious terror, who believes her daughter's body is evidence of sin and who says so in language the film takes from scripture and from nowhere else.

De Palma is showing off and it works

Split screen, extreme slow motion, a 360-degree dolly around the dance floor, a split-diopter shot that holds the bucket and the couple in focus at once, Pino Donaggio's shrieking string cue borrowed openly from Psycho. The prom sequence is about fifteen minutes of pure technique and it is one of the great set pieces in American film, because every formal choice is doing narrative work: the slow motion is Carrie's perception, the split screen is the massacre becoming simultaneous, and the dolly is a girl who thinks the world has turned towards her.

The telekinesis is a symptom

King's novel and De Palma's film agree that the power arrives with menarche and is governed by shame. Carrie cannot use it deliberately until the end, and when she does she cannot stop. The film is explicit that nothing she does at the prom is aimed — she locks the doors and kills indiscriminately, including the one teacher who was kind to her, which is the detail that makes the sequence tragedy rather than revenge.

Where it has dated

The high-school scenes are shot and scored as period teen comedy and the tonal gear change is abrupt. The locker-room opening is leering in a way that is hard to defend as purely perspectival. And John Travolta's Billy is broad.

For King's other great adaptation of the period, The Shining; for the novel King wrote next about a town that will not help, Pet Sematary; for the modern King adaptation that gets the bullying right, It.

The short answer: Chris Hargensen and Billy Nolan rig the prom ballot so Carrie is crowned, and tip a bucket of pig's blood over her on the stage. Carrie locks the doors with her mind and kills almost everyone in the hall — fire hoses, electrocution, fire — including Miss Collins, the teacher who defended her, and Tommy Ross, killed by the falling bucket itself. She walks home through the burning town and destroys Chris and Billy's car on the way. At home Margaret bathes her, tells her she should have killed her at birth, and stabs her in the back with a kitchen knife. Carrie pins her mother to the doorframe with flying kitchen implements, in the posture of the St Sebastian figure Margaret kept in the prayer closet, and then brings the house down on both of them. The last scene is Sue Snell's dream: she lays flowers on the lot where the house stood, and Carrie's hand bursts out of the gravel and seizes her wrist. Sue wakes screaming, sedated, with her mother holding her.

What happens at the prom in Carrie?

Chris and Billy stuff the ballot so that Carrie and Tommy win king and queen, having already killed a pig and hung a bucket of its blood in the rigging above the stage. Carrie is crowned, the bucket is tipped, and the hall laughs — or Carrie believes it does; the film shows her hearing laughter that is partly in her head. She seals the doors, and the gymnasium becomes a closed room with a fire in it.

Does Carrie die at the end?

Yes. She is stabbed by her mother, and after killing her she loses control completely and collapses the house with both of them inside; the final shots show it burning and sinking. The only ambiguity the film offers is Sue's nightmare, which is explicitly a dream — the preceding dialogue and the sedation after it establish that Carrie is dead and that Sue is not recovering.

Why does Margaret White stab her own daughter?

Because she has concluded that Carrie is the product of sin and the vessel of the Devil, and that killing her is a duty she failed at once already. The film gives her a long, strange, almost erotic monologue about the night Carrie was conceived, in which she describes being aroused and therefore damned. Her last act is to tell Carrie she loves her and then put a knife in her back, and Piper Laurie plays it as relief.

What is the hand at the end of Carrie?

A dream, and the first use of the device in modern horror. Sue Snell, the only survivor of the prom who tried to help, walks to the vacant lot with flowers and Carrie's hand erupts from the ground and grabs her. De Palma shot it in reverse to get the uncanny movement. It is not a resurrection or a sequel hook; it is the film saying that the one decent person in it will not get to put this down.

Is Carrie's power telekinesis or something else?

Telekinesis, and the film roots it in the body. It first appears in childhood, in a story about a rain of stones, and returns with her first period in the opening scene. She can move objects, close doors, start fires and stop a heart; she cannot control it under stress and cannot aim it at all. Both the novel and the film treat it as an involuntary physical fact rather than a gift or a curse.

Who kills Carrie's bullies?

Carrie, but indiscriminately. Chris and Billy die when she throws their car off the road and it explodes as they try to run her down. Everyone else in the gymnasium — the people who laughed, the people who did not, Tommy, Miss Collins, the band — dies in the same event, because she is not making distinctions. The film refuses to let the massacre be satisfying.

Scored against the published rubric, here is what the numbers mean.

The threat at 068 leans human — 84 works score lower, which is the correct reading: every cruelty in the film is committed by people, and the supernatural element belongs to the victim.

Era bias 010 is deep analog — only 17 works score lower. 1976 film stock, in-camera split screen, optical slow motion and a string score cut on tape.

Viscera 054 is just above the median film — 65 works score lower. A stabbing, an electrocution, a burning, an impalement by kitchen knives and a great deal of pig's blood.

Tone 026 is bleak — 70 works score lower. Everybody dies, the kind teacher dies with the cruel students, and the survivor is left sedated.

Pace 038 is on the dread side — 54 works are slower. The first hour is deliberate and almost all of the incident is in fifteen minutes.

Reality anchor 044 is just under the midpoint. The town, the school and the house are entirely ordinary; only Carrie's perception at the prom bends.

On jump scares: one, and it is the most copied in horror.