Carrie at 50: Brian De Palma’s fiery masterpiece still has the power

Often when a pop culture figure, whether real or fictional or somewhere in between, is described as an eternal teenager, it refers to an image of youthful vitality. Carrie White, the wallflowery, telekinetic, sort-of heroine at the center of Stephen King’s book and its multiple adaptations, is a sadder case. She’s forever a teenager because until recently, every version of the story ends with her demise – a turn that would qualify as a spoiler if not for the universal familiarity of her story, or the fact that the book heavily implies her fate within the first 30 pages or so. That fate is poised to change with Mike Flanagan’s TV series, which was recently renewed for a second season (though even then, there’s still plenty of room for poor Carrie to die young). The new show updates and expands the story of the 1974 novel, taking its inspiration from a combination of 2020s social trends and details from the original text. In other words, it’s a new adaptation, not a remake of the Brian De Palma film from 1976. As such, it’s the first truly successful version of Carrie in half a century. (Previous iterations popped up in a 1999 movie sequel, a 2002 miniseries and another film in 2013.) It’s arguable, however, that the reason such a high-profile new version of Carrie exists in 2026 is that first film, which was released 50 years ago on 3 November. In fact, King’s book was not a bestseller when it first came out in 1974. His subsequent novel, Salem’s Lot, sold better out the gate in 1975; Carrie didn’t hit the New York Times bestseller list until December 1976, in paperback form. This was a month or so after the release of De Palma’s film, which had become an unexpectedly strong holiday-season hit. Though a willowy Sissy Spacek wasn’t a precise match for King’s description of Carrie as a more full-figured and less ethereal teenager (nor was her mid-20s age a match for Carrie’s teenage status), the image of her drenched in blood, wide-eyed with shellshocked vengeance at the film’s prom-set climax became indelibly associated with the simple story. De Palma’s film is even more streamlined than King’s novel. It retains the basic structure – the first half taking place over a week or so leading up to the high school prom, the second following that evening, where Carrie is unexpectedly crowned queen before suffering a planned humiliation, followed by an extremely brief survey of the aftermath – as well as many of the book’s details and some of its dialogue. But King also intersperses excerpts from various (fictional) outside texts written after the story’s deadly climax, both hinting (sometimes more than hinting) at the carnage to come and filling in various backstories and flashback anecdotes about Carrie White, her telekinetic powers and her religious fanatic mother Margaret (Piper Laurie in the movie). Without these digressions, De Palma’s film seems ruthlessly efficient, especially compared to the recent series. While King’s imaginative array of academic explorations, magazine articles and fake tell-alls lend the proceedings a slight detachment (if a frequently mournful one), De Palma uses his pure-cinema immediacy to put the audience into the movie’s hair-trigger adolescent-hothouse atmosphere. That most of the actors were actually well into adulthood only makes their aggression pop more. Some have accused De Palma’s opening sequence, where the camera tracks around a girls’ locker room in anticipation of the famous inciting incident where Carrie gets a late-onset period and is terrorized by her cruel classmates, of crossing the line into lasciviousness. But when his camera lands on a showering Carrie White, alone with her thoughts and a vaguely sensual look on her face, De Palma keys into all that is discomfortingly intimate about the story, fraying at that image immediately when Carrie notices her menstrual blood and panics. That raw-nerve discombobulation is a hallmark of the film, which traffics in familiar settings (high school, teenagers in cool cars, a glittery dance) while making them feel distorted and intense. To this end De Palma makes heavy use of split-diopter shots, a camera-lens trick that creates the ability to sharply focus on objects in the foreground and background simultaneously, with a blurry, out-of-focus line separating the two. In an English-classroom scene, for example, De Palma keeps popular, cheerful Tommy (William Katt) in closeup while Carrie, quietly besotted with the poem he wrote for class, remains in focus several rows behind him. They’re occupying the same space, but Carrie – bedeviled by her classmates, yes, but also the haranguing of her impossible-to-please, God-fearing mom – looks impossibly distant, too. Later, after repentant popular girl Sue (Amy Irving) has Tommy, her boyfriend, ask Carrie to prom to give her a taste of social acceptance, De Palma’s camera follows the not-quite-couple to the dancefloor. As they dance in circles, the camera rotates around them, which in conjunction with the colorful lighting creates a dizzying, carnival-like effect. It’s a lead-up to a classic De Palma uncorking, where vengeful mean girl Chris (the terrific Nancy Allen, who later married and divorced De Palma) dumps a bucket of pig’s blood on to poor Carrie, unleashing the girl’s nascent telekinetic powers. An entire gymnasium’s worth of students suffers her split-screened, fiery wrath, with Psycho-style string stings accompanying the bursts of power. (It’s probably not a coincidence that the main location has been rechristened Bates high school by Alfred Hitchcock-loving De Palma.) Watching De Palma’s treatment of this sequence soon after Flanagan’s is striking: in part because De Palma’s version is scarier (while Flanagan’s somewhat mitigates Carrie’s participation), and in part because it’s so evocative without the torrents of dialogue that Flanagan favors. There are about 15 minutes from Carrie’s prom-queen coronation to her arrival back at home to have it out with her mother that involve only incidental chatter. For that matter, there isn’t a whole lot of dialogue in the ensuing final 15 minutes, either. This does mean that both King’s book and Flanagan’s series have a bit more nuance to various characters. The 1976 movie portrays the world around Carrie as both beautiful and unceasingly harsh; her moments of respite, even joy, have a pleading quality. That quality only makes Spacek’s performance – Oscar-nominated, alongside Laurie’s – all the more heartbreaking. In the end, the White house collapses on to Carrie and her mother; it crumbles from her psychic powers, but she seeks cover all the same, toting her lousy mother’s body with her, surrendering to her power as uncontrollable. De Palma can’t resist one last sting that wouldn’t make much sense in the book: a dreamy scene where Sue visits the razed site of the White house, whereupon a bloody arm bursts out of the ground and grabs hold of her, before she awakes screaming in fright. This could be read as a cheap horror-movie trick to rattle audiences just a little more on their way out the door, or a nasty rebuke to Sue’s mother who claims a doctor said Sue will probably forget all about the Carrie White incident in time. Fifty years later, though, it feels most like an acknowledgment of how this particular version of Carrie has lingered in the public imagination as a nightmare reflection of the adolescent experience. Flanagan brought Carrie White into the 21st century, but she didn’t have to travel far to get here. Carrie is available to watch on Amazon Prime in the US, UK and Australia