OhOften, when a pop culture figure, whether real or fictional or somewhere in between, is described as an eternal adolescent, they are referring to an image of youthful vitality. Carrie White, the wallflower, telekinetic heroine at the center of Stephen King’s book and its multiple adaptations, is a sadder case. She is still a teenager because until recently, every version of the story ended with her disappearance – a twist that would be considered 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 about to change with Mike Flanagan’s TV series, which was recently renewed for a second season (although even then, there’s still plenty of room for poor Carrie to die young). The new series updates and expands the story of the 1974 novel, drawing on a combination of 2020s social trends and details from the original text. In other words, this is a new adaptation, not a remake of Brian De Palma’s 1976 film. So this is the first truly successful version of Carrie in half a century. (Previous iterations appeared in a 1999 movie sequel, a 2002 miniseries, and another movie in 2013.) Arguably, however, the reason such a high-profile new version of Carrie exists in 2026 is that first movie, released 50 years ago on November 3.
In fact, King’s book was not a bestseller when it was first released in 1974. His later novel, Salem’s Lot, sold better in 1975; Carrie did not appear on the New York Times bestseller list until December 1976, in paperback form. It was about a month after the release of De Palma’s film, which had become an unexpected hit during the holiday season. Although a willowy Sissy Spacek didn’t exactly fit King’s description of Carrie as a more full-figured, less ethereal teenager (nor did her age of twenty-somethings live up to Carrie’s teenage status), the image of her drenched in blood, wide-eyed with shocked vengeance during the film’s prom climax became indelibly associated with the simple story.
De Palma’s film is even more refined than King’s novel. It retains the basic structure – the first half taking place over about a week before the high school dance, the second following that party, where Carrie is unexpectedly crowned queen before undergoing a planned humiliation, followed by an extremely brief glimpse of the aftermath – as well as many of the details from the book 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 supplementing various flashback stories and anecdotes about Carrie White, her telekinetic powers, and her religious fanatic mother Margaret (Piper Laurie in the film).
Without these digressions, De Palma’s film seems ruthlessly effective, especially compared to the recent series. While King’s imaginative array of academic explorations, magazine articles, and false revelations lend the proceedings a slight (if often sad) detachment, De Palma uses his purely cinematic immediacy to immerse the audience in the film’s adolescent hothouse atmosphere. The fact that most of the cast has reached adulthood only makes their aggression even more visible. Some have accused De Palma’s opening sequence, where the camera follows a girl’s locker room in anticipation of the infamous inciting incident in which Carrie has a late 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 seizes on everything intimate and uncomfortable about the story, immediately unraveling in this image when Carrie notices her menstrual blood and panics.
This nervous bewilderment is a hallmark of the film, which treats familiar settings (high school, teenagers in cool cars, a sparkly dance) while making them seem distorted and intense. To this end, De Palma makes extensive use of split diopter shots, a camera lens trick that creates the ability to focus on objects in the foreground and background simultaneously, with a blurred, blurred line separating the two. In an English classroom scene, for example, De Palma keeps the popular, cheerful Tommy (William Katt) in close-up while Carrie, quietly fascinated by the poem he wrote for the class, remains the center of attention several rows behind him. They occupy the same space, but Carrie – tormented by her classmates, yes, but also by the harangues of her impossible-to-please, God-fearing mother – also seems incredibly distant.
Later, after repentant popular girl Sue (Amy Irving) asks Tommy, her boyfriend, to ask Carrie to prom to give her a taste of social acceptance, De Palma’s camera follows the quite couple on the dance floor. As they dance in a circle, the camera rotates around them, which, combined with the colorful lighting, creates a dizzying, carnival-like effect. It’s a lead-in to a classic De Palma uncork, where vengeful bad girl Chris (the terrific Nancy Allen, who later married and divorced De Palma) pours a bucket of pig’s blood on poor Carrie, unleashing the girl’s burgeoning telekinetic powers. Students in an entire gymnasium experience his fiery wrath on split-screen, with Psycho-style stings of strings accompanying the bursts of power. (It’s probably no coincidence that the main location was renamed Bates High School by Alfred Hitchcock-loving De Palma.)
Watching De Palma’s treatment of this sequence shortly after Flanagan’s is striking: partly because De Palma’s version is scarier (while Flanagan’s tones down Carrie’s participation somewhat), and partly because it is so evocative without the torrents of dialogue Flanagan favors. There are about 15 minutes between Carrie’s coronation as prom queen and her return home to chat with her mother, which only involves casual chatter. Besides, there isn’t much dialogue in the last 15 minutes either. This means that King’s book and Flanagan’s series have a bit more nuance to the different characters. The 1976 film depicts the world around Carrie as both beautiful and relentlessly harsh; his moments of respite, even of joy, have a pleading character. This quality only makes Spacek’s performance – Oscar-nominated, alongside Laurie’s – all the more heartbreaking. Ultimately, the White House collapses on Carrie and her mother; he collapses because of her psychic powers, but she tries to hide anyway, taking the body of her ugly mother with her, giving in to her uncontrollable power.
De Palma can’t resist one final sting that wouldn’t make much sense in the book: a dream scene where Sue visits the razed site of the White House, whereupon a bloody arm shoots out of the ground and grabs her, before she wakes up screaming in fear. This could be read as a cheap horror movie trick to shake the audience up a little more before coming out, or as a nasty rebuke to Sue’s mother who claims a doctor said Sue would probably forget the whole Carrie White incident in time. Fifty years later, however, it mostly feels like an acknowledgment of the way this particular version of Carrie has remained in the public imagination as a nightmarish reflection of the adolescent experience. Flanagan brought Carrie White into the 21st century, but she didn’t have to travel far to get here.
Gn entert
