Carrie White is a lost child. She’s teased and tormented by her peers at school, and abused by her religious zealot of a mother. Her life doesn’t look to improve, until, one day, she discovers that she’s been gifted with telepathic powers. Not only that, they come when a handsome classmate finally asks her to the prom. She attempts to take her life back into her own hands…and it all goes horribly wrong. The night that this town would never forget…black prom.
Carrie is an interesting piece. I discovered it when I was an unhappy 16 year old girl, wishing for someone who ‘understood’ what it felt like to be bullied. What I found when I picked that book up was one of the most raw picture of teenage life I had ever seen. King it so right that this book was banned from several different school libraries. It was unfiltered, truthful, unapologetic in it’s portrayal of just how nasty teenagers can really be.
This version of the movie keeps that, mostly in how nasty 70’s’ teenagers can be. Nancy Allen’s Chris Hargensen is just so hateful, spiteful and nasty that I can’t look at her without getting angry; Sissy Spacek as the titular character is fragile and delicate…and then so unnerving and horrifying later on; and John Travolta plays Billy Nolan like a more vicious version of Danny from Grease. They’re all fantastic, though a chunk of them didn’t go off to do anything else too special (Sans Travolta).
This is my favorite version of the movie because everything looks the part. The normal, everyday suburbia is clean, bright and cheery; Carrie’s house, by contrast, looks as old-fashioned and suffocating as the mother herself. It’s all so quaint and suburban, making it all the more interesting when it’s shaken up. It even managed to include an awful little prop from the book: a statue of Jesus, crucified, with some of the freakiest looking eyes you ever saw. It was a major point from the text, despite how little we see it, and I can’t ever forget it after seeing it in this film…that awful statue…
He’s always watching.
That being said, this is also one of the first
movie’s I’ve seen that isn’t tacked down by very many useless scenes.
There’s one I would have cut, mainly when Tommy goes to find his Tux
with his two annoying friends, but otherwise everything else we see
keeps the story going at an even pace. If it seems like I’m overselling
this, it’s honestly because there’s not much wrong with it. Blunt, to
the point, and unforgiving; just like it’s source material.
I can’t recommend this film enough. It’s a
dark, twisted film that really probes the uncomfortable places of being a
kid, and the dark subconscious of those suffering from some pretty
intense bullying. The newer versions can’t measure up, and I don’t see
this one going away anytime soon.
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