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Movie Review: 'Carrie' (1976)

Horror film review of 'Carrie' (1976) directed by Brian de Palma. Spoiler alert!!

By Sabri'A PricePublished 5 years ago 5 min read
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The original Carrie was directed by Brian De Palma and based off of Stephen King's novel. You can find it in Netflix's horror section!

This is my first time watching any of the Carrie's. I didn't go watch the 2013 Carrie because I had this awkward feeling that I should watch the '76 one first. So here I am, five years later!! :-)

Plot: Carrie is a quiet teenager that keeps to herself. She's introduced to us as she gets bullied by her female classmates in gym class. While taking a shower in the locker room, Carrie starts her first period. Frightened, Carrie runs out of the shower and begs the girls to help her. They all laugh and humiliate her by throwing tampons and towels at her. When Carrie is sent home, we're introduced to her weirdo mom, Margaret. Margaret ends up calling Carrie's period the "curse of blood" that God gives to all women that have sinful thoughts. After forcing Carrie to recite some Bible verses, she locks her in a closet and tells her to pray. WTF. So it's automatically clear why Carrie is the way she is. Carrie starts noticing she has the power of telekinesis. Carrie's gym teacher ends up punishing the other girls in the class by giving them a week long detention which comes with refusal of their senior prom tickets if detention is skipped. Chris, the ringleader of the mean-girl crew that terrorizes Carrie, makes a fuss about how she's not going to go to the detention and ends up getting banned from prom anyway. One of the gym class girls named Sue feels bad about the locker room incident and asks her popular brother, Tommy, to ask Carrie out to the prom. When Tommy asks Carrie to prom, she runs away, sure that he is trying to plan some kind of cruel trick with the others. Gym teacher Ms. Collins convinces Carrie to accept the offer to prom.

When Carrie goes home and tells her mom about Tommy, Margaret goes off on a tangent, saying things like "after the blood comes the boys!!" Carrie ends up being allowed to go to prom with Tommy. Tommy arrives to pick up Carrie and Margaret begs Carrie to stay home because "they're all gonna laugh at you!" Carrie pins her mom to the bed with her telekinesis power and goes out with Tommy anyway. Meanwhile, Chris is setting up a plan with her friends and boyfriend to humiliate Carrie on prom night. She plans to rig the votes so that Carrie and Tommy will win prom king and queen, then a can of slaughtered pig blood will fall from above the stage on to Carrie. At the prom, Tommy and Carrie have fun dancing and everything seems to be going well, despite the whispers and giggles from fellow classmates.

At this point, I began to wonder where is the horror? This seems like a regular high school flick and the only "scary" thing is the weirdo mom and the telekinesis ability. WRONG. After Carrie and Tommy are pronounced prom king/queen, Chris and friends spill the pig blood onto Carrie from above, humiliating her for the last time. As people reacted, all Carrie can hear in her head is a repeated "they're all gonna laugh at you!" in her mother's voice. Carrie then uses her telekinesis to shut all of the exits, trapping everyone inside. Staff and students scream and try to escape as Carrie's telekinetic wrath electrocutes the principle, crushes Ms. Collins, and sets the whole place on fire. WTF! But they all totally deserved it!

Carrie walks home and ends up mentally flipping a car over and kills Chris and her boyfriend Billy. After going home and taking a bath to wash all the blood away, Carrie asks her mother to hold her. While holding Carrie, Margaret goes into this spiel about how she should've never had premarital sex, how her husband raped her (which she said she enjoyed, WTF again) and how she should've (and even tried to!!) have an abortion. While she's holding Carrie, she says "Let's pray for the last time" then stabs Carrie in the back. W...T....F. Carrie crawls away to escape as her mother floats through the house, knife in hand with a big creepy smile. To protect herself, Carrie mentally pins her mom to an opposite wall by hurling all the knives in the kitchen at her. Carries mother dies and then the house starts falling apart???? Carrie takes her dead mother's body and escapes the house before it catches on fire??? I'm still very confused about that last part. The movie ends with Sue, Chris's friend, being treated for... I guess being traumatized by the whole prom situation. She has a nightmare that she was visiting her classmate's grave but was grabbed from the ground by a bloody hand (Carrie's). Sue wakes up screaming in a panic. THE END.

I give this movie an 8/10. I almost ended the movie in the middle of the prom scene because everything was going too well. It almost did not seem like I was watching a horror movie. But I was pleasantly surprised by Carrie unleashing well-deserved fury onto her classmates. It was very iconic to watch her snap. And the mother was a nut job from the beginning, but stabbing your daughter?! Yeah, no mistake this was a horror movie—and a good one! If you like revenge and blood, this is the film for you!

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About the Creator

Sabri'A Price

I'm a 22 year old lover of all horror movies, books, tv shows, and video games. From psychological to slasher, I love it all!

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