Carrie (1976)

  So I reviewed the (fairly) recent remake but I've never actually reviewed the original, even though I've seen it three or four times.  It is a horror classic but as the remake proved, less for the story and more for De Palma's signature style in execution.

Carrie White (Sissy Spacek) is bullied both at school and at home.  A classmate (Amy Irving) feels guilty about the bullying and tells her boyfriend (William Katt) to take Carrie to the prom as his date.  Meanwhile, the resident Mean Girl (Nancy Allen) has a plan to get revenge on Carrie for existing by rigging the Prom King & Queen votes in order to dump a bucket of pig's blood on Carrie.  Carrie unleashes a hitherto unpublicized telekinetic ability to wreak havoc on the school that has wronged her.

This is some premium quality sleaze with full nudity (in slo-mo!) almost before the opening credits finish.  It's so male gaze-y you could forget you were watching a horror film and not Skinemax until Carrie burns down her school.  But that actually works in its favor, lending a heightened hysteria to the whole affair while rendering it as dated as the clothing styles.

Carrie is a weird artifact in the world today.  It's supposedly anti-bullying but even when people are being nice to her, Carrie has no real autonomy.  She's very much the protagonist and an object of pity so her casual mass murder is cheered, even though the majority of those people in the gym are completely innocent.  It's easy to dismiss Carrie as fantasy, though, because the murder weapon is telekinesis.  If she had physically used the fire hose to attack people and manually caused the fire that killed them, would she be as sympathetic?  Or would that be too real, like We Need to Talk About Kevin, a film that is not listed as horror but most emphatically is.