i did not expect myself to react much to this movie. i already knew roughly What Happens at the climax of the movie through cultural osmosis, and once you’ve interacted with enough Stephen King media (which i have thanks to my mother-in-law’s longtime fascination with King that bled into my husband’s reading taste as a child), you kind of sense the general shape of the entire plot once all the characters are introduced because everything is following that sort of campy, pulpy horror.
but! in that framing, you’re able to channel such great horror because it’s so cartoony! the evil bimbo is comically evil in how she wields her sexuality like a weapon. (as opposed to Carrie’s slow, new discovery) the role models in Carrie’s life who only want to help her face a Greek tragedy level of cruelty. the religious fanatic mother is killed in a ridiculously on-the-nose fashion! it’s over the top in its melodrama, but it works
i know it can be an annoying trend of people to over-ascribe certain Types of Reads to media these days, but boy if i sure didn’t bawl my eyes out during the scene where Tommy tries to get Carrie to dance to her reluctance, her belief that this is all just a trick like she’s always prepared herself for it to be, her internalized self which sees her as incapable of love because of her past, all while sitting next to my husband who did that same insistence to me at my senior prom. in the 13 years since my senior prom, i have learned that i am both autistic and a woman, not in the same way as Carrie (as i think the heavy menstruation/sexual coming-of-age theme disqualifies), but i think i have it on good authority reclaiming this one! much like others have done for Sleepaway Camp, i am here to declare that Carrie is indeed for the traumatized autistic bitches!!!
King (in his first novel!!) knew that the scariest thing of all is being an autistic, sexually-repressed teenaged girl whose been sheltered and traumatized by your religious fanatic mother in an America school system whose puritanical nature has left you incapable of knowing your own body, and he swung a monster-sized home run swing when he said that her murdering almost her entire high school class and abusive mother was Actually Based As Fuck in 1974
(it’s even more people in the book!! she destroys an entire town and telepathically projects a message to everyone that She did it, which is ice cold. movie Carrie should have gone harder… also, her and Sue have a much nicer ending, but i respect the movie’s ending/theme about the continual reproduction of trauma)