Streamin’ King: ‘Carrie’ Is As Heartbreaking As It Is Terrifying

Welcome to Streamin’ King, a series grave-digging through the myriad Stephen King adaptations available on your favorite streaming services. This time we’re watching 1976’s Carrie, the first King film, adapted two years after the debut King novel was published.

THE GIST: High school outcast Carrie White, the abused daughter of a Christian zealot single mother, at once begins menstruating and experiencing the awakening of a psychic power. Her mercy-date to the prom/rigged queen status gets ruined by bullies with a bucket of pig’s blood, enacting a telekinetic matricidal nightmare. One of the all-time great horror set pieces, followed by a hall-of-fame jump-scare ending.

PEDIGREE: Directed by Brian De Palma (Scarface, Mission: Impossible) and written by Lawrence D. Cohen (Ghost Story). Stars Sissy Spacek, lately of Bloodline, here earning her first of six Oscar nominations. (Her one win came four years later.) Piper Laurie’s turn as Carrie’s mother, Margaret, brought her out of a 15-year movie hiatus and earned her an Oscar nod as well. Among the teenagers is John Travolta in his first big film role, after a small part in a movie about Satanists. He moved from Carrie straight to Saturday Night Fever and Grease.

WORTH WATCHING FOR CONSTANT READERS? Yes. King loves it, history loves it, and so will you. As with dozens of King’s books, the climax is even more shocking than whatever you’ve imagined during the painstaking build-up.

WORTH WATCHING FOR KING NEWBIES/AGNOSTICS? Carrie is a phenomenal piece of 1970s cinema that unfortunately opts to begin by leering through a locker room full of young women playing high schoolers in various states of nudity, followed by Spacek slo-mo washing herself. Once that wrong-kind-of-creepiness passes, Spacek and Laurie’s work—a daughter and her extremist mother isolated from the world, the child kindling suspiciously Satanic-seeming powers—becomes entrancing. The deal’s sealed with a soaring romantic score that pivots to a horror opera with the violin stabs literally straight out of Psycho, plus a comically boppy montage theme.

King’s novel had a restless form, jumping between newspaper articles, letters, book excerpts, and official documents; De Palma does the same, taking one-time-only swings with a bunch of distinctive shots, colors, and cuts.

Making Carrie much more than a cool scary flick is Spacek’s quiet, close-up transformation from beginning to end. When her glowing prom queen moment tilts into hellish catastrophe, it’s as heartbreaking as it is terrifying.

It’s packed with quotables (“I can see your dirty pillows”), scarring moments (the prayer closet), and archetypal jump-scares (Margaret behind the door). John Travolta’s sudden appearance a half-hour in is truly wild, Billy Nolan crushing a PBR while driving and hatefully smacking his girlfriend, who repays him with a beej.

9 STEPHEN KING TIES, REFERENCES, AND MISCELLANY:

1. A Sissy Spacek–narrated Carrie audiobook dropped in tandem with the 2012 movie remake. Next she’ll be one of at least two former King performers seen on Hulu’s Castle Rock series. (It‘s Pennywise, Bill Skarsgård, is the other.)
2. Stephen King’s name was spelled “Steven” in the trailer.

3. Screenwriter Lawrence D. Cohen hasn’t done much, but most of it’s been in the King-verse: his name’s on 1990’s It miniseries, ’93’s The Tommyknockers miniseries, an episode of TNT’s short-lived anthology show Nightmares & Dreamscapes, and the 2013 Carrie remake.
4. When King heard the plan for a theatrical remake (less than a decade after NBC’s TV version), he told Entertainment Weekly, ��The real question is why, when the original was so good? I mean, not Casablanca, or anything, but a really good horror-suspense film, much better than the book. Piper Laurie really got her teeth into the bad-mom thing.” He thought Lindsay Lohan would make a good Carrie and conceded he “could get behind it if they turned the project over to one of the Davids: Lynch or Cronenberg.”
5. He was right to be skeptical. At Kimberly Peirce’s Carrie prom, Chloë Grace-Moretz uses the Force and opens cracks in the earth and FLIES.

6. Amy Irving returned as Sue Snell for 1999’s The Rage: Carrie 2. Her 25-years-later memories cue flashbacks that use actual Carrie footage.
7. Also in ’99, Carrie actress Nancy Allen did Children of the Corn 666: Isaac’s Return. (Bonus: she played a character named Carrie a few years after Carrie.)
8. In addition to water-blasting Carrie‘s prom-goers (and echoing the locker room intro’s shower head), a fire hose becomes a menacing living object in the Shining novel and miniseries.
9. And Carrie’s name is really Carrietta, heads up.

CRITICAL CONSENSUS: Extremely beloved and consistently written about for more than 40 years. When Carrie began its $34 million theatrical run, Time fawned that its “ultimate triumph is spectacular beyond anything one is used to in this antique genre” and called it “an exercise in high style that even the most unredeemably rational among moviegoers should find enormously enjoyable.” A fair amount of hilarious critical savagery came, too, with the New York Times publishing a lede for the ages: “Carrie is an elegant box lunch that got dropped. The wine is all over the rolls. Caviar is embedded in the turkey, and there is lettuce in the mousse.”

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL CONTEXT FOR CARRIE (1974): King’s first published novel, although not the first he wrote, which would be the three eventual Richard Bachman books Rage, The Long Walk, and The Running Man. Rescued out of the trash by wife Tabitha King. Changed their lives when Signet paid $400,000 for paperback rights, heartwarmingly recounted in On Writing.

NEXT TIME ON STREAMIN’ KING: Frank Darabont’s follow-up to The Shawshank Redemption, 1999’s The Green Mile. The adaptation of King’s serialized novel from ’96 got four Oscar nominations, including Best Picture.

Zach Dionne is a North Carolina–based writer; he wants to wish a happy birthday to November babies Wizard and Glass, turning 20, Dolores Claiborne, turning 25, and the upsettingly underrated Tommyknockers, turning 30.