Carrie (1976)

I just rewatched Carrie last week. The weird part about watching Carrie is that I always forget about the whole telekinesis thing. I know it's sort of at the center of her character, but the images that stick with me from the movie are almost completely independent of the paranormal aspect of the story. For me, you could edit out the light-bulb-bursting, knife-hurling, door-slamming parts and have the same movie, or maybe a better one. The scary stuff is partly in Sissy Spacek's face, and mostly in Piper Laurie's intensity.

I suppose we're meant to view Carrie as a revenge movie. The popular girls mistreat the weird high school outcast, but they don't know who they are dealing with, so they get roasted alive in the gym. In fact, the gym scene comes off as very silly, while the scenes between Carrie and her crazy Christian mother remain unsettling and sometimes scary (okay, sometimes silly too).

Or is it just me? Is it just that I am terrified of weird Christians? (This would explain the time when Kristin and I were at Blockbuster in Urbana, and I was like "We should rent The Exorcism of Emily Rose! It's so scary!" And then we asked the guy behind the counter, and he was like "Dude, have you seen that movie? It's not even a horror movie. It's like, a courtroom drama. No, we don't have it." Sort of as if he had personally tossed it in the dumpster to save customers from having to watch such an unscary movie.)