‘Carrie’ was groundbreaking when it came out in 1976 and has lost none of its power to disturb with its depiction of school bullying (a familiar Stephen King trope – and this sterling effort from Brian De Palma is adapted from his novel) where we are effectively rooting for a possessed child. The Hitchcockian links can be found from everything including the split screen shots, the screechy, stabbing sound of violin strings being plucked, blatantly ripped off from the shower scene in ‘Psycho’, Catholic guilt – laid on pretty thick here – and down to Carrie’s home not just looking like the hotel from ‘Psycho’ but also having the school where this is largely set being called Bates High.

While Carrie (Sissy Spacek) has the ‘gift’ of telekinesis and which is used to commit mass murder as the revenge fantasy she plays out on the entire school community that victimized her, Carrie also earns our sympathy because we see that she is punished by her religious zealot of a mother simply for having a period, synonymous in the eyes of Mrs. White (an Oscar nominated and terrifyingly brilliant performance from Piper Laurie) with sin borne by Satan. The girls at the school, who are punished for humiliating Carrie, decide to play a devilish trick on Carrie, in the form of dousing her at the school prom – where they engineer her to be voted queen – with a bucket of pig’s blood.

This is a film prepared to take risks – the bullied school girl who undertakes an act which if it were manifested in the form of a shooting spree would have led to calls for the film to be banned. But because De Palma frames this as a supernatural horror trope somehow the film works entirely in its own orbit. It takes two plausible real world tropes – childhood bullying and religious fanaticism – and blends them in the most unsubtle of ways.

Carrie just wants to be accepted, and when she thinks that the jock, Tommy (William Katt) who takes her to the prom is really interested in her, this works as a romantic coming of age narrative, of the girl who literally becomes a woman and starts to find the independence and gumption to navigate her own path in the world after being held back – and actually locked away, physically – by her overbearing, Bible-spouting mother. It is also a shocking film for the fact that there is no salvation on offer for anyone, with the only survivor of the tragedy subjected to visions and nightmares which plunge her into the grave. A mesmerizing, horrific tragic coming-of-age tale with frenzied, no-holds-barred direction from Brian De Palma.