For this month’s Great Adaptations though, we’re back with horror – but the smart kind. Stephen King’s Carrie is a classic book and in 1976 it became a classic movie too: from the hand reaching out of the grave (for which Sissy Spacek was actually buried alive under the set) or a prom queen drenched in blood, it’s difficult to overstate the impact Carrie has had on popular culture.
Carrie is unsettling in every way that counts. It’s a story about humiliation, religious fanaticism, and rage – all wrapped in the high-school world of bullying, locker-room laughter, and ostracism. It’s also a story about power: what happens when someone who has always been powerless finally snaps?
Whether you’re reading the book or watching the film, you can feel the inevitability of the ending building, like a migraine or a storm.
The horror comes not just from the blood, or even from Carrie’s power, but from the recognition that we’ve all seen a Carrie somewhere – or been one.
Published in 1974, Carrie was Stephen King’s first novel – but it was almost lost to the bin, when he threw it away, unable to connect to Carrie as a character. His wife, Tabitha, fished it out and told him to keep going. He did, and before long, King was on his way to becoming one of the world’s bestselling and most beloved writers.
The book’s form is unusual and is a big part of what makes it so distinctive: a semi-epistolary collage of newspaper reports, scientific papers, and testimonies woven around the main narrative.
It gives the impression of reading a historical case study rather than a horror novel, one that has already happened and is being dissected by experts, long after the fact.
That distance somehow heightens the unease, even as it creates a space between Carrie’s experiences and the reader’s empathy which should make it feel more comfortable.
The story follows Carrie White, a painfully shy teenager raised by a fanatically religious mother who believes sin lurks everywhere, especially in her daughter.
When Carrie gets her first period in the school showers and panics, not understanding what’s happening, her classmates mock her mercilessly, unaware that the humiliation will awaken her latent telekinetic powers. The gym teacher intervenes but the bullying continues.
As the bullying escalates, a well-meaning classmate tries to make amends by convincing her boyfriend to take Carrie to the prom. But another, crueler girl has other plans.
What follows is one of the most iconic and catastrophic prom nights in fiction – a night of blood, fire, and revenge.
King’s writing in Carrie is raw, propulsive, and full of empathy for outsiders. The horror works because it’s rooted in real emotion – shame, isolation, and the desperate hunger for acceptance.
Anyone who’s ever felt like an outsider will be able to empathise with Carrie. The book is also surprisingly concise by King’s later standards, coming in at under 250 pages, which keeps the pace taut and suspenseful. There’s an almost tragic inevitability to Carrie’s fate: even knowing what happens in the end, as you read or watch you’ll still find yourself rooting for a different outcome.
Brian De Palma’s 1976 adaptation captures the feverish atmosphere of the book and adds a lurid, dramatic flair. Sissy Spacek, with her wide eyes and eerie fragility, gives a performance that’s both haunting and heartbreakingly human. Piper Laurie, playing Carrie’s mother, delivers religious mania as high art. And the final prom sequence, with its split screens, slow motion, and silence before the storm, remains one of cinema’s most unforgettable moments.
Book or film?
The film streamlines King’s fragmented narrative, removing the reports and letters that frame the novel. Instead of a post-event investigation, it unfolds in real time, which makes the climax feel more immediate and emotive but less reflective.
The destruction in the book is also on a far larger scale – Carrie’s rage levels an entire town, not just a gymnasium. The epistolary fragments give a wider sense of the disaster’s aftermath, suggesting government cover-ups and long-term fallout. The film, by contrast, tightens the focus on the human emotion and spectacle at the core of the story.
The endings also differ: the novel ends with a hint that another telekinetic child has been born, leaving open the possibility of future incidents. De Palma opts for a pure horror punchline to the film – that infamous hand bursting from the grave – designed to make audiences jump out of their seats. It’s very effective.
So, which is better: book or film?
This is one of the rare cases where both are brilliant in their own right. The book is a better psychological study: claustrophobic, strange, and full of pathos, with a wider and more ambitious scope. The film, though, is the better experience: stylish, shocking, and unforgettable, it brings you up close to all the emotion and the human story underneath the destruction of the book.
In this instance, I don’t think it matters which way around you take them: the book will unsettle your mind, while the film will unsettle your nerves. Either way, it’s clear that this is the type of horror that works best precisely because it makes us feel sorry for the monster.