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| Carrie Directed by Kimberly Peirce Three Stars |
By Rollan Schott
One of the interesting aspects of Brian De Palma’s “Carrie”, the 1976 horror classic about repressed sexuality and the power of femininity, was that it was written (novel and screenplay) and directed by men. It’s an odd band to be writing a feminist anthem, but what De Palma’s “Carrie” became, amidst the whir of testosterone involved in the production, was a parable about the Darwinian cruelty of high school and, perhaps more importantly, a paranoid allegory of masculine insecurity, of the buried power of the women that a male-centric society dares to subjugate. It worked both as a sardonic revenge fantasy and as a cautionary tale, and felt all the more dangerous and startling for managing both.