Hook: Today "Carrie" by De Palma came up in my random film of the day — and I dove in to see what's behind it. Expected a banal review of a "cult horror," stumbled onto a pure textbook on nonlinear consequences. One low-budget 1976 film simultaneously: launched Sissy Spacek's career, resurrected Piper Laurie after 15 years of self-imposed exile, turned Stephen King's $2,500 advance into a multimillion-dollar fortune, encoded the DNA for Halloween, slashers and MTV videos of the '80s, and remains the only horror film in history where both lead female roles received Oscar nominations. This isn't a film — it's a damn bifurcation point.
Investigation:
Stephen King was finishing "Carrie" in 1973, sitting on a washing machine in a laundromat — he and his wife Tabby didn't even have a desk back then, they were that broke. The manuscript came out thin, and King decided it was garbage: according to legend, he threw it in the trash, and Tabitha Spruce pulled it out and told her husband not to embarrass himself. In April 1974 Doubleday gave King an advance of $2,500 — standard rate for a first-timer, zero faith in success. Hardcover print run — modest 30,000 copies.
Then something happened that nobody planned: Signet Books bought paperback rights for $400,000 (plus royalties, King received around $500,000 total). The book sold millions. "Carrie" became the #1 bestseller, and King became an author who would have "The Shining" in 6 years, "Cujo" in 7, and so on to infinity. Return on invested advance — 200:1. If Tabby hadn't retrieved that manuscript, we might not have had "The Shining," or "It," or Lynch, or "Stranger Things" (which literally rides on King like a raft on the Nile). This isn't cinema — it's the foundation of the last 50 years of pop culture.
Director Brian De Palma by 1976 was an outsider auteur with five failed films behind him. Budget was miserable — around $1.8 million. Producer Paul Monash insisted on two things: cast little-known Sissy Spacek (at the time — a 26-year-old Texas debutante moonlighting as a waitress) in the lead role and bring back Piper Laurie — an actress who left the profession in 1961 after the flop of "The Hustler" and had spent 15 years raising horses on a California ranch.
Laurie agreed only because the role of religious fanatic Margaret White reminded her of her own mother. This casting became one of the most expensive career mistakes for all the other contenders.
At the 1977 Oscars "Carrie" received two nominations:
And this is still the only case in history when BOTH lead female roles in a horror film were nominated. Not "The Exorcist" (only Jason Miller and Linda Blair), not "The Silence of the Lambs" (only Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins), not "The Sixth Sense" — nobody has repeated it. Horror — a genre the Academy traditionally ignores. And "Carrie" — went and made them vote.
De Palma in "Carrie" honed techniques that all of Hollywood then stole. The main ones:
Long slow-motion scenes stylized as "American musical." The prom climax was shot like a waltz — in slow motion, with lighting, with sound design under silence. This is visual language that later literally became MTV's grammar in 1981, when the channel launched with the "Video Killed the Radio Star" video. Ask any music video director of the '80s — A-ha, Duran Duran, Bryan Adams — they learned editing from De Palma.
Split-screen and doubles. De Palma was obsessed with doubles since "Sisters" (1973) — an obsessive idea that the same person can be both victim and predator. In "Carrie" this manifested in the final scene where Sue Snell walks down the corridor approaching the White house, and Carrie returns to school. Two frames — one canvas. Hitchcock worked this way in "Vertigo," but De Palma took it to the level of signature branding.
The shower scene and the prom scene — twin sisters. Carrie being doused in blood after menstruation at the beginning of the film, and Carrie being doused in pig's blood at the prom — this is literally the same scene, mirrored. Forty years later Andy Muschietti's "It" would rediscover this technique, and critics would write that it's fresh. Fresh, right.
Robin Wood in 1979 organized the "American Nightmare" festival in Toronto and formulated the idea: "Carrie" 1976, Carpenter's "Halloween" 1978, Hooper's "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre" 1974 — these are not just horrors, but social commentary on the decay of the American family after Vietnam and Watergate. Horror for the first time became the language in which America talked to itself about its own wounds.
Before "Carrie" horror was either gothic (Universal, Hammer), or slasher wasn't yet a genre. After "Carrie":
Without "Carrie" we don't get "Scream," "It," "Stranger Things," which literally rides on De Palma's 1976 visual DNA. This is not an exaggeration — it's simply empirical fact of cultural archaeology.
After "Carrie" Spacek received 4 Oscar nominations in 6 years ("3 Women" 1978, "Coal Miner's Daughter" 1981, "Missing" 1982, "The River" 1984) and won for the role of Loretta Lynn in "Coal Miner's Daughter" in 1981. Before "Carrie" Laurie was considered "an actress of the past," and after — received nominations for "The Bostonians" (1984) and continued acting until 2021 (last role in "Candyman"). Both women essentially rebooted their careers in one day.
Critic Darren Elliott-Smith in 2022 published a study "Queer Horror Film and Television", which showed that De Palma inadvertently (or subconsciously) made a film that became an icon of queer culture:
This is a non-obvious layer: De Palma most likely didn't encode it consciously, but a film shot at a moment when the gay community in America was fighting for survival after the Stonewall backlash turned out to be the perfect mirror for those who themselves felt "different" within school walls. Carrie — this isn't just about menstruation and a religious mother. This is about anyone who ever felt alien at prom.
Box office: $33.8 million domestic (with a budget of $1.8 million). ROI — almost 19:1. Including re-releases, home video, streaming — somewhere around $100 million cumulative revenue from one picture. With that money you could have made 18 films at "Carrie" level, and Warner Bros. made one. This is a rare case when the studio hit the very nerve of the era — 1976, Boston, high school prom, religious mother, telekinesis, pig's blood. America, tired of Nixon's moral bankruptcy, saw itself in Carrie White. With the difference that America's telekinesis doesn't work.
Conclusions:
The film "Carrie" — is a rare case when a cultural artifact turned out to be so at the intersection of all possible vectors that any analysis yields an equally rich harvest. You can study it as:
What hooked me personally is this: "Carrie" 1976 teaches us that in pop culture there are no small things. King lacked the courage to throw out the manuscript — and an entire empire appeared. De Palma lacked money for stars — and he dug up two actresses who got Oscar nominations for a high school horror. Laurie lacked the drive to stay in Hollywood — and she spent 15 years on a ranch to return in the scariest mother role in cinema history. Every participant in this chain was one decision away from complete failure — and each time that decision was made in favor of madness.
If you think 1976 Hollywood was about "Taxi Driver," "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre" and "West Side Story" — you're right. But without the little picture about a girl with telekinesis who got doused in pig's blood at prom, all of this would be in a different editing order. Maybe wouldn't exist at all. Or would exist — but without doubles, without slow-motion, without "It," without Stephen King as a cultural institution.
And it all started with a wife pulling a pile of papers written on a washing machine out of the trash. That's how pop culture works — through a chain of insignificant acts of mercy that nobody planned.