Stephen King admitted his stories of adolescence were drawn from his memories of high school, both, as teacher and pupil, “a time of misery and, resentment”. He likened it to the tribal initiations of American Iroquois who swung clubs at their young braves. Replace clubs with insults and you have the high-school locker room where Carrie opens, with girls throwing sanitary napkins at a sexually ignorant girl. From the slow-motion swoon through a female locker room to the sudden wrench into the rabid attack on a desperate, bleeding girl is like an erotic dream giving way to a nightmare…
A suburban high school is a microcosm of society. Carrie’s secular peers are social Darwinists, turning on the weak. “I wanted the reader to see that this girl was really being put upon,” said King, “that what she did was not really evil, not even revenge, but just the way you strike out at somebody when you’re badly hurt.” [Brian] De Palma maintained that her power was purely emotional. De Palma leant into the idea that it was Carrie’s coming of age that stirs her talents. With the blood comes the power. Carrie is the exception among King’s many gifted children. She is both victim and monster. A creature literally divided across split screens. This is what separates Carrie from the gruesome procession of slasher movies that came in its wake. King had reconvened Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in a high school and audiences would find themselves inflamed by the frisson of her revenge…
It is now legend that searching for unknowns for their respective high school and faraway galaxy, De Palma and Lucas doubled up on casting sessions for Carrie and Star Wars. In a different universe, William Katt, who plays nice guy Tommy Ross, could have been Luke Skywalker and Amy Irving, as the compassionate Sue Snell, a very different Princess Leia… De Palma was deliberately creating a dramatic tension between teensploitation comedy and psychological horror that became seminal. Carrie would spark not only the spate of adolescent horrors from Halloween to Scream, but grossout high-school comedies like Animal House and Porky’s… That bucket of pig’s blood left a permanent mark on the cultural landscape.

Ian Nathan, Stephen King at the Movies. A Complete History of the Film and Television Adaptations from the Master of Horror, Palazzo Editions, London 2019