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10/29/2026 | Press release | Distributed by Public on 10/29/2026 03:24

‘Carrie’ at 50: The Villain We Root For

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October 29, 2026

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Even those who have never seen the film are likely familiar with the scene. Shy teen Carrie White has just been named prom queen, but her joy is short-lived as bullies drench her in pig's blood from a bucket suspended above her. It's the last straw for Carrie, who draws on her telekinetic powers to enact horrific revenge against those who had tormented her throughout the school year.

This October marks 50 years since the film "Carrie" debuted, directed by Brian De Palma and based on the first novel written by fiction author Stephen King. The disturbing story has been retold numerous times over the past five decades, including a new miniseries that recently premiered on Amazon Prime.

Why do audiences find themselves rooting for a character capable of such horrifying violence? We connected with University of California San Diego Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies in the Literature Department, Silpa Mukherjee, on how the director drew from classic horror film styles to beguile audiences. She also explains how the plot examines significant themes that complicate our feelings toward Carrie's character as both victim and villain.

How does director Brian De Palma infuse elements from iconic horror films to build tension and terror in "Carrie?"

Mukherjee: Carrie is a bullied and traumatized young girl, so whatever she does, we feel a strange need to root for her destructive telekinesis. One way De Palma did this was by invoking composer Bernard Herrmann's stabbing refrain from Psycho, but cuts it short, using only the first half as a sonic cue. Much of the anticipation of something terrifying is therefore pleasurable: you hear the "Psycho" theme and think, "Yes! It's coming!"

Yet the refrain stops halfway through, and nothing truly horrifying happens, frustrating our expectations. De Palma relies on homage to the point of hilarity, which I think is part of what makes his films comic.

How do horror and comedy intersect in "Carrie?"

Mukherjee: Carrie's silent scream after she is drenched in blood in the prom scene is almost indistinguishable from mad laughter. There is an interesting theory in William Paul's Laughing Screaming: Modern Hollywood Horror and Comedy that these two genres represent opposite ends of the human experience - the harmony and joy of festive comedy countered by the horror and graphic violence of the Grand Guignol form of theatre, a French theatrical tradition known for its shocking horror.

De Palma is a master auteur of these lowbrow genres of horror and comedy as he places laughter and screaming in unstable proximity. The apparent oxymoron becomes precisely the point: his formal virtuosity turns the supposedly disreputable pleasures of horror, gore and excess into his playful signature.

"Carrie is a bullied and traumatized young girl, so whatever she does, we feel a strange need to root for her destructive telekinesis." Assistant Professor Silpa Mukherjee

How does the story present Carrie as both victim and villain?

Mukherjee: I look at Carrie as a revenge film; I would even go so far as to call it a rape-revenge thriller. De Palma does wonders with the motif of blood, from the beginning of the film, when Carrie's classmates torment her over her first period, to the bloody climax, when they drench her in pig's blood.

The film builds toward, and renders part of the everydayness of, women's sexual violation, seen in the uber-religious mother's disclosure of her own non consensual impregnation and in her classmates Chris and Billy's strange, toxic, sexually exploitative relationship. It offers a pointed commentary on rape culture in high school, where sexual violence often goes unacknowledged and unchallenged.

Tell us about your upcoming class on horror films.

Mukherjee: This winter quarter my film studies and literature course will examine how horror films are an effective medium for talking about unspeakable violence, trauma, fantasies, and desires. By "unspeakable," I mean both personal psychological repression and the real governmental apparatuses that silence voices.

Historically, horror movie monsters have allegorized the violence of slavery, xenophobia, war, eugenic control and religious persecution. To that end, some of the films we will be watching include: Jordan Peel's psychological horror Get Out (2017); Guillermo del Toro's 2025 reimagining of Mary Shelley's classic tale Frankenstein; Under the Shadow (2016), a supernatural thriller set in 1980s Tehran during the Iran-Iraq War; a cult video horror from Japan called Ring (1998); and Mercy, the Mummy Mumbled (1918), a wonderfully strange early film made by Black filmmakers. The fragile survival of this comic mummy film is both an echo of Black historical erasure and a defiant act of archival preservation. I'm very excited to teach this class!

Blending creativity with scholarship

Films, media and video provide a rich source of inquiry for students and faculty in UC San Diego's Department of Literature. The interdisciplinary program invites explorations of how meaning and culture are made on a global scale through the study of film, literature, history and language.

Mukherjee's research represents many of these intersections. She is currently completing her first book titled Cinema Contraband: The Corridor Connecting Bombay to Dubai, which explains the role systems of law have not just in suppressing, but tolerating and generating criminality that serves the State's broader purpose of social control. Her work has been supported by numerous awards, including fellowships from The Society of Hellman Fellows, UC San Diego's Suraj Israni Center for Cinematic Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts.

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