Blood opens and closes the circle. Not just any blood, but primordial blood, the kind that marks the boundary between childhood and the storm, between innocence and the carnal knowledge so terrifying to America's puritans. The first drop, secret and humiliating in a high school shower, unleashes a chorus of cruel mockery; the last, an apocalyptic deluge of vengeance that stains the collective memory of cinema red. In between, Brian De Palma orchestrates a symphony of terror that is at once a perverse Sirkian melodrama, an inverted biblical parable, and the most devastating metaphor for adolescent anguish ever committed to film. "Carrie", adapted from the debut novel of a young Stephen King still far from being an institution, is the breaking point where American horror stops looking at external monsters—vampires, ghosts, creatures—and turns its magnifying glass to the horror brewing within: in the family, in the school, in the psyche.

De Palma, then a young virtuoso infatuated with Hitchcock to the point of obsession, doesn't settle for a faithful adaptation. He phagocytizes King's raw, direct prose and transfigures it through a baroque, almost operatic formalism. His gaze is that of a voyeur, an entomologist pinning his characters to a screen that becomes a microscope slide. The use of the split-screen in the climax is no mere stylistic affectation; it is the visual fragmentation of a mind that has fractured, a way of simultaneously showing cause and effect, action and reaction, the tormentor and her victims in a single, ineluctable tableau of destruction. The camera floats, spies, creeps into the girls' locker room with a lubricity that anticipates the violence, turning the viewer into an accomplice to the predatory gaze that haunts Carrie White. This is a cinema that never hides its mechanisms, that flaunts its own manipulative nature, just as the bullies of Bates High manipulate their designated victim. De Palma borrows the voyeurism of Psycho and the suspense of Vertigo, but contaminates them with an Italian Giallo aesthetic and the ecstatic brutality of a Sam Peckinpah, creating a stylistic hybrid as brazen as it is brilliant.

At the heart of this visual hurricane are two performances that transcend the genre and enter the annals of history. Sissy Spacek, with her eyes wide open to a world that rejects her and a physicality like that of an otherworldly creature, doesn't play Carrie: she is Carrie. She is a disjointed marionette whose strings are pulled by a monstrous mother and an indifferent society. Her slender, almost translucent body becomes the battlefield between repression and nascent power. When she finally smiles at the prom, illuminated by a soft light that makes her resemble a Pre-Raphaelite saint, her triumph is so fragile and so pure that the subsequent humiliation becomes unbearable not only for her, but for anyone who has ever felt the sting of being 'wrong'. Her transformation from victim to Nemesis has nothing cathartic about it; it is a Greek tragedy in a miniskirt, the fixed, catatonic gaze of a goddess of destruction who feels no pleasure in her vengeance, only a cosmic void.

Opposite her, Piper Laurie delivers one of the most terrifying incarnations of religious fanaticism. Her Margaret White is no simple caricature; she is a Gothic archetype torn from the pages of Flannery O'Connor and transplanted into a Californian suburb. With her red hair a presage of fire and blood, Laurie acts as if on an Expressionist stage, with grand gestures and a voice that oscillates between persuasive whispers and hysterical shrieks. Her faith is a weapon, her house a prison, her love a form of torture. The scene of the forced prayer in the closet, illuminated by a candle projecting demonic shadows, is pure psychological terror, an exploration of abuse that predates many later analyses by decades. Her death, impaled by knives that transform her into a macabre version of Mantegna's Saint Sebastian, is the culmination of the sacrilegious aesthetic that pervades the entire film.

"Carrie" arrived in 1976, in the heart of a decade marked by the disillusionment of a post-Vietnam and Watergate America, an era when the utopia of the '60s had definitively shattered against the wall of reality. The American high school, so often depicted as an idyll of carefree fun, here becomes a microcosm of social cruelty, a ruthless Darwinian arena where the different are systematically purged. The film's 'villains', from Chris Hargensen (a superbly hateful Nancy Allen) to Billy Nolan (a young and already charismatic John Travolta), are not monsters, but ordinary products of a culture based on conformity and bullying. Their violence is no less terrifying than Carrie's telekinetic rage, because it is more insidious, more mundane. In this sense, the film joins that current of 'New Hollywood' that dismantled America's foundational myths, exposing the rot lurking behind the perfect facades of suburbia.

One could read "Carrie" through countless lenses. It is a Cinderella story in reverse, where the glass slipper is a bucket of pig's blood and Prince Charming is burned to a crisp. It is a feminist allegory about the reclamation of the female body and the repressed rage that explodes against a patriarchy that seeks to control and humiliate it (the first blood is menstruation, and the telekinetic power manifests with it). But it is also, perhaps, a reactionary vision that associates female power with a destructive, irrational force, an echo of ancient fears surrounding witchcraft. The greatness of De Palma's work lies precisely in this ambiguity, in its refusal to provide a simple moral. Carrie is neither a hero nor a villain. She is an event. An inevitable chemical reaction at the intersection of religious oppression, systemic bullying, and the awakening of a power that cannot be contained.

And then there is the ending. After the apparent calm, after Sue Snell's pastoral dream of laying flowers on Carrie's grave, comes the final, unbearable jolt. The hand that erupts from the earth is not just one of the greatest and most imitated jump scares in cinema history. It is the definitive negation of all catharsis, the reaffirmation that trauma cannot be buried, that horror, once unleashed, leaves indelible scars on the psyche. It is the return of the repressed in its purest Freudian form, a scream from the unconscious reminding us that some nightmares never end. With that final, chilling image, "Carrie" ceases to be merely a horror film and becomes a cinematic trauma in its own right, an immortal masterpiece that taught an entire generation that hell is not some otherworldly place, but a school prom, and that there is no gaze more terrifying than that of a girl who has finally stopped crying.