Mike Flanagan’s Timely ‘Carrie’ Is the First Worthwhile Adaptation in 50 Years

You can find support for each of these readings in King’s own reflections. “The book is, in its more adult implications, an uneasy masculine shrinking from a future of female equality,” he wrote in his 1981 nonfiction book Danse Macabre. “For me, Carrie White is a sadly misused teenager, an example of the sort of person whose spirit is so often broken for good in that pit of man- and woman-eaters that is your normal suburban high school. But she’s also Woman, feeling her powers for the first time and, like Samson, pulling down the temple on everyone in sight.” In her influential 1992 study Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, the scholar Carol J. Clover suggests that this tangle of intentions explains the broad and, in some ways, contradictory appeal of Carrie across genders. Its protagonist is, at once, a projection of female power and male fear and the universal horror of bullying.