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What’s more, Peirce’s take on the climactic prom massacre, which finds the unfairly terrorized Carrie reaching her wits’ end and murdering her classmates, has an uncomfortably contradictory air given the film’s call for more empathy and less cruelty. Most likely, her hand was forced by the studio powers that be. I wish it weren’t so. It’s disheartening to think that a director as talented as Peirce would have to essentially smuggle these themes into her own film, so here’s hoping she earned enough dough to help fund a more personal project.
- The Dead Zone (David Cronenberg, 1988) Cronenberg seems to have a good time with this thriller about a man who awakens from a coma and learns he has psychic abilities, though it’s certainly not among his most essential works. The film’s style of horror differs from his usual stuff—there’s no vaginal imagery or deformed, murderous children, for instance—but the pathological nature of the story is vintage Cronenberg, whose portraits of male obsessives (Max Renn in Videodrome, Seth Brundle in The Fly) provide psychological dynamics of his “body horror.”
Drew Hunt writes film-related top five lists every Sunday
