The Greatest Horror Movie Villain Isn’t Exactly a Villain
The greatest horror movie villain isn’t just scary — she’s got a lot of pathos. While the genre has given us numerous great villains, one is beyond compare: Carrie White from Brian De Palma’s Carrie, an adaptation of the Stephen King novel of the same name. While no one would deny she’s one of the most fascinating figures in all of cinema, some would contend that she’s not a villain at all. That’s part of what makes her so great.
The greatest horror movie villain is a tragic hero as well
Picture this: a young woman gets embarrassed at her prom and responds by going on a killing spree that ends with her stabbing her own mother to death. Most of us would agree that a young woman like that is a real-life villain. Getting humiliated at the prom is no small thing, but it doesn’t justify a reign of terror.
However, De Palma makes Carrie a combination of villain, tragic hero, and anti-hero. Because we see the abuse she suffers at the hands of her religious fanatic mother and her schoolmates, we understand why Carrie is so angry. When bullies dump pig’s blood on her during her beautiful night at the prom, we understand why she snaps and uses her telekinetic powers to exact a brutal revenge on her tormentors. This moral complexity makes Carrie far more interesting than similarly frightening figures like Leatherface from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre or Michael Myers from Halloween.
The other reason Carrie White is the greatest horror movie villain
Of course, the transition from page to screen could have gone horribly in De Palma’s movie as it did in the 2013 remake. What makes Carrie work is Sissy Spacek’s performance, which is fragile, terrifying, otherworldly, and all too human.
For her role in Carrie, Spacek was one of the rare horror movie stars to get nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress. She lost to Faye Dunaway for her role in Network. Which movie do people still talk about today?
Why Stephen King wrote the novel in the 1st place
In a 2014 article from The Guardian, King explained how he came up with the idea for the novel Carrie. “I’d read an article in LIFE magazine some years before, suggesting that at least some reported poltergeist activity might actually be telekinetic phenomena — telekinesis being the ability to move objects just by thinking about them,” he wrote. “There was some evidence to suggest that young people might have such powers, the article said, especially girls in early adolescence.”
King was not a big fan of the premise for his debut novel at first. ‘I did three single-spaced pages of a first draft, then crumpled them up in disgust and threw them away,” he added. “The next night, when I came home from school, my wife Tabby had the pages. She’d spied them while emptying my waste-basket, had shaken the cigarette ashes off the crumpled balls of paper smoothed them out, and sat down to read them. She wanted me to go on. She wanted to know the rest of the story.”
We can thank Tabitha King for the greatest horror movie villain — and the career of one of the most popular horror movie writers who ever lived.
