“There are two equally valid sides to every story. Every warped viewpoint must be weighed seriously for any grain of truth it might contain. If you shout loudly enough, down is actually up.”
—“From Cruella to Maleficent to the Joker: Is It Time to Retire the Villain Origin Story?” by Stephanie Zacharek, TIME Magazine, May 26, 2021
I enjoy Horror as a genre. Stephen King’s novel Carrie captivated me early on as a reader. It still does. It’s a brilliant novel about mundane evil—one of King’s best. It’s also a villain origin story. A young, abused girl with powerful psychic abilities she can’t control, Carrie White destroys everything she wanted and everyone she loved. Stephen King takes a complex, nuanced approach, skillfully treading that fine line between humanizing Carrie too much—and therefore blaming teen bullies for their own horrific murders—and making a teen girl’s indignation into a horror monster. In the final scene of his adaptation, Brian De Palma highlighted the dilemma. When Sue Snell lays flowers on Carrie’s vandalized grave, Carrie’s gore-soaked hand reaches through the earth to attack her. De Palma and King seem to say, “Be careful who you empathize with, lest you too be dragged to hell.”
