I was born in 1985. Growing up, I didn’t watch movies from before the eighties. I had no control over what I could watch on TV, as I lived in my older brother’s bedroom. After I hit my twenties, I only watched a handful of movies from the seventies and earlier. The big ones, mainly: Jaws, Chinatown, Taxi Driver. I was aware of Carrie from popular culture. I knew that its protagonist was a shy girl who got bullied in school, lived with her religious nutcase of a mother, got deceived into going to the prom, had pig’s blood dumped onto her head, then proceeded to slaughter everyone inside. I didn’t know who Sissy Spacek was. The times I heard her name, I wondered who would have been so thoughtless as to call her child “Sissy.”

Recently I realized that I somehow managed to miss all of Sissy Spacek’s work from after I was born. Literally the only thing I briefly caught her in was Andy Samberg’s Hot Rod. She played Samberg’s mom. I didn’t even remember her from that movie, and by then, she was already old; sorry to say, I’m not attracted to old people. Hell, I’m not even attracted to most women my age. Also, I turned off the movie not even halfway through because I found it too goofy, and I was only watching it because Andy Samberg somehow managed to marry Joanna Newsom, with whom I was obsessed at the time.

Recently, as a forty-one-year-old man, I had the misfortune to come across Terrence Malick’s haunting Badlands, experienced Sissy Spacek properly for the first time, and I was struck in a way I couldn’t deny. Where had this girl been all my life?

Now I’ve watched Sissy’s Badlands, 3 Women, the godawful Welcome to L. A., Prime Cut, Ginger in the Morning, and two episodes of The Waltons she starred in. I was running out of her big roles from the 70s.

I didn’t want to watch Carrie. I hate horror movies, I don’t like Stephen King, and I didn’t want to see Sissy Spacek get abused. But tonight I put my big-boy pants on and started watching it. Sissy’s Carrie gets harassed by seemingly her entire class of girls for being bad at volleyball. In a strangely-erotic scene, we witness Sissy caressing her breasts as well as the rest of her beautiful, pale, freckled body in the shower, before she experiences menstruation for the first time. When Carrie, who had no clue what was happening to her because her mother is a sickening nutcase, begged her classmates to help her, they mocked her relentlessly and threw tampons and pads at her as Sissy curled into herself in a corner of the showers. Then a teacher came and slapped Carrie. Then she got called into the director’s office, who proceeded to call her Cassie four times.

By then I was done. I didn’t want to keep watching. People are terrible, I have had to deal with and witnessed terrible behavior at school, but I had a hard time believing that Carrie had happened to land in a class where virtually all the girls were sociopaths. I didn’t buy that the school director, principal or whatever that careless fuck was would get her name wrong four times after getting corrected. This was just piling on for some purpose that didn’t sit well with me.

It already hurt to see Sissy Spacek behave like a scared wild animal who can only expect to be mistreated. But I continued watching nonetheless. Thankfully, the rest of the movie is more nuanced than that. There’s cinematography and imagery to praise, particularly a sequence involving a circling camera during the prom dance. There’s a surprise along the way that I don’t want to spoil regarding the circumstances around Carrie getting invited to the prom. But in the end, I got mostly what I already expected to encounter: a shy, traumatized girl gets bullied, eventually invited to the prom, ends up on stage as the prom queen, and gets pig’s blood dumped onto her, which convinces her that every human being in sight deserves to die. I can’t exactly blame her for breaking.

The prom scene is extremely memorable, but simultaneously way sillier than I expected. Some general spoilers from now on. I got the sense that the filmmakers, when trying to put it together, ended up thinking, “She’s telekinetic, yes, but how on Earth would she use telekinesis to murder all these people?” So we have some silly moments with Carrie controlling a hose and spraying people. Electricity gets involved, someone dies who didn’t deserve it, and eventually the whole place seems to burn.

Looking back, I doubt that Carrie tried to kill people in the beginning. She went directly for the hose and went around spraying whoever was available. She could have launched any objects in sight as projectiles, but didn’t. Then, some people got electrocuted, and she pivoted to murder as if thinking, “Oh well, I’ve already caused some people’s deaths. May as well go all the way.”

Also, a couple of bastards get their car and themselves blown up after they attempted a little hit-and-run on the bloodied prom queen. Good riddance to those pig fuckers.

Before I watched the movie, I didn’t know what happened to Carrie after she returned home, and now I wish I still didn’t know.

What maybe hurt the most regarding Carrie is that, leading to the prom, she had started to assert and believe in herself. She put her abusive mother in her place, she made a beautiful dress for herself, and hoped that for once in her tragic life, she could spend a single evening in public without being abused.

Sissy did an extraordinary job playing Carrie. She inhabited all the fear, pain, hope, gratitude, murderous revenge. I understand how everyone for decades remembered her as “the girl from Carrie,” although this is a role completely unlike her as a person, as far as I can tell from interviews and her autobiography. And of course, Sissy was hauntingly beautiful on this movie. Also, her mother didn’t name her “Sissy.” That comes from the nickname her brothers used for her as their sister.

Travolta was also in the movie, playing a dumb motherfucker. Didn’t like him one bit, but I guess Travolta played him just fine.

I don’t have the kind of temperament that would allow me to like this movie even if I wasn’t obsessed with Sissy Spacek to begin with; seeing her being bullied and abused isn’t something I would do for fun. People liking this movie seems to me more like bonding over shared trauma. I can admire what the film accomplishes. Enjoying the experience of watching it is another matter.

Carrie White is a Medusa of modern times. She deserved better.