He’s A Perfectly Normal Boy! Hooptober XI
10/32 - 70s

This is more of a “perfectly normal girl” movie, but I recently got the 4K from Shout! and had to give it a spin. I have to admit, having crazy sisters made me a little more sensitive to these kinds of stories, so if it weren’t for a full-blown De Palma obsession, I’d likely not have revisited Carrie and, boy, what a mistake that would have been!

Carrie’s third act is legendary, but the masterful engineering of that tension and release goes on through the whole film. To all those millennials and later—yes, bullying was really this bad, as was teachers slapping the shit out of you. Take it from a guy who got taped to a light pole in the Alaskan winter of his freshman year after getting all sweaty in gym. 

This movie has some of the best horror performances of all time and is probably the apex mountain of teen horror. There are horror masters and then there are master directors who made horror. Hitchcock, De Palma, and Kubrick are on that Mt Rushmore. Who is the fourth? William Friedkin? Discuss.