Once, when I was traumatised about something in December 2009, I’m pretty sure I went telekinetic.  The lights began to glitch; the boiler gave a Southern Gothic death rattle as the heaters broke, and the computer emitted a sacrificial beep and yielded its data to the ether. As my life shattered into pieces, my home sprang into uncanny response, externalising my horror. I felt like Carrie, the telekinetic protagonist of Stephen King’s 1974 debut novel and Brian de Palma’s excellent 1976 film adaptation.  Carrie is back this month, in musical form, at the Southwark Playhouse. It has endured not because it’s uncanny but because it resonates with how women have to live. We sublimate our trauma, mute our pain, internalise our anger and try to damp down our fear, desire and frustration. If, like Carrie, we really gave full voice and action to how we felt, then the patriarchal world would collapse.  Carrie has always been billed as a horror tale about an unstoppable demonic force terrorising regular middle-American teenagers. But under its crust of gore, it’s both a satirical debunking of ugly duckling-to-teen beauty high school films and a highly sympathetic story about a young woman revolting against bullying, body-shaming, religious sexism and the contradictory and unjust pressures placed on her. It’s as pertinent now as it was 40 years ago.  Carrie is a shy, innocent teenager brought up by a Bible-bashing mother, played by the brilliant Piper Laurie in de Palma’s film as a crazed Jesus groupie tumbling about in soggy white clothes, drunk on His love, haranguing her daughter about the dangers of the dirty deed while giving the distinct impression that she herself thinks about nothing else.  At school, Carrie is first bullied by the minxy mean girls and their macho jock boyfriends, then cleverly and cruelly set up by them. She thinks she’s going on a prom date with one of them, even giving herself a makeover in preparation. It all reaches a pitch of joy when she becomes prom queen; and then, when she’s getting her crown and clutching her flowers and looking out at the crowd, the jocks dump a bucket of pigs’ blood over her. It saturates her skin, hair and clothes.  Time slows down. In a brilliant moment of full-on Revenge of the Nerds fury, Carrie forgets about being a nice girl, transforms into who she really is, swells up with telekinetic life force, and unleashes her anger.  If you weren’t on her side before, you 100% are by the time she unbottles nearly 20 years of outrage. The horror of the novel isn’t what Carrie does but what she has been subjected to – a daily, constant, specifically gendered nastiness that is unsensational because it’s so all-consuming, normalised and endemic. When she uncorks her full power it’s a triumph, a release – the naked blood-streaked face of female fury.  When she uncorks her full power, it’s a triumph  In smaller measure, it felt as if something similar happened to me. Admittedly, losing my life’s work, plus my mother’s life’s work, plus all our bank details and passwords wasn’t as fun as making knives shoot out of the knife rack and stab into the opposite wall. And leaving an ice-cold house to queue for portable fan heaters at an Asda superstore on the coldest weekend of recent years didn’t rival the occult possibilities of making furniture spontaneously stack up around the room.  But despite that, I’m inspired by Carrie, and still believe in rightful vengeance and the epic, brutal, inexorable payback of the gods.  Stephen King and Brian de Palma delivered all that, with glossy lashings of cine-blood. It is said that revenge is a dish best served cold; Carrie suggests sometimes it might be better at another temperature – red hot. And stinking of pig.
Spoiler alert: When Stephen King’s telekinetic hero – now back in musical form – finally uncorks her power, she releases the rage we women must repress