It has been almost fourteen years since the Sandy Hook school shooting, the deadliest shooting at a K-12 school in U.S. history. The Sandy Hook tragedy was supposed to be the tipping point for gun reform and legislation, yet as of 2026, we have passed neither a national assault weapons ban nor universal background check legislation. As new headlines regarding gun violence pass our screens every day, I fear we have grown desensitized to a reality that is anything but inevitable. That saturation has produced several films concerned with the before, during, and after of school shootings: Elephant (2003), We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011), The Fallout (2021), Mass (2021), Our Hero, Balthazar (2025), and the two Oscar-winning documentaries Bowling for Columbine (2002) and All the Empty Rooms (2025). 

     I want to propose reading Brian De Palma’s Carrie (1976), and its prom night telekinetic massacre in particular, through this lens. The reading is not new, but it has become unavoidable on rewatch, and more so as the film turns fifty this November and Mike Flanagan’s remake, released on Amazon Prime on October 7th, returns Carrie White to popular culture. What does it mean to root for Carrie in a post-Sandy Hook context, and what responsibility does an adaptation bear when the implications of her telekinetic violence can no longer go unacknowledged?

     De Palma’s film invites sympathy for Carrie by design. Where Stephen King’s original novel depicts a frumpy, overweight, sometimes rude Carrie who echoes her mother’s extremist rhetoric to her classmates, De Palma and Sissy Spacek offer an isolated but curious girl, abused by her mother, bullied by her peers, and completely failed by the adults around her. The prom sequence is built to turn that sympathy into catharsis through Carrie’s slow-motion triumph as she’s crowned prom queen, and De Palma’s split-screen composition, which lets the viewer track the bucket of pig’s blood while Carrie remains oblivious. When the blood falls and the gymnasium doors lock, the film arguably evokes a “good for her” sentiment that is simultaneously disturbing and cathartic as she seeks revenge. In 1976, that response was reasonable, as the audience cheers on the revenge fantasy of a victim finally turning on her many tormentors.

     Yet, the sequence also forecloses that reading, and in a contemporary context the foreclosure is hard to ignore. Carrie’s retaliation is indiscriminate. Her gaze is dissociated, and the violence spreads well beyond the students who conspired against her. It reaches Miss Collins, the one adult who showed her care, along with bystanders who did nothing worse than attend their school’s prom. De Palma’s formal choices complicate the audience’s alignment further as the split screen, which once heightened suspense, now resembles the rehearsed quality of an attack that had been planned or anticipated. With the locked doors, students screaming for escape, and a perpetrator who is also a victim of sustained abuse, these cannot be ignored as the structural elements of countless real-world accounts of school violence and their perpetrators. I do not claim that De Palma intended an allegory for the school shooting, but the film now offers one whether it wants to or not.

     Mike Flanagan, whom Stephen King himself describes as “the best adapter of [his] work,” is more explicit in his 2026 adaptation about the world it inhabits. The series includes a school shooting drill that traumatizes Carrie, a former homeschooled student encountering the rituals of American public schooling for the first time. She simultaneously encounters a more contemporary form of bullying and abuse via social media. Where De Palma’s Carrie was an outcast from an older form of cruelty, Flanagan’s is shaped by an environment of surveillance, and one in which the school shooting is already a lived expectation. By placing the drill in the first episode, long before the prom, the series acknowledges that its audience arrives fluent with the language of an active shooter response.

     While De Palma’s version holds Carrie responsible for her actions and depicts the sequence a bit more elaborately, Flanagan stages Carrie’s public humiliation more matter-of-factly and hedges on Carrie’s actions in the pivotal prom scene. A new character, Emaline West, is introduced as Carrie White’s friend who also has supernatural abilities and offers to “take the wheel” after the blood falls, possessing Carrie and taking control. This version of Carrie is thus arguably less culpable for her actions, and the violence returns as the very scenario of a school under attack that prompted her first telekinetic episode, now carried out through her powers but under an outsider’s influence. One could read this as an ethical complication, but it looks more like having it both ways, with Flanagan keeping the story’s iconic moments without asking us to reckon with a Carrie who actively chooses them.

     Each adaptation must choose between the cathartic logic of the revenge narrative and an ethical reckoning with what that violence resembles. Fifty years later, Carrie’s story can no longer be only a parable about adolescent cruelty and female rage. It has become a touchstone of how American culture imagines the school shooting. Whether we can still root for Carrie, and what it says about us if we do, is the question her story now puts to its audience.