10 Famous Movies Whose Genres Everybody Always Seems To Get Wrong
2. Carrie
Mistaken Genre: Horror What It Actually Is: Teen Drama Brian DePalmas 1976 film starring Sissy Spacek as the titular Carrie, a high school outcast with supernatural telekinesis powers, is considered a classic representation of the horror genre. Even the movies advertisements claim, If You've Got A Taste For Terror... Take Carrie To The Prom. Additionally, the film is based on the novel by the mediums undisputed master of horror fiction, Stephen King. So why isnt Carrie a horror movie? Because save for the one big scene in the gymnasium at the end, theres hardly any horror to be found in this film. Carrie is incredibly ahead of its time in terms of how it looks at the potentially tragic consequences of teen bullying and emotional abuse. But the way this movie was marketed, you would think that Carrie went to the prom with Tommy Ross and murdered him in cold blood for the sport of it. Instead, after being bullied and pushed way too far by her abusive classmates, Carrie snaps and loses control of her powers, incidentally killing everyone at the prom in the process.Thats unquestionably a horrifying scenario, but Carrie is no homicidal maniac the way some other King-created monsters have been portrayed cinematically, like Jack Torrance in The Shining or Pennywise the Clown in It.
Mark is a professional writer living in Brooklyn and is the founder of the Chasing Amazing Blog, which documents his quest to collect every issue of Amazing Spider-Man, and the Superior Spider-Talk podcast. He also pens the "Gimmick or Good?" column at Comics Should Be Good blog.
