Although Carrie White is the main character in her eponymous story, she's not exactly the most likeable one. Even Stephen King said words to the effect that he couldn't sympathise with the social outcast with telekinetic powers, and he's the one who created her. All that said, Carrie's a bundle of kittens and gumdrops compared to her overbearing religious zealot of a mother, who regularly beats her daughter down emotionally and occasionally locks her in a closet in their dilapidated home, all because she's a "child of sin". That's hardly her fault, is it? Piper Laurie can stand with the best melodramatic villains as Margaret White, a character who - although fictional - has strong echoes of the real about her, a disturbing reminder of the immense power parents can have over their children - that is, until their children snap and burn down a school with all of their classmates in it. Though Carrie's the one who commits the most explicitly atrocious acts, it's her mother's campaign of fear that's truly responsible for all the suffering that happens in the film, and we won't soon be forgetting it.
