I first met Margaret White in the pages of Stephen King’s Carrie in elementary school and it was all because of a crush. After the release of Children of the Corn in 1984, I saw the prettiest girl in fifth grade carrying around Night Shift, the short story collection in which its source was anthologized. With no other way to get close to her, I got my parents to buy me the book and fast became obsessed by King and the illicit charge of what I’d read. Finished in a fever, I had gone in search of more King and landed on Carrie, his first book. King describes Margaret White in its first pages as a “holy roller” so obsessed by the notion of sin that she could not conceive she was pregnant until she birthed Carrie on her own on a blood-drenched mattress in an empty home surrounded by neighbors who hate her. The book, these stories and characters, have anchored themselves in me. The image of Margaret White — a person so pugnacious, so broken by experience and yet so resourceful, so driven and unknowable — immediately lodged itself in my imagination. When I finally saw Brian De Palma’s adaptation of Carrie on a VHS tape I wasn’t technically allowed to rent, the moment Piper Laurie appears on screen I knew immediately that this was Margaret White, a more-rounded, more terrifyingly human Margaret White: a volcano in sheep’s clothing.

What Laurie captured so well was not just the monstrousness of a woman who refers to breasts as “dirty pillows,” not the middle-distance gaze, the sense that not all was well with Margaret who had one foot in reality and the other with the cruel angels of her own divining, but the woman who had her own sad stories to tell — but no one to tell them to. King says Margaret believed her pregnancy was a rapidly-spreading “cancer of the womanly parts” and that she was going to die soon. I can see her belief manifested in Laurie’s performance: the fatalism and mortality, the surety that comes with ignorance and unquestioned faith, the beatific arrogance of the saved forged in the fire of ostracization and isolation. Margaret first appears ten minutes into Carrie, a witch from a fairytale all in black with black cloak, her red hair an untamed thicket come to call on a hapless neighbor with a poisoned apple of the Good News promising salvation in a Godless time. She proselytizes with orgasmic bliss to an increasingly unnerved neighbor before being sent away with ten dollars. She experiences the same kind of rapture when she’s beating her daughter, Carrie (Sissy Spacek), and forcing the child to confess to sins she hasn’t committed. She’s transferring the rejection of her evangelism into rage at a daughter whose budding sexuality she can’t stem. Margaret can’t save her. She’s failed as a parent. Margaret’s humiliation is Carrie’s fault, Carrie who is learning how terrible the world is for young women despite all the precautions Margaret’s taken. Margaret wants to protect Carrie from the rejection and humiliation that she, herself, suffers daily. She’s a terrible mother but what makes her indelible in Carrie is how Laurie makes us believe she has good intentions.

A lot of actors would be up to the task of playing unhinged, but few could also do what Laurie does later when Carrie, fresh from a round of punishments and forced isolation, kisses her mother sweetly on the cheek before bed. Laurie underplays the moment. Her Margaret has no shame for her behavior — why should she? just pleasure over how things have returned to her sense of normal. Laurie underplays it but if you look close, her eyes are glassy and ecstatic. Margaret isn’t sliding up and down an emotional scale, she’s burning at the same temperature whatever her outward expression. When she’s not in the midst of an eruption, she’s still vibrating, maniacally, dangerously in place. I think among Laurie’s peers in the Hollywood of the 1950s, where she got her start as a contract player for Universal, only Ida Lupino had the same quality of dangerous, even explosive potential in stillness. I don’t know that even Lupino could have played Margaret White as something other than a camp caricature, some “psycho-biddy” refugee from a Robert Aldrich exploitation film. As played by Laurie, Margaret’s story has the awful weight of history and melancholy: her story becomes a blueprint for suffering for her daughter, of trauma left to metastasize into madness and of mental illness shunned rather than treated.