In Carrie, Brian De Palma flaunts his virtuosity as a filmmaker (is there a passage in ’70s Hollywood as elegant as Carrie’s long, slow walk to the stage, culminating in the fall of the blood bucket, at which point the somnolent slowness goes from lovely to agonizing?) as much as he displays his bone-aching empathy for the tragic Carrie White (Sissy Spacek). Adapting Stephen King’s debut novel at the advent of King’s reign in the book world and in Hollywood, on his way to becoming the most pervasive presence in pop-culture of the 1980s (it was his endorsement that helped bring Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead success), De Palma creates a harmonious marriage of formal bombast and tender humanity, capturing the panic spread by the unusual and the pain of the daily banalities of being a teenage girl in America.

“Virtuosity” and “humanity” also describe Piper Laurie’s staggering performance as Margaret White, Carrie’s mother, a fervid acolyte of some notion of Christ whose beliefs and implementation of punishment for minute sins are unorthodox, but she believes with all her heart. Her faith remains unwavering. The film’s cast is an eclectic array of characters with quirks and personalities, some modest and “realistic” (Amy Irving’s Sue, afflicted with guilt) and some decidedly villainous (Allen’s queen bitch and her thuggish, beer-swilling, swine-killing boyfriend played by John Travolta) in that distinct, classic way of the pre-slasher horror picture, a genre founded upon fear of the strange (Baudelaire’s affinity for the anomalous is very much relevant here).

Laurie’s God-fearing matriarch is outlandish, realized with some capital-A acting at the apogee of New Hollywood histrionics and opposite Spacek’s very internalized, kind-and-loving performance, emotions conveyed in meek terseness and downward-gazing eyes. With hair the color of sin sticking out all frizzy and unkempt, her makeup-less face wide in divine expression as she spreads the word of God translated into her own sui generis piousness, Laurie’s return to Hollywood after a 15-year absence (following her acclaimed performance in 1961’s The Hustler) is indelible and incendiary. Her presence in the film is exaggerated, a performance with an exclamation point, yet still steeped in humanity, strangled by the trauma of corrupted innocence and the desperation to make sense of one’s life. She had a kid and it ruined hers; you hear such stories all the time, hear the sanctimony of parents telling teens to abstain because the last thing they want is a kid too young.

When Margaret hurls her daughter into the closet for blaspheming, it’s not hatred of her daughter that has her quaking, but hatred of herself for birthing spawn that possesses the power of the Devil.