Fifty Years On, 'Carrie' Remains a Study in Horror and Humor

The 1976 film Carrie has endured for five decades because it refuses to let audiences settle into a single emotional register. While the story features a telekinetic teen exacting bloody revenge on her tormentors, the experience of watching it is often described as funny as well as frightening. This duality is the central argument of Silpa Mukherjee, an assistant professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of California San Diego.

Mukherjee notes that director Brian De Palma manipulated audience expectations by borrowing sonic cues from classic horror. He used the first half of Bernard Herrmann’s iconic score from Psycho as a signal for impending danger. However, the music frequently stops before the scare lands. This truncation creates a sense of frustration that Mukherjee identifies as a source of comedy. The reliance on homage becomes so evident that the tension shifts toward the absurd, making the film feel less like a pure thriller and more like a playful subversion of genre rules.

The intersection of horror and comedy is further evident in the film’s visual language. Mukherjee points to Carrie’s silent scream after the prom blood incident, which she describes as nearly indistinguishable from mad laughter. She references the work of scholar William Paul, who argued that horror and comedy represent opposite ends of the human experience. De Palma places these two reactions in unstable proximity. This formal approach turns the gore and excess into a specific style of entertainment that challenges traditional definitions of high and low art.

Beyond the stylistic choices, Mukherjee classifies the narrative as a rape-revenge thriller. The film uses the motif of blood to trace a line from Carrie’s first period, which triggers bullying, to the pig’s blood that triggers her final act of violence. The story also examines the dynamics of sexual violation in a high school setting. It highlights the non-consensual impregnation of Carrie’s mother and the exploitative relationship between classmates Chris and Billy. These elements provide a commentary on how sexual violence is often normalized and left unchallenged in educational environments.

Mukherjee is currently preparing a winter quarter course that examines horror films as a medium for discussing trauma and repression. Her syllabus includes a range of films from different eras and regions. The list includes Jordan Peele’s 2017 film Get Out, Guillermo del Toro’s 2025 version of Frankenstein, and the 1980s Iranian thriller Under the Shadow. She also plans to show the 1998 Japanese film Ring and the 1918 American film Mercy, the Mummy Mumbled.

The inclusion of Mercy, the Mummy Mumbled, serves a specific academic purpose for Mukherjee. The film was produced by Black filmmakers and is considered a rare survival from the early days of cinema. She views its preservation as both an echo of historical erasure and a defiant act of archival care. Her research in this area is supported by fellowships from the Society of Hellman Fellows and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Her upcoming book, Cinema Contraband: The Corridor Connecting Bombay to Dubai, will explore how legal systems tolerate and generate criminality to maintain social control. The work continues her focus on the intersection of media, law, and culture. This interdisciplinary approach reflects the broader mission of the UC San Diego Department of Literature, which uses film and media to study meaning and culture on a global scale.