Ask any horror fan off-hand what the best-regarded Stephen King adaptation is, and they usually jump to The Shining, Stanley Kubrick’s seminal masterpiece about a haunted Colorado hotel. Canny fans might also mention The Shawshank Redemption, which holds a higher standing among critics, but it's not strictly a horror film, and even that still isn’t the top of the list. According to Rotten Tomatoes, the best Stephen King film is Carrie, Brian De Palma’s 1976 adaptation which helped usher in the author's arrival as a pop culture icon.

Not only was Carrie the first time King’s work was adapted for the big screen, but it also established De Palma as a major director and helped launch its talented cast into the A-list. Today, the film remains a justified classic, and with a 93 percent Tomatometer rating, it’s unquestionably the critical champion of King-based films.

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Carrie White is crowned prom queen before the chaos in Brian De Palma's Carrie movie.

The book famously saved King and his family from poverty, as was revealed in his omnibus On Writing and a 1986 cover story from Time magazine. However, King thought the idea for the book was terrible and threw the brief first draft away. His wife Tabitha rescued it from the trash bin and read it, then encouraged him to finish it. The month he turned in the manuscript, they turned off the power to their very modest home, and he was paid a mere $2,500 advance for it. It wasn’t until May 1973 when the paperback rights to the book came up that King realized he was sitting on a massive bestseller.

De Palma was a fan of the book and United Artists wanted him to direct when they optioned the rights to the film, according to a 1977 interview in Cinemafantastique magazine. It made for an ideal match, mostly because King’s name was still little known then, so much so, he and his wife weren't invited to the premiere. Regardless, Carrie was a huge hit, with a $33 million box office gross against a budget of only $1.8 million. More important than money, though, its status as a horror classic came almost freshly minted and never diminished in the ensuing decades.

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That started with the cast, whose ranks included the likes of John Travolta, Nancy Allen, Amy Irving and William Katt, who all went on to future success. Topping them all was Sissy Spacek, whose performance as the brutalized title character remains the signature performance of a storied career. The film’s critical response was unusually strong for a horror movie as well, with Spacek and co-star Piper Laurie both receiving Oscars from an infamously anti-horror Academy.

The positive response can be credited to the way Carrie captured many of what turned out to be core themes of King’s work -- the cruelty of bullying, the shared silence of small towns and the idea that sometimes no amount of atonement can undo the damage that has been done. De Palma gave the movie a feverish intensity, embracing rather than shying away from the story's pulpier side, and the results made an indelible impact in a decade that was becoming known for iconic horror movies.

Perhaps the most telling detail about the film, though, is that no one else has been able to capture its essence, despite multiple attempts to do so. Carrie has been remade twice, was the subject of several stage adaptations and even got a sequel in 1999 that saw Irving return as the first film’s only survivor. None of those projects have had the influence or the staying power of the original, which has remained one of the genre’s evergreens for over four decades.

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