Carrie/Headscratchers


 * Just for starters...why didn't anybody intervene in Carrie's home life before her senior year in high school? Were all of her relatives dead or so distant that they couldn't come and see what sort of grade-A loony was raising her? And didn't the teachers in that school notice that something was really, badly wrong?
 * No one ever knew just how abusive her home life was. Carrie didn't come forward about it, and they never had guests over, so as far as anyone could tell she was just a girl being raised by a religious nut case. Which is not illegal by itself.
 * Her neighbors in The Remake knew what Margaret was like. Why didn't THEY do anything?
 * One of the neighbors in The Remake did make an aborted attempt to help in the flashback. You can see one of the men run to the front door when young Carrie starts screaming, but he's driven back when fire starts raining from the sky. After fireballs falling from the sky, they were probably too afraid to try again.
 * The same reason such things happen in Real Life - they "don't want to get involved" because it doesn't directly effect them.
 * Especially true of child abuse. Back in the early 1960s, it often went unreported. "It's none of our business." In the book, the neighbors were part of the reason the rock incident happened in the first place -- and they still ended up concluding "it's none of our business." The "whore of Babylon" wanted to do something, but her mother talked her out of it.
 * Also, the sensibility towards that sort of thing has dramatically increased over the last few decades. Some forms of domestic violence were probably much more common back when the film was made (in the 70s, I believe?). Were I to start telling you about what we did to each other at my school, you'd have to basically arrest every last one of us.
 * Chris Hargensen. Paternal Love Is Blind, but still...shenanigans like putting a firecracker in another girl's shoe should have tipped Daddy Dearest off that his little girl was growing up to be a very nasty piece of work indeed.
 * Daddy's Little Villain.
 * As wrong as it seems, some parents WILL just chalk up something like that to "youthful high spirits" and see nothing really wrong with it.