To be sure, [Carrie] is a special kind of fairy tale: it is an adult fairy tale explicit in matters of sex, killing and revenge, and if the young appreciate it, it may be because their tastes have grown ahead of their chronological age. But Carrie is nevertheless a fairy tale: rites de passage, supernatural powers, magic and rites of sacrifice. Since fairy tales feed on such themes, the folktale opus is quite similar the world over. But Carrie, made into a highly popular movie, and thus rendered into a series of images, largely does away with the one unshakable source of ethnicity in folklore, namely the language of the people. The film medium as well as the inexpensive translations into many languages made by the industry of successful paperbacks assure Carrie of a wide, international diffusion and turn it into the new universal fairy tale.

The German...