Carrie, 1976

A lonely teenager (the distractingly attractive Sissy Spacek) discovers that she has telekinetic powers that put a dent in the senior prom. Brian De Palma turned Stephen King's first novel into a menstrual apocalypse; and the final scene initiated the now-mandatory trend of giving viewers a final scare to keep them shivering on the way home. We award honorable mention to three other adaptations of King stories: Stanley Kubrick's 1980 The Shining (gorgeous, chilly and strenuously overacted to the director's specifications), John Carpenter's 1983 Christine (the car as object of love, fear and vengeance) and Mikael Håfström's recent 1408 (which reestablishes the sense of dread as an accumulation of unsettling details).