Branches of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences represent distinct disciplines of moviemaking. Working with members of the Academy branches, the Academy Museum presents a weekly series that offers a one-of-a-kind journey through film history. Working alphabetically through all 18 branches of the Academy, each week a different branch selects a film that represents a major achievement in the evolution of moviemaking and its unique disciplines.

Brian De Palma wrote and directed this mystery about a movie sound technician (John Travolta) who inadvertently records the assassination of a politician. Stylish and unexpectedly emotional, Blow Out has become one of De Palma’s most acclaimed films over the last four decades, and his script cleverly incorporates filmmaking techniques into its storyline. In collaboration with sound mixer Dick Vorisek and sound editor Dan Sable, as well as such De Palma regulars as cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond, film editor Paul Hirsch, and composer Pino Donaggio, the director creates a worthy successor to the great conspiracy thrillers of the 1970s.

Thanks to Brett!

Despite the temptation of stepping away from new movies in favor of the Overlook’s impressive revival slate, which included a 10th anniversary screening of Oculus with Mike Flanagan in attendance followed by Lucio Fulci’s Louisiana-set The Beyond, there was one classic film I could not ignore. I ventured from the Prytania multiplex to the classic New Orleans theater that gave it the Prytania name—an Uptown institution for over a century that can be found in the pages of A Confederacy of Dunces—for a 50th anniversary screening of Brian DePalma’s Phantom of the Paradise followed by a Q&A with songwriter/star Paul Williams conducted by John Cameron Mitchell. It was a predictably memorable conversation, filled with behind-the-scenes stories and other tales from the height of Williams’ variety show-era stardom (including an anecdote about visiting New Orleans with Lee Majors while wearing a dog collar). The film remains as thrillingly weird as ever, but it also felt fitting to close out the Overlook’s 2024 incarnation with a film that defied categorization then and now and helped inspire those that followed to do the same.

In the book, the gym teacher was named Rita Desjardin, but called Miss Collins in the movie. Future Broadway and Eight Is Enough star Betty Buckley played Miss Collins on screen. She also petitioned director Brian De Palma to let her character live!

“I kept saying to him, ‘She shouldn't die. She didn't die in the book,’” Buckley, 76, tells PEOPLE. “And I'm like, ‘Seriously, Brian, don't kill Miss Collins off. Let her go to the end.’”

Unlike in the novel, which saw the gym teacher survive, Miss Collins becomes one of Carrie’s victims at the prom after Carrie is doused in a bucket of pig’s blood in a humiliating prank pulled by her chief tormenter Chris (Nancy Allen).

Furious and embarrassed, Carrie locks the doors of the school, trapping everyone inside while an electrical fire breaks out.

As chaos ensues, Miss Collins is crushed to death by a falling basketball backboard. “That was my first death scene. It was pretty classic,” says Buckley, who felt uneasy about filming it after seeing a stunt coordinator working on the movie get seriously injured.

The coordinator was doing another scene in which he was thrown in the air as one of Carrie's classmates who gets killed. “There was a mattress for him to land on, and they miscalculated the distance and he hit the ground and hurt himself badly,” recalls Buckley.

“So we all witnessed that and we’re like, ‘What? Are we in safe hands?” adds Buckley, who became nervous that she’d be injured, too.

Buckley’s character is pinned against a wall when the basketball backboard falls. The pendulum-like apparatus was on ropes, and Buckley says there was a piece of balsa wood that was supposed to prevent any injury to her: “That was the safety mechanism.”

“Oh, this'll work,” Buckley says she was told, but she was not entirely sure: “The terror you see from Miss Collins when that happened was absolutely real.”

Despite that, Buckley, who starred alongside Spacek, Allen, John Travolta, Amy Irving and William Katt in the film, loved making Carrie.

“We all had so much fun, and there were seven of us making our film debut, including John Travolta,” she says. “And the group of us were just so excited to be doing it. Sissy Spacek had done some films, and so she was a veteran, all chill and everything. And the rest of us were like, ‘Oh, Hollywood, we're so excited to be here!’”

In “On Writing,” Stephen King’s nonfiction account of his career, he talks about a girl he calls Dodie Franklin. She attended his high school and, he recalls, was often bullied for wearing the same clothes every day. In their sophomore year, on the first day back after Christmas vacation, she came to school wearing newly fashionable clothes with a trendy hairstyle — but the bullying and teasing never stopped. “Her peers had no intention of letting her out of the box they’d put her in,” Mr. King writes. “She was punished for even trying to break free.”

The realization that nothing could change Ms. Franklin’s social standing, coupled with a few more unfortunate examples of young women he knew, helped inform a story about a bullied girl with telekinetic powers who is pushed to her limits and who wreaks brutal revenge on her classmates and, eventually, her abusive mother. “Carrie,” Mr. King’s first published novel, was released 50 years ago, in 1974.

There have been many iterations of “Carrie” since. Horror enthusiasts will recall the classic film directed by Brian De Palma and released in 1976; there have been several remakes, most recently one in 2013 starring Chloë Grace Moretz. There was an ill-fated stage adaptation, “Carrie: The Musical,” which the TV show “Riverdale” once paid homage to. Many things have changed in the half-century since Mr. King’s novel was published, yet Carrie White remains a strikingly relevant and highly relatable figure. She raged her way to a place in pop culture’s pantheon. But why? I first read “Carrie” as a nerdy, horror-enthused 14-year-old growing up in Sri Lanka. At the library of the Christian school I attended, Mr. King’s books were extremely hard to come by, so when I saw a copy at a friend’s house, I was quick to borrow it. I vividly remember being drawn to Carrie’s wide-eyed gaze on the cover, blood trailing from her forehead and dripping down her chin. “Nobody was really surprised when it happened,” it reads in the opening pages. “Not really, not at the subconscious level where savage things grow.” I was hooked. What did Mr. King mean by “savage things”? I didn’t realize then that I would spend so much of my adult life thinking about this very question.

I’ve reached for “Carrie” many times since, and my relationship with the story has continued to shift and evolve. Like most teenagers, I suppose, I initially reacted to Carrie’s story with pure horror; I was mortified by the way she was teased, repulsed by the pig’s blood that gets dumped over her at prom and fascinated by the death and destruction she wrought in retaliation. In my 20s, when I revisited the novel, the horror I felt at her tale turned to something closer to sympathy. By that point, I’d moved from Colombo to California to Britain and then back to my hometown in Sri Lanka and had chalked up enough life lessons to understand Carrie’s suffering in a different way. Now, as a woman in my 30s, I no longer see Carrie as simply a victim to be pitied. I’ve learned to relish her rage. Her anger has inspired much of my own fiction writing and, more important, has taught me that anger, when channeled, can be an asset. This truly hit home for me in July 2022, when I joined thousands of protesters in Colombo marching against corruption and the economic mismanagement of the country’s leaders. Years of feeling powerless finally erupted. We were all angry, of course, but we used our rage as fuel.

A film about a principled artist who must sell his soul to the devil and immediately regrets it? It’s easy to see Phantom of the Paradise as an arrow fired by one of New Hollywood’s great directors to the executives that fund his work, but it’s not a simple act of youthful rebelliousness. Winslow, perhaps a stand-in for De Palma, despises the glitz and glam of Swan’s world, but when he burns his face in a bizarre record-pressing incident, he dons makeup and a mask in order to become the phantom. It’s a fascinating comment on how show business can make a principled artist become what he despises, even as he rejects it.

Despite his pointed critique (and self-critique), there’s a softness in De Palma’s perspective that sets him apart from his more accomplished peers. While Martin Scorsese was fantasizing about being a New York tough guy in in Mean Streets, and Steven Spielberg was examining his own masculinity in Duel and Jaws, De Palma made a film about a man consumed by unrequited love, and its profound vulnerability is supported by the androgyny of its male characters. Before his accident, Winslow is just a gangly, goofy loner who wears his crush on his sleeve. Swan, as played by Williams, is small and effete, with shades of Truman Capote. Then there’s Beef (Gerrit Graham), who Swan first hires to replace Winslow. There’s a corollary to Rocky from Rocky Horror, another muscle-bound object of desire who confronts hetero-normies with their unspoken urges. He also looks a bit like Michelangelo’s David, if he were covered in glitter and given an endless supply of cocaine.

De Palma is having such fun poking at our vulnerable spots, however, that these questions and contradictions don’t really feel explored. They are raised, embodied, and then swept into the film’s audacious style. As in most of the director’s work, there are betrayals, murders, and sexual longing, but unlike the rest of his work, there are few moments of restraint here. De Palma plunges headfirst into his fantasia of music and mayhem and doesn’t really let up until the credits roll. It’s a near-psychedelic experience built not on freaky visual effects but on pure passion and unadulterated artistry. It might be mind-blowing if viewed under the right, umm, conditions, but even the straitlaced freaks among us are likely to fall under its magic spell.