First question: Carrie, why? Possible answers: the remake rights were just lying there, like as not. And it's been a profitable property several times over now, taking a circuitous, money-spinning four-decade journey through pretty much every medium of popular entertainment: a huge bestselling print debut for Stephen King in 1974, the much-beloved 1976 Brian De Palma adaptation, fancied nowadays as one of the greatest horror movies of all time, a Broadway musical adaptation in 1988, a pretty trashy sequel in 1999, a 2002 TV remake intended as the pilot for a series that was never picked up (nice work as Carrie's mom by Patricia Clarkson), and now a wholesale big-screen remake from Boys Don't Cry director Kimberly Peirce (my compulsive penchant for completism compels me also to mention this year's Orgy University: Carrie XXX – tagline: "Add it to your bucket list!" And yeah, that's not blood she's drenched in).

We also live in an age of Stephen King remakes: it's like the end of Graham Greene's life, when all the movies that had been mutilated by Hollywood in the 40s and 50s got halfway decent new versions. And if King's name is on almost anything, it will sell, guaranteed.

The best reason for remaking Carrie is that it channels every negative feeling about the American High School Experience, that Darwinian war of nerd versus jock, into a climactic explosion of suppressed teenage rage. Surely every high-school spree-killer has, at some point before cracking, imagined himself as the apocalyptic author of similar destruction and mayhem (and pace Carrie, it's always a him). King got right inside the mind – and the incipient rage – of a naive victim, but he always gives good villain, too: no matter who plays Carrie's tormentor Chris and her hoodlum boyfriend Billy, you always end up wanting to scoop their eyes out with a melon-baller.

Pierce treads a fine line between re-adapting the original novel and remaking De Palma's classic. She's far less operatic in her style than De Palma (who isn't?), and doesn't linger over the early locker room scenes with De Palma's predilection for gauzy, voyeuristic David Hamilton-ish, softcore photography and maximum nudity (Carrie's ordeal is filmed on a smartphone), but she retains his aggressively menstrual Carrie White v The Colour Red design. Her Carrie is Chloë Grace Moretz, who is very good with the naivety, victimhood and desperate sexual confusion the part demands. Julianne Moore, meanwhile, plays Carrie's mother Margaret with a manic glint in her eye, though probably no one can top Piper Laurie's sense of psychotic religious conviction in the original.

Last question: Carrie remake, why? Answer: why the hell not?