Despite his great films and huge influence on several of today’s most celebrated directors (including Quentin Tarantino), Brian De Palma is somehow one of cinema’s most underrated filmmakers. While De Palma has had his share of misfires (Snake Eyes) to outright disasters (Bonfire of the Vanities), he’s also responsible for many great films (Scarface, Casualties of War, Dressed to Kill, The Untouchables, and Obsession to name a few).

In honor of the New York Film Festival premiere of Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow’s new documentary De Palma (read our review), which screens on October 11^th, Way Too Indie put together a list of the Top 5 Brian De Palma Films. With such a lengthy filmography and a true master of his craft, it was difficult to decide on just five of his films. So after watching the following films, be sure to check out more of his prolific catalog.

Top 5 Brian De Palma Films

#1. Blow Out (1981)

One of the greatest and most criminally under-seen films of all-time, Blow Out is a true masterpiece in every sense of the word, up there with the best of fellow new Hollywood greats like Spielberg, Scorsese, and Coppola. Featuring John Travolta’s best performance, it makes you wonder how (outside of Pulp Fiction) he has been so spectacularly wasted throughout most of his career. Pino Donaggio’s heartbreakingly beautiful score will sit with you for days after hearing it, no matter how many times you’ve heard it before. Nancy Allen is at her most charismatic, her chemistry with Travolta so rich and natural. At one point while jotting down notes for this article I simply wrote “VILMOS FUCKING ZSIGMOND”, the incredible cinematographer who is a frequent collaborator with De Palma. (Note: Zsigmond’s middle name isn’t “Fucking”, but I’ll be damned if that’s not how I pronounce it every time I watch the many ambitious photographed sequences in Blow Out.)

But the real star of the show is of course, Brian De Palma. Blow Out is the moment when it all clicked in place, all the tools and style De Palma had been toying with and perfecting over the years are on full display here. Beautiful, and in some cases groundbreaking, use of split diopters, Steadicam, split screens, and expert audio editing demonstrates his technically proficient skills. But this is also De Palma’s most mature film. Though not completely void of some of his trademark sleaze and sophomoric humor, Blow Out is a classic thriller that illustrates the frustrations of a person in post-Watergate America tired of the political cover-ups. The film also contains the most tragic, painful, and beautifully executed ending I’ve ever seen in a film.

Do yourself a favor and buy a copy of the Criterion Collection’s release of Blow Out on DVD & Blu-ray. Don’t download it, don’t wait for it on Netflix, buy the Criterion release. You won’t regret it.

#2. Carrie (1976)

Shield your eyes Kubrick super-fans, not only is this one of the strongest horror films of the ’70s, it’s also the best film adaptation of a Stephen King horror story. Don’t get me wrong, The Shining is excellent (so put down that Jack Torrance’s axe), but De Palma’s Carrie is so stylistically rich and anchored by an incredible performance from Sissy Spacek that it’s impossible to turn away from. Spacek and Piper Laurie’s Academy Award-nominated performances (along with Travolta’s stellar work in Blow Out show what a great director of actors Brian De Palma has been throughout his career. Make sure to see this right away if you haven’t already, and if you have, it’s the perfect time for a rewatch.

#3. Carlito’s Way (1993)

One of the more underrated De Palma films and certainly not as widely known as his other collaboration with Al Pacino, but Carlito’s Way is De Palma’s finest crime drama, even superior to Scarface in just about every way. Pacino is in top form here and (along with his Michael Mann collaborations) delivered some of his finest work since the ‘70s. Sean Penn heads up a strong supporting cast. Stephen Burum’s cinematography is exquisite. And David Koepp’s script brings a solid foundation that is missing from most of De Palma’s efforts in this decade.

#4. Sisters (1973)

Along with 1974’s Phantom of the Paradise, Sisters was the film that set in motion the De Palma we know today. The film demonstrated just how versatile he could be considering his earlier work on counter-culture comedies. While Sisters is rough around the edges in some areas, the talent is very clear. De Palma has always been accused of being a Hitchcock rip-off artist and it’s easy to see why when watching something like Sisters (or better yet, Dressed to Kill). But lost in that criticism is the fact that De Palma has always been experimenting and curating his own style by way of his Hitchcock influence. That experimentation is rarely more evident than it is in Sisters with its heavy use of split screens and De Palma allowing the exploitation side of him show with increasingly graphic imagery.

#5. Mission: Impossible (1996)

Still the best entry in the Mission: Impossible franchise despite lacking the thrill of high stakes stunts executed by Cruise himself (an area the last two films have excelled in). Where De Palma one-ups the others is his handling of smaller, quieter moments that create an intensity that permeates the whole film (rather than just a few minutes of insane stunts). This proved that De Palma can handle the big scenes as well, the scene where Cruise’s Ethan Hunt steals the NOC list from C.I.A. headquarters is one of the most masterfully directed sequences of his career.

Brian De Palma makes classics–from the gangster guts ‘n’ glory of Scarface to the thrilling cinematic barrage of Blow Out, his films will go down as some of the best in memory. Much like Gus Van Sant did with his re-imagining of Psycho, director Kimberly Peirce (Boys Don’t Cry, Stop Loss) faces a seemingly insurmountable uphill battle with her remake of one of De Palma’s greatest, the cult horror classic, Carrie. And, just like Van Sant, she bravely goes toe to toe, scene for scene, with an all-time great auteur, essentially mimicking the narrative structure of De Palma’s film which inherently, daringly says, “I can do better.” She’s got guts.

Look–it’s not impossible to improve upon a classic. Just look at De Palma’s own Scarface or Joe Cocker’s version of The Beatles’ “With a Little Help From My Friends.” Does Peirce hold her own against the excellence of De Palma’s 1976 original? On some levels, yes, she does–her riffs on certain scenes are actually better than De Palma’s. But, overall, Peirce’s film is bested by the elegance, purity, and raw high school terror of the original, as she wastes time with trivial infusions of modernity and assembles a glaringly uneven cast.

The weight of the horned beast that is high school is enough to break anybody, and when you’re a bullied social outcast like Carrie White (Chloe Grace Moretz), the pressure is tremendous. Compounding the horrors of high school is her traumatic home life, which she shares with her psychotic, self-destructive mother, Margaret (Julianne Moore, monstrous), who beats into Carrie’s head (sometimes literally) that life’s pleasures are constructs of the devil and stuffs her into a dingy closet full of gothic religious knick-knacks on the regular. When we, along with Carrie, discover that she has potentially destructive (Peirce hammers this home) telekinetic powers, all of a sudden we have a classic “ticking time bomb” story on our hands. Smashed between two equally unbearable worlds, it’s only a matter of time before Carrie’s frustration erupts in a shower of destruction.

The original story (penned by Stephen King in the novel that spawned it all) had a simple shape, an elegant upward curve tarting with a trickle of blood–a flock of mean girls “stoning” a desperately confused Carrie with tampons–and ending with a bucket of pig’s blood that prompts Carrie to unleash hell. Peirce, however, mucks it up by introducing the modern complication of cell phone videos-gone-viral, which adds nothing interesting to the story and only serves to meddle with the pitch-perfect flow of King’s narrative. She’s also crafted a much more brutal, gory film here, with the super-power violence of the finale bearing a striking resemblance to the carnage at the end of last year’s Chronicle (a similar film, in many ways). The disgusting kills Peirce presents don’t seem to gel with the story as much as De Palma’s tamer sequences, but hell, the epic gore-storm is still a ton of fun to watch.

Sissy Spacek was iconic in her turn as the vengeful Carrie, and Moretz puts on a fine performance herself, though the blood-soaked dress doesn’t fit her quite as well. Moretz doesn’t convey frailty or meekness as well as Spacek does (few could), but the camera loves her (she was born to be on screen) and her more imposing physicality appropriately matches the inflated violence of Peirce’s version of the tale. During the explosive finale, she’s an otherworldly force of nature that’s more bad-ass (Kick-Ass?) than frightening, and though I prefer De Palma and Spacek’s more chilling take on the character, Peirce and Moretz super-villain version of Carrie White is stunning in its own right.

As mentioned, the cast is uneven, but sitting right at the top of the slope is Julianne Moore, who is, actually, much more terrifying and riveting than Piper Laurie, who originally played the sadistic Momma White. Moore’s deranged whispers and coos toe the line between disturbing and silly, but like the veteran she is, she always lands on the side of the former. She inflicts just as much, if not more, damage on herself than she does her daughter, jabbing sharp objects into her arms and thighs constantly, in some twisted form of repentance. The scenes between Moore and Moretz are unquestionably the best in the film, and they make the drama that plays out in the high school seem like they’re from a different, lesser movie. Portia Doubleday plays a decent bitch as Chris Hargensen, Carrie’s prime tormentor, but Gabriella Wilde is useless as Sue Snell, a remorseful rich girl who pushes her boyfriend Tommy (Ansel Elgort) to take Carrie to the prom in a misguided act of charity. When sharing the screen with pros the caliber of Moore and Moretz, it’s hard not to get overshadowed, and they do.

Cinematically, Carrie no slouch, with some truly expertly crafted sequences. In De Palma’s film, a scene in which Tommy asks Carrie to prom on her doorstep at night is unremarkable at best, with Spacek looking over her shoulder in fear that her mother will catch them. In Peirce’s riff on the sequence, she puts the teens out in front of the house in broad daylight, with Moretz frantically scanning the road for her mother’s car, as she could be arriving at any moment. It’s much more suspenseful and engaging than the original setup, which says a lot about Peirce as a filmmaker. While De Palma’s Carrie is a film of camerawork, Peirce’s is one of editing, employing subjective cuts and slow-motion to generate momentum.

It’s difficult not to compare Carrie to the original 1976 version due to Peirce’s decision to essentially tell the same story, with only a few tweaks and updates here and there. While Peirce’s more muscly, less refined film doesn’t quite measure up to De Palma’s masterpiece, it dwarfs the typical torture-porn fare that we’re so inundated with during Halloween season. The ambition of Peirce, Moretz, and Moore shines through in the film’s strongest moments, and though the supporting players and shaky contemporary revisions weigh the film down, Peirce deserves credit for putting up one hell of a fight.

This Friday, the girl in the blood-soaked prom dress returns to wreak havoc on the masses in Carrie, a re-imagining of Brian De Palma’s beloved 1976 horror gem. Helmed by director Kimberly Peirce (Boys Don’t Cry, Stop-Loss), the film again follows the complex, violently turbulent relationship between outcast quiet-girl Carrie White (Chloe Grace Moretz), a girl with telekinetic powers, and her creepily religious mother, Margaret (Julianne Moore). Carrie, who’s constantly bullied at school, suspiciously gets asked to prom by a popular jock, but her magical night turns bloody as the bullying gets out of hand.

During a roundtable interview, Peirce went in-depth into her affection for De Palma’s film, why she chose to remake it, how the film is a superhero origin story, infusing the story with modernity, casting her talented leading ladies, and more.

Carrie opens this Friday, October 18th.

It’s a bit of a herculean task remaking one of the great cult horror films of our time, and Peirce needed to make sure that the project was the right fit. “I’m not necessarily for or against re-imaginings,” Peirce explained. “To me, it’s an opportunity; the question is, is it a good opportunity? When [the studio] came to me with the project, the first thing I thought was that I love Brian De Palma. He’s a fantastic director and I love his original. Actually, I’m friends with him. He was really supportive of me, so I felt I had to talk to him about it. He said, ‘I think you should do it.’ Once I cleared that hurdle, I picked up the book, which I had read as a kid, and dove back in. I read it back to back three times, because it’s so compelling.”

What ultimately drove her to want to make the movie more than anything was her fascination with the Carrie White character. “She’s a misfit, a social outcast,” Peirce said of the iconic character. “What I love is that she wanted love and acceptance, and she was up against huge obstacles. The girls at school make it impossible [for her]. At home, she has this amazing relationship with her mother, [who] loves her, but is also feuding with her because she thinks [Carrie’s] evil. Carrie’s up against these obstacles, but will do anything to overcome them to get what she wants. I love that. I love that there’s a Cinderella component, that she wants to wear a beautiful dress, go to the ball, and dance with a handsome boy. That, to me, is fantastic.”

Structurally, Peirce goes virtually scene for scene with De Palma in her take on the story, though she gives modern updates many of the key narrative components and makes them her own, including the mother-daughter relationship. “They’re locked in this love affair and this feud,” Peirce told us. “This is where this movie needs to begin. We need to begin in this relationship. It was imperative to me that you could follow this and it would escalate all the way to the climax, where they basically come to blows with one another. The powers come out; they unconsciously erupt, and then the duel begins. I made sure that the duel was much more violent and brutal than it ever has been.”

“Stephen King had written a classic story that was timely, timeless, and ahead of its time,” Perice said of the original novel. “It looked at emotional and physical empowerment and violence, it looked at wanting to fit in, it looked at superpowers…all this stuff. What it presupposed was that we were going to move into the moment we’re in now, in which social networking…our phones take videos, pictures…how many times do you find yourself living through something and someone’s recording it? Human beings have been telling stories since the beginning of time. We now live in a mode where we’re obsessed with recording ourselves. The devices we have have the ability to maximize human contact, for better or for worse. For me, it was important I ran through the story the modernity we live in. I was interviewing teachers and principals, and I said, ‘Tell me what the situation is now, and how is it different than five years ago?’ They said the difference is, the kids with these devices, this stuff goes viral. It’s not just dangerous for the kid who got tormented–it’s dangerous for the kids who torment, because they can now be implicated. And, it’s dangerous for the schools. They don’t want to be on the Today Show. I said wow, that’s gold, entertainment-wise.”

Peirce continued: “I saw it as a superhero origin story. That was really exciting to me. Maybe it’s because we’ve had the great benefit of the great Marvel movies, but these are real stories. What I loved was that the powers were part of Carrie’s personality. They were part of her survival. If you’re a misfit and you can’t fit into the social spectrum, you’re lonely, you can’t get love and support at home, then you find you have a talent–you can write, direct, photograph, or you’re good at business–whatever your talent is, that’s your mode of survival. That’s what the powers were for her. She researches [her powers], and she realizes, “Oh my god, there are other people like me! Maybe I’m normal!'”

Carrie is an outcast’s tale, and Peirce wanted to make sure that her take on the story retained that perspective. “There was an equation to the entertainment. We had to make sure we [followed] Carrie’s footsteps every step of the way. There were forces that were suggesting maybe we shouldn’t identify with Carrie, [but rather] the leggy blonde girl. I was like, ‘No no no.’ This is a story about a misfit, because we’re all misfits. Whether it’s at your job, you school, with your family, with your friends, on some level, human dynamics are always shifting, and we’re all misfits on some level, somewhere.”

When Peirce first saw De Palma’s film, it was overseas, butit was a sort of strangely patriotic experience for her. “I believe I saw it in Japan,” Peirce recalled. “I left the states when I was 18 with my boyfriend. I spent the first year in Japan saying, ‘I need to be independent of this system that is so much about success in a very narrow channel.’ Once I freed myself from that [by] learning Japanese and photographing all over the place, I had a huge craving to come back to the States and be an American again, with a newfound understanding of my own identity. In many ways, my stories are always about identity. I started going to the American Consulate all the time, and I started consuming American culture. It was like I was looking for the most American pieces of film to reorient myself. With De Palma’s film, it was very much like seeing 8 1/2 and La Dolce Vita, it gave me permission to dream, in terms of cinema. I loved it.”

There have been rumors floating around the cinemasphere that Peirce filmed multiple alternate endings for the film, though she quickly refuted them. “That is a rumor,” she asserted. “We spent a lot of time thinking about the ending, but there aren’t five or six. We explored different avenues to get the ending right, definitely, but not that [many] of them.” Still, she wasn’t bothered at all by the gossip. “I like rumors!” she confessed.

De Palma’s film is a wonderful piece of horror cinema, but Peirce didn’t shy away from attempting to improve certain scenes she thought could do with a re-write. In one scene from the original, Carrie’s crush asks her to prom on her doorstep, but Peirce thought the setup was a bit implausible. “[For] that scene, we started asking, well, is it really realistic that the mother would have been in that house and not come to the door?” Peirce told us. “We [thought], not really. The mother shouldn’t be there, but once we took the mother out, we thought the mother’s presence should be there. The only way to have the mother’s presence there without her in the house would be to have her coming home. Since I [have her working at] the dry cleaner, we had a basis for her being out of the house. So, she’s coming home from work, Carrie’s told she needs to go right home and never talk to strangers, and the car coming could actually be a threat. I love screenwriting for that reason, because it’s like problem solving.”

Moretz (Let Me In, Kick-Ass) is one of the brightest young actresses in the movies today, but she had quite large shoes to fill, as Sissy Spacek’s original turn as the vengeful high-schooler is so canonized and revered. Peirce detailed the many facets of Carrie that Moretz had to embody.”What was important to me was that you had to be deeply in love with Carrie and walk in her footsteps. This had to be a very point-of-view movie, so I needed somebody who had the warmth and the love, but [she also needed to transform] into a human monster. You needed to love her; you needed to want her to succeed at the prom; you needed her to become a human monster; when she turned and the powers leaked out, you had to buy it; when she does the revenge tale, you still needed to be sympathetic to her. That was everything. If you ever lost your sympathy for Carrie, the movie didn’t work.”

Despite the immense talent Moretz possesses, there was still work to be done for her to truly become Carrie White. Peirce recalled one of the first conversations she had with Moretz on set. “‘You’re amazing, but look at you!'” she remembers saying to Moretz. “‘You’re so confident, you’ve got a family that loves you, and you live on the world stage. You could not be farther from Carrie White.’ I said, ‘It’s imperative that we get rid of your confidence, we make you fragile, you’re underprivileged instead of overprivileged, and your mother’s very complicated with you.’ Peirce went to great lengths to instill the despair of the character into Moretz.

“We went to homeless shelters and I had her meet women who unfortunately had challenging circumstances. I said to her, ‘I don’t want you to just learn their stories. I want you to learn them. I want you to try to vibrate the way they vibrate, feel what they feel.’ We just kept doing exercises and pushing her there.”

Peirce then explained the complexities required to play the other, more frightening half of the mother-daughter duo. “Here’s a woman who loves her daughter, but feuds with her because she thinks her daughter has evil powers. She also is a woman who is afraid to leave the house because she’s afraid of the outside world. She uses corporal punishment on her daughter, but as Julianne will tell you, she uses it even more on herself. She doesn’t want to hurt her daughter and would rather hurt herself. It’s such a beautiful way of looking at that character. And, she’s created her own religion. Religion is very important in the movie, but if you look closely, it’s her religion. Like Carrie says, ‘Mom, that’s not even in the bible!’ She may be telling Carrie all this scripture that may not even be in the bible.”

With Moore, Peirce felt she had found the perfect woman for the job. “Julianne was the only person who could play that role because she’s one of our great living actresses,” Peirce gushed. “She’s warm, sensual, sexual, beautiful, a consummate professional. She’s a great mother to her children, so she carries with her an understanding of motherhood. Chloe brings a wonderful understanding of being a daughter, but she isn’t yet an adult. She’s still growing, so when they got together, the relationship took off. They really worked together in ways that were profound.”

As an example of their strong onscreen chemistry, Peirce pointed to one of the original film’s most unforgettable scenes. “They’re showing the closet scene on TV, where Julianne pushes Chloe in.” Capturing the right tone for the physical struggle proved to be more difficult than expected. “We did the first take of the scene, and I was like, ‘Whoa, that was too easy.’ I went to Chloe, and I said, ‘You’re making it too easy for her to push you in. You need to fight back.’ She fought back a little bit, and I said, ‘I see the problem. You have too much respect for Julianne Moore! Forget your respect for Julianne Moore. You’re terrified of that closet. You’re going to fight to the death–you’re not going in that closet!’ In the take used in the film, Moretz doesn’t show any respect for Moore and fights for her life. “Julianne was sweating and she had to work harder. She works harder, Chloe works harder, and all of a sudden, you have a relationship.”