‘Carrie’: 17 things you probably never knew about the horror film — 40 years later

Prom: Your first sexual experience

According to director Brian De Palma, who did a lot of research on American proms before making the film, prom is like your first sexual experince. In a 1977 interview, he said, “[Proms] are very much the same as they were. They haven’t changed. The Senior Prom is the Senior Prom — it’s still the big dance of the year and who’s with who! I went to a few recently to check out to see if they had changed much, and they hadn’t at all. A prom is like your first sexual experience. It never changes. In 1980 or 2001 we’ll still be having puberty, adolescence, young manhood.”

Real-life homecoming queen

Though Carrie’s crown in the movie was a cruel joke, Sissy Spacek was quite popular as a teenager and was even voted homecoming queen at her school, Quitman High School in Texas. Spacek was born Mary Elizabeth Spacek but was given the nickname “Sissy” by her two brothers.

‘Star Wars’ and ‘Carrie’ casting crossover

George Lucas and De Palma held a joint casting session because they were both looking for young, unknown actors for Star Wars and Carrie, respectively. At one point, Lucas was seriously considering Amy Irving for Princess Leia, but the role ultimately went to Carrie Fisher. Actor William Katt, who plays Tommy in Carrie, also auditioned for the role of Luke Skywalker.

Who’s Vinnie Barbarino?

De Palma claimed he didn’t know who John Travolta was and had never seen his TV show Welcome Back, Kotter. “I never saw that series. [Travolta] doesn’t have a big part in Carrie. But John was always the best for the role. He helped immensely. He was very cooperative, very helpful.”

Spacek’s audition

Spacek really wanted the part of Carrie, but De Palma had another actress in mind. The day before the screen test, Spacek found out that she had booked a TV commercial. If she accepted the job, she wouldn’t be able to make it to the screen test, so she called De Palma to ask for his advice. He told her to take the commercial because he didn’t plan on casting her, thinking she was too pretty to play the part. This infuriated Spacek so much that she showed up to the final audition with Vaseline in her hair, didn’t brush her teeth and wore a ragged sailor dress with the hem torn out. She won the role of Carrie, hands down.

Inspired by Biblical illustrations

In between filming her scenes, Spacek would study the pictures in a Bible illustrated by Gustave Doré. She was particularly interested in “the body language of people being stoned for their sins,” she said. She and the director would figure out a way to start or end each scene with one of those positions.

Menstruation and telekinesis

The shower scene where Carrie gets her first period is one of the most brutal scenes ever put on film. But Stephen King says it was important for Carrie to get her period in the book because the onset of her menses triggered her telekinetic powers.

In an interview for Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone Magazine, King said, “The other girls would pelt her with sanitary napkins when she got her period. The period would release the right hormones and she would rain down destruction on them… I did the shower scene, but I hated it and threw it away.”

It was King’s wife who pulled the pages out of the garbage and made him keep working on the novel.

Getting naked

According to De Palma, some of the young actresses didn’t want to be naked in the locker room scene, and some were even in tears over it. But after he showed them footage of the shower scene with Carrie that had already been shot, the other actresses changed their minds and said, “If Sissy can do it, so can I.”

Nancy Allen freaked herself out

Actress Nancy Allen, who played the main bully at Bates High School, found herself hating Carrie a little too much — so much so that in the 2001 documentary Acting Carrie, she said, “To shoot it, I have to say, was maybe the most disturbing thing I have ever shot because it’s like a gang, it’s like a tribe and a ritual or some kind of horrible thing… [I] did start to feel like I hated her and all of those feelings that you’re supposed to be feeling as a character, but I remember shaking. It was very disturbing, very, very disturbing.”

Holy hemoglobin

Though the blood in the bucket was suposed it be from a pig, it was actually a mix of corn syrup and red food coloring. Under the hot lights, the stuff dried up into a sticky paste. To keep continuity in the blood spatter over several days of shooting, Spacek claims she slept in the dried blood.

The red/pink dress

In the screenplay, Carrie’s prom dress was supposed to be red, like blood. But the costume designer thought Spacek would look prettier in pink, so she put her in a pink dress.

Piper Laurie, who plays Carrie’s whacked-out, religious-freak mother, Margaret White, still wanted to say the line from script as it was written: “Red. I might have known it would be red.”

But De Palma asked her to just say “pink.” Laurie insisted on saying “red” because she thought, in her character’s mind, it was red — the color associated with prostitutes.

Keeping up with the Irvings

Actress Priscilla Pointer, the real-life mother of Amy Irving, also plays Irving’s mom in the film — De Palma liked using real family dynamics on screen. At the very end of the film when Sue Snell (Irving) wakes from her nightmare, Pointer calls her Amy instead of Sue.

Amy’s sister, Katie Irving, performed the song that Tommy and Carrie dance to at the prom.

‘Carrie’ goes ‘Psycho’

De Palma was obsessed with Hitchcock’s 1960 film Psycho. He tried to hire the same musician, Bernard Herrmann, to compose the score, but Herrmann died before Carrie was filmed. As an homage to Herrmann, De Palma included the four-note violin sample from Psycho in Carrie.

Also, the name of Carrie’s high school is Bates High School, after the Bates Motel.

Hand from the grave

The final scare in the movie chilled audiences to the core. Carrie’s hand ejects from the grave and grabs Sue. Spacek wanted to do the stunt herself, which meant they had to bury her in dirt and rocks.

Spacek said, “Jack [Fisk] dug the hole, Brian yelled ‘Grab!’ and that was my cue. Those rocks were pumice and they were heavy. It was the last day of shooting and I was all dolled up, and they wanted my stand-in to do it. But my hand is my hand! It was claustrophobic, but very exciting. I couldn’t see, and what with the blood being slippery, I almost broke Amy’s arm! The rocks scratched my arm to bits all the way down, but I wouldn’t have missed that for the world!”

Freaky end sequence

To give the last scene an odd, dreamlike quality, the director shot it with the actors moving and walking backwards, then playing the sequence in reverse. If you look carefully, you can see a red car in the background going backwards.

Director David Lynch would use this same technique in his TV show Twin Peaks.

Love connections

Spacek was already in a relationship with art director Jack Fisk when Fisk convinced De Palma to audition Spacek for the lead role in Carrie. Fisk and Spacek tied the knot and are still married today.

Amy Irving had previously dated Katt, but apparently director Steven Spielberg dropped by the Carrie set because he heard there were many beautiful actresses in the film. Irving and Spielberg got married, but eventually they divorced.

De Palma ended up marrying Nancy Allen, who plays Chris in Carrie, but they also divorced.

Oscar nominations

Both Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie received Academy Award nominations for their roles in Carrie. Though Spacek lost the Best Actress award to Faye Dunaway for her performance in Network, Spacek eventually won the Best Actress award for her role in the 1980 film Coal Miner’s Daughter.

Laurie lost the award for Best Supporting Actress to Beatrice Straight in Network.