Trivia / Carrie (1976)

• Ability over Appearance:
  • Sissy Spacek was widely thought to be too pretty for the title role, the character in the book being described as chunky, mousy-haired and covered in pimples with Spacek being a thin strawberry blonde with clear skin. Even Brian De Palma thought that Spacek was too pretty to play Carrie and tried to discourage her. For the audition, Spacek combed Vaseline into her hair to make it lank and oily and wore an old, dowdy dress she'd had since middle school in order to prove she could be sufficiently unattractive. And of course her Oscar nomination speaks for itself.
  • Chris is olive-skinned and black-haired in the book, but is played by blonde Nancy Allen who absolutely nails the bitchy attitude.
• Acting for Two: Betty Buckley plays Miss Collins and also dubs the voice of the boy on the bike who shouts "creepy Carrie" as Carrie walks home.
• Acting in the Dark: Betty Buckley didn't know Miss Collins would die until the prom scene was filmed.
• Actor-Inspired Element:
  • Once Sissy Spacek was cast as Carrie, the script added in lines not from the book suggesting that Carrie could pay a little more attention to her appearance to subvert Hollywood Homely.
  • After Amy Irving was cast as Sue, Brian De Palma sought out her mother Priscilla Pointer (also an actress). He had cast real life mothers and daughters together before, and expanded the role of Mrs Snell slightly to have Priscilla play it.
  • The red baseball cap Norma wears was worn by P. J. Soles at her first audition, and De Palma encouraged her to wear it again in the follow-ups, and finally in the film itself. She was initially only cast for two weeks, but De Palma liked her Throw It In! of hitting Sissy Spacek with the cap during one scene and her role was greatly expanded.
• Actor-Shared Background: Sissy Spacek was voted Homecoming Queen in high school.
• Baby Name Trend Killer: In the early '70s, "Carrie" was a fairly common name for baby girls that was rapidly rising in popularity, but it collapsed just as quickly after the film made it a shorthand for somebody (especially a woman) violently snapping after hitting her Rage Breaking Point. Michael Landon's depiction of another Carrie as "an eternal bed wetter who never learned to talk properly" proved the final nail in the coffin.
• Billing Displacement: John Travolta, who was then the star of Welcome Back, Kotter, got second billing on the posters behind Sissy Spacek, even though Billy was, at best, the seventh most important character. Home video releases continue this tradition now that Travolta is a Hollywood icon.
• Blooper:
  • When Sue is having her nightmare, her mother can be heard saying "Amy" by accident.
  • When Miss Collins is disciplining the girls, she says to one girl "Katie" and the girl reacts. Yet her name is confirmed to be Helen in subsequent scenes.
  • When Margaret locks Carrie in the locker, prompting the latter to telekinetically shatter the mirror, the mirror is not only intact when the door gets opened again, but the crack marks are completely different.
  • Miss Collins throws Sue out of the prom right as the blood is poured on Carrie. She's at the fire doors at this point, but in the next shot is back in her original position back in the crowd.
  • Margaret's corpse's feet can be seen moving when Carrie drags her into the closet.
• Breakthrough Hit:
  • Brian De Palma, while well-regarded by critics, had a spotty box office record until Carrie, alternating between underground Cult Classics (Greetings; Hi, Mom!), underperforming high-profile films (Get to Know Your Rabbit, Phantom of the Paradise) and Sleeper Hits (Sisters, Obsession). Carrie was massively profitable (making $30 million on a $2 million budget) and turned him into an A-list director.
  • In a way for Stephen King as well, since the film's runaway success gave his fledgling writing career a massive boost.
• California Doubling: The cars' license plates indicate that the film is set in Ohio, but the presence of palm trees and mountains indicates a very Californian-looking "Ohio". In fact, the prom scene was shot a few blocks from the ocean (in a school-turned-community center in Hermosa Beach).
• Career Resurrection: Piper Laurie had retired from the movie business after The Hustler (1961) when the script came her way. She initially didn't understand the script at all, thinking it rather clichéd, until her husband pointed out that Brian De Palma usually took a comedic approach to his work. When she reread the screenplay with that viewpoint, the part of Margaret White made a lot more sense to Laurie. The subsequent Oscar nomination for playing Margaret relaunched her career.
• Cast the Runner-Up:
  • Amy Irving was in very close running to be given the role of Carrie. However when art director Jack Fisk persuaded the director to let his wife Sissy Spacek audition, Irving ended up with the role of Sue instead.
  • Spacek originally auditioned for Chris. P.J. Soles also auditioned for Chris and wound up playing Norma.
  • John Travolta was originally considered for Tommy Ross.
• Corpsing: Sissy Spacek as Carrie and Piper Laurie as Margaret have very hard times keeping a straight face. Special mention to Piper Laurie, who was so over the top De Palma had to take her aside and remind her she wasn't in a comedy. (In her interview on the DVD, Nancy Allen, who played Chris in the 1976 version, states that she thought they were making a comedy.) It's most obvious during her psycho rant about how boys are like dogs. She's supposed to be furious at Carrie, but is clearly struggling to keep a straight face.
• Creator-Preferred Adaptation: Stephen King has admitted on many occasions that he not only enjoyed Brian De Palma’s adaptation of his book, but even went as far as to say it was better than the book. King considers the book one of his lesser novels, to the point where he actually threw the first few pages in the trash and his wife had to convince him to finish it, and he thought the film fixed many of the mistakes he made in the book. His fandom of this movie, in fact, is the reason why he has disowned every other adaptation, as he doesn't think they're as good as De Palma's film.
• Cross-Dressing Voices: Betty Buckley provides the voice over ("Creepy Carrie! Creepy Carrie!") for the little boy on the bike that chastises Carrie on her way home.
• Dawson Casting:
  • Since you have full frontal nudity in a high school girls' locker room during the opening credits, out of necessity the "teenagers" were all in their 20's at the time. Sissy Spacek was 26, Amy Irving was 23, William Katt was 25, Nancy Allen and PJ Soles were 26 and John Travolta was 22. However, in the original book, Billy's a nineteen-year-old who had to repeat a year. Joked about by CinemaSins, who notes that by comparison, Betty Buckley ends up looking like they hired a student to teach gym class.
  • Edie McClurg has said that, despite the fact that her IMDb page says she was born in 1951, she was actually over 30 when she made the movie.
• Deleted Scene: Amy Irving was originally rather disappointed that many of her larger scenes were cut. A scene featuring her and William Katt in the backseat of his truck was cut, for reasons unknown.
• Enforced Method Acting: Several cases.
  • For the locker room scene, Brian De Palma actually filmed Carrie's showering first. This is because the other actresses were all nervous about appearing nude or in their underwear - whereas Sissy Spacek had no problem doing so. Once they saw the rushes of Sissy in the shower, that made them feel more comfortable. Nancy Allen has also said the fact that they were all nervous together acted as a sort of bonding experience and helped them all feel comfortable.
  • For Carrie's reaction to getting her first period, Sissy Spacek was told "it's like getting hit by a truck". Her husband Jack Fisk (who was also the art director) had been hit by a car as a child, and was just off camera (where he had to be to apply the blood) coaching her on what that experience was like.
  "When I'm playing that scene, I am walking down the street looking at the Christmas lights. And when I see the blood in my hand is when he looks over and sees the car. That's what I was thinking. That's what was going on in my mind during the shower scene."
  • Sue Snell's mother was played by Amy Irving's real life mother, Priscilla Pointer, which caused some real-life emotions to spill into the scene where she comforts Sue following her nightmare at the end of the film. If you listen carefully, she even slips up and calls Amy by her real name at one point.
  • During filming of the scene where Miss Collins is chewing out the girls in gym, Brian De Palma was standing behind Amy Irving just off screen and whispering horrible cruel and hurtful things into her ears in order to make Sue's look of misery and guilt on camera look genuine. Amy later told him that he could have just asked her to look guilty without having to resort to that.
  • De Palma wanted Betty Buckley to really slap Nancy Allen. Because Allen couldn't get the reaction he wanted, Buckley ended up slapping her as many as thirty times. Similar to the above, Allen wondered why he didn't just tell her what reaction he was looking for.
  • In the prom attack scene, they used an actual fire hose on P. J. Soles (who played Norma). Her screaming and collapsing onto a table and then passing out was real. She ruptured her ear drum doing that sequence, lost consciousness, and was deaf in that ear for six months after filming.
  • Also, Betty Buckley says the terrified look on her face right before she gets killed is real, since they hadn't been able to test the falling backboard to make sure it would stop where it was supposed to before hitting her and no one knew for certain whether it would work.
• Flip-Flop of God: Various people who worked on the film have given conflicting answers on whether everyone is really laughing at Carrie after she gets covered in blood, or it's just a hallucination on her part. It's strongly implied to be at least partially a hallucination, though Miss Collins is the only one who's been confirmed to have not been laughing at her. It's unclear how many other people are laughing at her, but it's entirely possible only the mean girls laughed. Brian De Palma himself said that the laughter is almost all in her head. As he's the director, this is probably the closest thing to a canon answer we're gonna get
• Follow the Leader: The two remakes use elements from the original film rather than the novel, despite both otherwise trying to be Truer to the Text. Carrie wears a red dress to the prom, but all films make the dress pink. In the book, she flees the prom before deciding to take revenge — all films have her doing it immediately from the stage. All films also turn a book character into Chris's Beta Bitch and has her rig the voting — it was entirely Chris and Billy in the novel, and Carrie won legitimately. Likewise, in the novel Margaret is killed before Chris and Billy, with the climax involving Sue confronting Carrie after she kills the latter two, but all films have Margaret's death as the climax.
• Fountain of Expies: Nancy Allen's portrayal of Chris Hargensen basically codified the Alpha Bitch as a stock character of school-based Teen Drama, and practically every future example owes something to her.
• I Am Not Spock:
  • In some ways, despite winning an Oscar for Coal Miner's Daughter and decades of other acclaimed roles, Sissy Spacek is still heavily associated with Carrie White.
  • A lot of Piper Laurie's earlier work is ignored too, and her iconic performance as Margaret is what she's best associated with.
• Irony as She Is Cast:
  • Piper Laurie, who is Jewish in real life, plays Carrie’s evangelical Catholic mother.
  • Sissy Spacek, playing a social outcast who's set up to be prom queen for a prank, was in fact her high school's homecoming queen.
• Method Acting:
  • Sissy Spacek deliberately isolated herself from her castmates during filming. She also decorated her dressing room with heavy religious iconography and studied Gustave Doré's illustrated Bible. She studied "the body language of people being stoned for their sins," starting or ending every scene in one of those positions.
  • The cast spent a week together before filming playing theatre games and holding things like class elections to get into the mindset of students who'd been in school together for years.
• Missing Trailer Scene: The original trailer shows a different shot of Carrie in the shower scene - where she's hunched against the wall as they throw the tampons at her. Likewise the original voice of the boy on the bike is heard, whereas he's dubbed by Betty Buckley in the finished film.
• No Stunt Double: Sissy Spacek insisted on using her own hand in the ending scene, so she was positioned under the rocks and gravel. Brian De Palma explains that crew members "had to bury her. Bury her! We had to put her in a box and stick her underneath the ground. Well, I had her husband [Fisk] bury her because I certainly didn't want to bury her".
• On-Set Injury: P.J. Soles ended up with a ruptured eardrum after pressurized water from a hose sprayed her directly in the ear during the filming of the prom scene. She made a full recovery and Brian De Palma decided to leave the shot in the movie.
• Orphaned Reference:
  • Boulders can be seen crashing through Carrie's kitchen ceiling as a remnant of the original ending where she would destroy the house in a shower of rocks. This is also why the grave Sue lays flowers on is under a pile of rocks.
  • Margaret says of Carrie's dress "I might have known it would be red". In the book the dress actually is red and it was going to be in the film, but they decided pink looked better on Sissy Spacek, but according to Piper Laurie she herself made them keep the line explaining to Brian De Palma that in Margaret's mind, the dress is red (aka sinful).
  • Tommy says of the poem Carrie liked "I didn't write it, someone else did" as a reference to a deleted scene where we'd discover Sue writing the poem for him. This explains Tommy's annoyed look at Mr Uhlmann's criticism, since he's criticising his girlfriend's writing.
• Playing Against Type: The Japanese dub, this is for Keiko Han (Carrie) as she is well known for voicing heroic roles.
• Production Posse: Brian De Palma, John Travolta, and Nancy Allen reunited five years later for the film Blow Out, while composer Pino Donaggio went on to score seven more films by the director.
• Real-Life Relative:
  • Amy Irving and her mother Priscilla Pointer played Sue and her mother respectively.
  • Brian De Palma's nephew plays the kid on the bike that insults Carrie, though Betty Buckley dubbed over his voice.
• Romance on the Set: Brian De Palma and Nancy Allen later married.
• Serendipity Writes the Plot: The original plan was to have Carrie burn down the entire town like in the book. However, this proved far too expensive to film. This is probably for the better, as it makes Carrie more sympathetic.
• Star-Making Role: The 1976 version was this for Sissy Spacek and for Nancy Allen.
• Throw It In!:
  • When Piper Laurie first read the script, Carrie's mother seemed so operatic and ridiculous to her, she honestly believed the movie was a comedy. She played the role accordingly, and was laughing between takes at the lunacy of it. Her over-the-top cartoonish portrayal stayed because it arguably made her even more terrifying. Of course, the most terrifying thing of all might be that she still believed it was a dark comedy for the rest of her life.
  • In the opening volley ball scene, the actresses basically used the takes to find out which of them were able to keep getting the ball over the net so they would know who to pass to before Sissy Spacek's bad pass would lose the game for Carrie's team.
  • Norma hitting Carrie with her red baseball cap was improvised by PJ Soles. She joked that it was what convinced Brian De Palma to give her more lines and screen time.
  • Betty Buckley decided to play Miss Collins as a lesbian.
  • In the final scene, you can see a car driving backwards. This is because they filmed things in reverse and then rewound the film in the edit. It works as a visual cue that Sue is just dreaming.
• Underage Casting: Betty Buckley as the gym teacher was only a couple of years older than the actresses playing her students. There is some merit to this as Carrie's narration in the book states that the teacher looked so beautiful at the prom that she could have passed for a student. Miss Desjardin is said to be a young teacher on her first year anyway.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The production of the original film experienced a literal example of Special Effect Failure, detailed in the special features on the DVD. The finale was supposed to involve Carrie calling down a meteor shower on her house, destroying it. Indeed, the interior scenes, showing the rocks coming through the ceiling, had already been shot. However, when they shot the exterior of the house burning down, the rig that was supposed to drop the stones malfunctioned. The production didn't have enough money left to redo the shot, so they simply filmed it sans meteors.
  • Glenn Close, Melanie Griffith, Anjelica Huston, Margot Kidder, Jessica Lange, Bernadette Peters, Jane Seymour (Actress), Cybill Shepherd, Meryl Streep, Kathleen Turner, Sigourney Weaver and Debra Winger were considered for Carrie. Farrah Fawcett was offered the role, but declined due to her commitment to Charlie's Angels. Linda Blair was offered the role, but turned it down, as she didn't want to get typecast after The Exorcist. De Palma was leaning toward casting the lesser-known Betsy Slade, an actress who better matched the novel's description of Carrie, but set designer Jack Fisk touted his wife Sissy Spacek for the part, and she absolutely nailed her audition.
  • Norma's role was smaller originally, and PJ Soles was only cast for two weeks. But Brian DePalma was impressed by her performance and expanded her role.
  • The film was cast in a joint session with the casting of A New Hope, which creates some very interesting casting possibilities.
  • There was originally a scene where Carrie as a little girl is caught talking to a woman sunbathing in the backyard by her mother. Margaret drags Carrie inside and Carrie makes stones rain on the house which tied with the original ending of her burying the house in a shower of boulders. The scene was dropped because the stones didn't have the right effect.
  • Bernard Herrmann was the first choice to score the film but died during production. Pino Donaggio, who'd contributed a memorable score to Don't Look Now, replaced him.
  • More split screen effects were filmed, but they turned out badly and only the few that looked good were used in the movie.
  • The original script contained a scene between Tommy and Sue having sex in the car - taken from the book. The poem of Tommy's that Carrie calls "beautiful" would be revealed as something Sue wrote for him - which is an invention of the film (he really wrote it in the book). The scene overall makes Tommy look less sympathetic - he says that Carrie has been "asking for it" with regards to the bullying.
  • There was also a scene scripted where Chris confronts Sue after the detentions - both the 2002 and 2013 remakes leave it in. Chris would also ask Sue to sign her yearbook, and Sue would only sign her name as a sign of her Character Development.
  • United Artists considered a sequel, with Curtis Harrington perhaps in line to direct. A treatment entitled Carrie - The Return was bandied around. It would begin with the revelation that Sue's dream was a premonition, and Carrie (to be played by a new actress) literally breaking free from the shackles of her grave, literally causing a landslide, rocks flying outward. In the process, Carrie would be revived, but with no powers, at least initially. Now a runaway, she'd be searching for her father, who would be revealed to be a cult leader of a similarly gifted race of telekinetic geniuses out to take over the world.
  • The "Runaway searching for her father and his cult" was actually the pitch for a late 80s syndicated series.
• Word of Gay: Betty Buckley revealed that she played Miss Collins as a lesbian.

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