Line #75 Trivia/Carrie1976


1	* AbilityOverAppearance:
2	** Creator/SissySpacek 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 Creator/BrianDePalma 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.
3	** Chris is olive-skinned and black-haired in the book, but is played by blonde Creator/NancyAllen who absolutely nails the bitchy attitude.
4	* ActingForTwo: Creator/BettyBuckley plays Miss Collins and also dubs the voice of the boy on the bike who shouts "creepy Carrie" as Carrie walks home.
5	* ActingInTheDark: Betty Buckley didn't know [[spoiler: Miss Collins would die]] until the prom scene was filmed.
6	* ActorInspiredElement:
7	** Once Creator/SissySpacek 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 HollywoodHomely.
8	** After Creator/AmyIrving was cast as Sue, Creator/BrianDePalma 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.
9	** The red baseball cap Norma wears was worn by Creator/PJSoles 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 ThrowItIn of hitting Creator/SissySpacek with the cap during one scene and her role was greatly expanded.
10	* ActorSharedBackground: Creator/SissySpacek was voted Homecoming Queen in high school.
11	* BabyNameTrendKiller: In the early '70s, "Carrie" was a fairly common name for baby girls that was rapidly rising in popularity, but it [[https://www.behindthename.com/name/carrie/top collapsed just as quickly]] after the film [[PersonAsVerb made it a shorthand]] for somebody (especially a woman) violently snapping after hitting her RageBreakingPoint. Creator/MichaelLandon's depiction of another [[Characters/LittleHouseOnThePrairie Carrie]] as [[Website/TelevisionWithoutPity "an eternal bed wetter who never learned to talk properly"]] proved the final nail in the coffin.
12	* BillingDisplacement: Creator/JohnTravolta, who was then the star of ''Series/WelcomeBackKotter'', 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.
13	* {{Blooper}}:
14	** When Sue is having her nightmare, her mother can be heard saying "Amy" by accident.
15	** 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.
16	** 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.
17	** 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.
18	** Margaret's [[spoiler: corpse's]] feet can be seen moving when Carrie drags her into the closet.
19	* BreakthroughHit:
20	** Creator/BrianDePalma, while well-regarded by critics, had a spotty box office record until ''Carrie'', alternating between underground [[CultClassic Cult Classics]] (''Greetings''; ''Hi, Mom!''), underperforming high-profile films (''Get to Know Your Rabbit'', ''Film/PhantomOfTheParadise'') and [[SleeperHit Sleeper Hits]] (''[[Film/Sisters1973 Sisters]]'', ''Film/{{Obsession}}''). ''Carrie'' was massively profitable (making $30 million on a $2 million budget) and turned him into an A-list director.
21	** In a way for Creator/StephenKing as well, since the film's runaway success gave his fledgling writing career a massive boost.
22	* CaliforniaDoubling: The cars' license plates indicate that the film is set in UsefulNotes/{{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).
23	* CareerResurrection: Creator/PiperLaurie had retired from the movie business after ''Film/TheHustler1961'' 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 Creator/BrianDePalma 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.
24	* CastTheRunnerUp:
25	** Creator/AmyIrving 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 Creator/SissySpacek audition, Irving ended up with the role of Sue instead.
26	** Spacek originally auditioned for Chris. P.J. Soles also auditioned for Chris and wound up playing Norma.
27	** Creator/JohnTravolta was originally considered for Tommy Ross.
28	* {{Corpsing}}: Creator/SissySpacek as Carrie and Creator/PiperLaurie 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.
29	* CreatorPreferredAdaptation: Creator/StephenKing has admitted on many occasions that he not only enjoyed Creator/BrianDePalma’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\|Adaptation}} every other adaptation, as he doesn't think they're as good as De Palma's film.
30	* CrossDressingVoices: Betty Buckley provides the voice over ("Creepy Carrie! Creepy Carrie!") for the little boy on the bike that chastises Carrie on her way home.
31	* DawsonCasting:
32	** 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. Creator/SissySpacek was 26, Creator/AmyIrving was 23, Creator/WilliamKatt was 25, Creator/NancyAllen and PJ Soles were 26 and Creator/JohnTravolta was 22. However, in the original book, Billy's a nineteen-year-old who had to repeat a year. Joked about by WebVideo/CinemaSins, who notes that by comparison, Creator/BettyBuckley ends up looking like they hired a student to teach gym class.
33	** Creator/EdieMcClurg has said that, despite the fact that her Website/IMDb page says she was born in 1951, [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVTpYPYxcnI she was actually over 30 when she made the movie]].
34	* DeletedScene: Creator/AmyIrving was originally rather disappointed that many of her larger scenes were cut. A scene featuring her and Creator/WilliamKatt in the backseat of his truck was cut, for reasons unknown.
35	* EnforcedMethodActing: Several cases.
36	** 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.
37	** 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.
38	--> "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."
39	** Sue Snell's mother was played by Creator/AmyIrving's [[RealLifeRelative 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.
40	** During filming of the scene where Miss Collins is chewing out the girls in gym, Creator/BrianDePalma was standing behind Creator/AmyIrving 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.
41	** [=De Palma=] wanted Betty Buckley to really slap Creator/NancyAllen. 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.
42	** 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.
43	** Also, Betty Buckley [[http://www.vulture.com/2014/10/horror-movie-deaths-rose-mcgowan-scream-carrie-piper-laurie-final-destination.html 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.
44	* FlipFlopOfGod: 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. ''Creator/BrianDePalma'' 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
45	* FollowTheLeader: The two remakes use elements from the original film rather than the novel, despite both otherwise trying to be TruerToTheText. 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 BetaBitch and has her rig the voting -- it was entirely Chris and Billy in the novel, and Carrie won legitimately. Likewise, in the novel [[spoiler: Margaret is killed before Chris and Billy, with the climax involving Sue confronting Carrie after she kills the latter two]], but all films have [[spoiler: Margaret's death]] as the climax.
46	* FountainOfExpies: Creator/NancyAllen's portrayal of Chris Hargensen basically codified the AlphaBitch as a stock character of school-based TeenDrama, and practically every future example owes something to her.
47	* IAmNotSpock:
48	** In some ways, despite winning an Oscar for ''Film/CoalMinersDaughter'' and decades of other acclaimed roles, Sissy Spacek is still heavily associated with Carrie White.
49	** A lot of Piper Laurie's earlier work is ignored too, and her iconic performance as Margaret is what she's best associated with.
50	* IronyAsSheIsCast:
51	** Creator/PiperLaurie, who is ''Jewish'' in real life, plays Carrie’s evangelical Catholic mother.
52	** Creator/SissySpacek, playing a social outcast who's set up to be prom queen for a prank, was in fact her high school's homecoming queen.
53	* MethodActing:
54	** Creator/SissySpacek 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.
55	** 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.
56	* MissingTrailerScene: 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.
57	* NoStuntDouble: Creator/SissySpacek insisted on using her own hand in the ending scene, so she was positioned under the rocks and gravel. Creator/BrianDePalma 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".
58	* OnSetInjury: 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 Creator/BrianDePalma decided to leave the shot in the movie.
59	* OrphanedReference:
60	** Boulders can be seen [[spoiler: crashing through Carrie's kitchen ceiling]] as a remnant of the original ending where [[spoiler: she would destroy the house in a shower of rocks]]. This is also why [[spoiler: the grave Sue lays flowers on]] is under a pile of rocks.
61	** 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 Creator/PiperLaurie she herself made them keep the line explaining to Creator/BrianDePalma that in Margaret's mind, the dress is red (aka sinful).
62	** 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.
63	* PlayingAgainstType: The Japanese dub, this is for Creator/KeikoHan (Carrie) as she is well known for voicing heroic roles.
64	* ProductionPosse: Creator/BrianDePalma, Creator/JohnTravolta, and Creator/NancyAllen reunited five years later for the film ''Film/BlowOut'', while composer Music/PinoDonaggio went on to score seven more films by the director.
65	* RealLifeRelative:
66	** Creator/AmyIrving and her mother Priscilla Pointer played Sue and her mother respectively.
67	** Creator/BrianDePalma's nephew plays the kid on the bike that insults Carrie, though Betty Buckley dubbed over his voice.
68	* RomanceOnTheSet: Creator/BrianDePalma and Creator/NancyAllen later married.
69	* SerendipityWritesThePlot: 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 [[Administrivia/TropesAreTools probably for the better,]] as it makes Carrie more sympathetic.
70	* StarMakingRole: The 1976 version was this for Creator/SissySpacek and for Creator/NancyAllen.
71	* ThrowItIn:
72	** When Creator/PiperLaurie first read the script, Carrie's mother seemed so operatic and ridiculous to her, she honestly believed [[http://www.cracked.com/article_20791_6-actors-who-thought-they-had-made-totally-different-movie.html the movie was a comedy]]. She [[HamAndCheese played the role accordingly]], and was laughing between takes at the lunacy of it. Her [[LargeHam 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.
73	** 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.
74	** Norma hitting Carrie with her red baseball cap was improvised by PJ Soles. She joked that it was what convinced Creator/BrianDePalma to give her more lines and screen time.
75	** Betty Buckley decided to play Miss Collins as a lesbian.
76	** 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 [[spoiler: that Sue is just dreaming]].
77	* UnderageCasting: 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.
78	* WhatCouldHaveBeen:
79	** The production of the original film experienced a literal example of SpecialEffectFailure, detailed in the [[DVDBonusContent special features]] on the DVD. The finale was supposed to involve Carrie [[DeathFromAbove 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.
80	** Creator/GlennClose, Creator/MelanieGriffith, Creator/AnjelicaHuston, Creator/MargotKidder, Creator/JessicaLange, Creator/BernadettePeters, Creator/JaneSeymourActress, Creator/CybillShepherd, Creator/MerylStreep, Creator/KathleenTurner, Creator/SigourneyWeaver and Creator/DebraWinger were considered for Carrie. Creator/FarrahFawcett was offered the role, but declined due to her commitment to ''Series/CharliesAngels''. Creator/LindaBlair was offered the role, but turned it down, as she didn't want to get typecast after ''Film/TheExorcist''. 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 Creator/SissySpacek for the part, and she absolutely nailed her audition.
81	** 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.
82	** The film was cast in a joint session with the casting of ''Film/ANewHope'', which creates some ''very'' interesting casting possibilities.
83	** 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.
84	** Music/BernardHerrmann was the first choice to score the film but died during production. Music/PinoDonaggio, who'd contributed a memorable score to ''Film/DontLookNow'', replaced him.
85	** More split screen effects were filmed, but they turned out badly and only the few that looked good were used in the movie.
86	** 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.
87	** 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 CharacterDevelopment.
88	** Creator/UnitedArtists 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.
89	** The "Runaway searching for her father and his cult" was actually the pitch for a late 80s syndicated series.
90	* WordOfGay: Betty Buckley revealed that she played Miss Collins as a lesbian.

Context Trivia / Carrie1976