It’s one of the scariest movies of all time – and this year Carrie turns 50!
We revisit Sissy Spacek’s experiences of starring in the horror flick, based on the Stephen King novel, and we’ve also dug up some curious facts about how it was made.
Sissy Spacek
Ask Sissy what her strongest memory is of making Carrie and she doesn’t miss a beat.
“How sticky movie blood is,” she laughs. “It was terrible, terrible, terrible!”
The gory horror film tells the story of high school misfit Carrie White, who is relentlessly bullied. On prom night, she is doused with pig’s blood. But unbeknown to her tormentors, she has developed telekinetic powers and wreaks revenge on all those who mocked her.
Sissy, who stepped into Carrie’s shoes with just two previous movie roles to her credit, took her big break seriously. She didn’t complain when she was doused in a mixture of corn syrup and food colouring for the climactic prom scene.
The sequence took two weeks to shoot and instead of washing off the grotesque concoction every night, she went to her trailer and slept in the “sticky, icky stuff” to maintain visual continuity.
The actress, now 76, isolated herself on set to feel like an outcast, decorated her dressing room with religious regalia and dramatically lowered her personal hygiene standards.
“I wanted to feel really badly about myself,” she says.
“There’s nothing like not washing your teeth or your face in the morning. I put Vaseline in my hair.”
The star, who was nominated for an Oscar for the role and three years later took home the gong for her role in Coal Miner’s Daughter, says the bullying theme still resonates with teenagers today.
“You’re going through so many changes and we all have a wounded teenager inside us. It’s a hard, hard time. “The best thing about Carrie for me is that it has ingratiated me to 50 years of teenagers seeing me in the grocery store and going, ‘Look. I have a tattoo of Carrie on my arm.’”
“And my answer is, ‘Does your mother know? And does she hate me?’ “That movie just speaks to something deep in teenagers that really endures. God bless Stephen King. It hit a nerve and it continues to hit a nerve.”
Norma’s fate
Norma, one of Carrie’s bullies, dies after being struck by a high-pressure fire hose during the movie’s crucial fire scene.
P.J. Soles, the actress who played Norma, paid a high price for her star turn – the intense water pressure popped one of her eardrums!
“It just went full force into my ear… I think I blacked out,” recalls P. J., 75, who remained deaf in one ear for six months.
“I definitely wouldn’t want to break my eardrum again. It was really painful, although now I hear in it better than ever.”
Not so scary
Piper Laurie scored an Oscar nomination for her role as Carrie’s abusive and religiously fanatical mother. But when she first read the script, she thought it was hilarious.
“I believed the character was so over the top that the film had to be a comedy,” she shared a few years before her 2023 death, aged 91.
Piper frequently burst into “gales of laughter” on set and found her white, gossamer nightgowns “absolutely hysterical”.
Psycho
Director Brian De Palma, now 85, is a huge Alfred Hitchcock fan and paid homage to his cinematic idol in Carrie by naming the high school in the film Bates High and the slaughterhouse Bates Packing after Norman Bates in Psycho.
Not really teens
Like Sissy, who was 26 when she played Carrie, none of the actors who portrayed teenagers in the flick were actually teens. John Travolta, now 72, was the youngest at 22, while Edie McClurg was the eldest at 31.
Soon after Carrie, Edie, now 80, landed a role in the hit comedy WKRP in Cincinnati and joked that she went “from playing a teenager to playing a middle-aged woman in three short years”.
Whoops!
To create a surreal effect in the scene where remorseful bully Sue Snell places flowers on Carrie’s grave, they filmed the shot backwards. It was then reversed and run in slow-motion to make it appear off-kilter. But sharp-eyed viewers can spot a car driving down the street backwards.
There’s more to come
An eight-episode TV adaptation aof Carrie drops on Amazon Prime in October this year – just in time for Halloween.
