Carrie was the novel that put Stephen King on the map as a horror author. And even now, these scenes are still capable of some serious chills.
As a Moments subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.
The novel
- The scene where prom-goers are electrocuted by broken power cables. We're given a description of Rhonda Simard convulsing from the electricity, before her full skirt burst into flames. While still convulsing. Yikes.
- At one point Carrie loses "sight" of the gymnasium doors and some try to escape - only to have Carrie regain focus and slam the doors again - severing one poor guy's fingers off.
- Sue is at home during prom. When the town's fire sirens go off, she rushes to the window and sees the high school on fire. Sue gets into her mother's car and, being a novice driver, is unable to start it quickly and must force herself to sit and wait until the car is ready to try again. Once she is moving, she drives to the school - only to witness the entire gymnasium wing explode into a massive fire ball.
- Tommy's death is especially chilling in the book because Chris and Billy rigged two buckets of blood, one of them intended for him. Unlike Carrie, Tommy couldn't be blamed in any way for Chris being banned from the prom, but they specifically wanted to get him too, just to punish him for being nice to Carrie. Worse, everyone is so busy laughing at Carrie that they don't realize what happened at first, and once the chaos starts, he's pretty much forgotten and left to bleed out on the stage. It's also mentioned earlier that the pig blood had frozen solid when Billy first rigged the buckets. Imagine if that had hit him, or if Carrie's bucket had hit her. They would have both been killed instantly. Even worse than this somehow, is that this fate could have hit any of the candidates for prom king and queen. Unlike in the films, Chris never rigs the ballots. It's by some sick luck that Carrie just happens to be voted. So, let's say that some girl and guy come onto the stage, get the crowns, and suddenly, one of them is dead, and the other is hopelessly drenched in blood.
- Later on, a woman, Cora Simard (Rhonda's mother) describes the horrific deaths of much of the town's populace, many of them having been awoken from their sleep by the disaster unfolding outside. Carrie used her powers to snap the surrounding power lines. The downed lines horrifically electrocute many of those present. Cora then describes the death of her friend, Georgette Shyres, as she runs away from Cora in a panic. Georgette runs straight into a power line and we are treated to a truly squicky description."She let go of my hand and started to run for the sidewalk. I screamed at her to stop-there was one of those heavy main cables broken off right in front of us — but she didn't listen. And she ... she ... oh, I could smell her when she started to burn. Smoke just seemed to burst out of her clothes and I thought: that's what it must be like when someone gets electrocuted. The smell was sweet, like pork. Have any of you ever smelled that? Sometimes I smell it in my dreams. I stood dead still, watching Georgette Shyres turn black."
- Carrie getting her first period was like nightmare fuel to her. This was a girl whose mother never told her about female biology let alone stuff normal for women, like pre or post menstrual. So when she got her first she initially thought she was bleeding to death. To make matters worse, when her mother, a religious fanatic with a pathological fear of sexuality, does find out about it, rather than do the rational thing and calm her down, she beats her and locks her in the praying closet claiming that she must have sinned, because from her viewpoint her daughter was blighted with the curse of blood. The girls throwing tampons at her and recording the event to post all over the Internet in the 2013 version is equally horrifying. It's sickening to even think that teenage girls could be so cruel.
- While the book describes some of Chris's past transgressions in school before the shower incident, an incident from her junior high days is borderline sociopathic; she slipped a firecracker into a classmate's shoe and nearly mutilated the girl's foot all because she had a cleft lip.
- The 'Prom Night' section of the book features an AP news ticker later on. As time progresses, the news becomes more and more serious...
- Chamberlain after Prom Night, especially when people are still finding and burying bodies.
- Carrie's life, for the most part, is a total nightmare. Her classmates bully her, her mother punishes her for everything she does, she has no-one to turn to, and in the end her mother tries to kill her.
- The book also makes clear that the pig blood prank didn't just send Carrie over the edge all of a sudden; she'd been harboring violent revenge fantasies for years. After the likes of Columbine and Parkland, every time this comes up is incredibly eerie to see back in the '70s. (Stephen King has talked about this in interviews.) This premeditation also comes through in how her first act after leaving the school is to burst all of the nearby fire hydrants in order to kill the water pressure, leaving the town unable to put the fire out so it will burn down completely.
- Even Carrie's birth is described like this! A neighbour describes hearing hysterical, anguished screaming coming from the family home; the noise is so prolonged and awful that eventually people start calling the police. The officers get there to find Margaret covered in blood, her new baby screaming and bloody.
- Carrie killing her mother is chilling as well. Yes, she is doing it partially in self-defense, and her mother completely deserved it, but the description of Carrie's telekinesis manifesting as a hand that is traveling Margaret's blood stream till it reaches her heart, then squeezing it until she has a heart attack.
- The sheer cruelty and pettiness of Chris is pretty horrifying in its own right. She easily makes Regina George look like Fred Rogers.
The 1976 film
- There is only one thing anybody thinks of when they think of Carrie, and that is this picture and this caption. Even the immediate aftermath is full of this. Just the way she momentarily stands there in stunned silence that gradually gives way to a silent wail of horror and anguish..."They're all gonna laugh at you! They're all gonna laugh at you!"
- The blurry filter on the prom crowd that's laughing at Carrie, which indicates that this crowd is being seen through Carrie's eyes. It's unclear if this is really what's happening or how Carrie is perceiving things due to her mother's warning combined with Sanity Slippage, making her believe every person in the entire room is laughing at her even when that might not be the case in reality at all.note
- But whether it's reality or not, what follows is very real. The. Eyes. Sissy Spacek's brilliantly terrifying wild-eyed and blank look that says right then and right there, her sanity has just gone bye-bye and no one will survive the night. Sure enough, her telekinesis comes to full bore and she proceeds to light the school up while stacking the corpses so very high. Whereas in the novel and most adaptations, there are a few, emphasis on few, survivors, most notably the gym teacher, in this version, Carrie spares no one.
- Carrie starts by slamming the doors shut (but not before Chris and Billy get out) and switching the spotlights to deep red. A couple of boys try to force one set of doors open, but Carrie forces them closed again. The students start to realise that whatever is about to happen, they are completely helpless to stop it. And then the fire hose comes out, and the wheel spins to crank its power up to full as Carrie uses it to throw the other students around the room like rag dolls, devoting particular attention to firing Norma against a table.note One student grabs the hose to get it under control, but only succeeds in firing the water at the spotlights, sending a shower of sparks raining down. Another student scrambles up the bleachers to a window, but Carrie simply blasts him with the hose.
- And then the kill count really starts climbing. Principal Morton and Mr. Fromm fight over the microphone in a muddled bid to appeal for calm, only for Carrie to turn the hose on them, fatally electrocuting the pair of them; the way they writhe in agony as thousands of volts course through them adds to the horror. Mr. Morton's body is thrown off the front of the stage, and Carrie then proceeds to kill Miss Collins (who only ever showed her sympathy and is seen rushing to the stage to check on the unconscious, possibly dead, Tommy as Carrie's rampage takes off) with a falling basketball backboard. Mr. Fromm's body is finally thrown off the back of the stage into the lighting board, setting off a huge electrical fire that spreads around the entire perimeter of the gymnasium in seconds. Now, the other students know that none of them are getting out alive. And all the while, Chris and Billy watch in horror from one of the windows, unable to save anyone.
- In one of the most chilling examples of Dissonant Serenity in cinema history, Carrie, deep in a trance, walks through the middle of the fire and carnage, uses her telekinesis to open the doors, and exits the gym, closing the doors behind her and leaving her classmates to die. There's a shot of Carrie standing outside the gymnasium, with the screams of people being burned alive in the background. What makes it scary is that she's just standing there, motionless
◊, before going on the move again.
- The entire premise of an Ordinary High-School Student snapping and going on a murder spree. Especially in hindsight.
- Margaret White is every horrifying stereotype of The Fundamentalist wrapped into a truly vile whole. And unlike in other versions of the story, there are absolutely no humanizing, sympathetic qualities to be found in her here.
- Her abuse and tendencies are disturbing enough, but her Sanity Slippage after Carrie reveals her powers and rebels by going to prom magnifies this. She scratches at her own face and rips her hair to try to get Carrie to stay at home/punish herself for her and her daughter's 'sins'. Later on, happy scenes of the better parts of prom night are intercut with an unsettling montage of Margaret back at the house in a fugue state, venting her aggression by brutally chopping up vegetables with the knife she will later use to stab Carrie, walking the floors in a trance, and lighting hundreds of candles all around the house. Particularly hits home for people who've had to live with an unstable family member.
- When Carrie returns home from the massacre, we are treated to a shot of her slowly walking through the house still drenched in blood and wild-eyed, before it switches to her POV where we see the house is now packed to the brim with lit candles and religious paraphernalia, including along the staircase and on her bed. All of this is set to horrifying, sombre organ music; evoking church, or Margaret's twisted concept of it. As one inter commenter put it, "it looks and sounds like a pathway to hell". It doesn't help that the candles later come into play when Carrie collapses the house, burning it to the ground.
- Margaret literally stabbing Carrie In the Back while they're praying, which causes Carrie to tumble down the stairs. Then Margaret comes down the stairs with a crazed grin on her face and makes the sign of the Holy Cross with her knife, all while pursuing Carrie, who backs away and tries to get into the closet, before she crucifies her mother with a bunch of knives, including a spatula, so that she resembles the statue of Saint Sebastian.
- The statue of Saint Sebastian on the cross as the house is collapsing and burning on top of Carrie and her mother at the end. The eyes are terrifying. And its facial expression has changed since the first time we saw it.
- The very last scene of the movie, the implied Dream Sequence where Sue goes not to a grave, but the wreckage of the house, implying Carrie and Margaret's corpses weren't even buried, just left to rot. Sue goes to leave a flower... and Carrie's hand reaches up from the ashes to grab Sue, terrifying an entire generation of moviegoers, and helping establish the "one last Jump Scare" as a horror movie tradition.
- Just how far Chris took this, and that people like her actually exist out there.
The Rage: Carrie 2
I guess anger issues run in the family...
- What's the difference between Rachel and her half-sister? When Rachel goes berserk, her powers cause her tattoo to spread across her body like veins. And that heart tattoo on her arm itself? It beats like one.
- The dream sequence at the end has Rachel visiting Jesse. The two share a kiss, right before Rachel shatters like glass. The alternate version of this sequence located on the DVD had a snake leaping out of Rachel's mouth and plunging down Jesse's throat.
- The party scene, natch. For the many who don't escape the carnage end up being impaled with random items (mostly: one of the Jerk Jocks ended up decapitated by the shattering mirrors), crushed by collapsed scaffolding, or set on fire (even with one girl caught on fire desperately crying out for someone to put her out). Then when Mark, Eric and Monica try to shoot Rachel with spear guns, she uses her powers to crack Monica's eyeglasses, sending glass exploding into her eyes and blinding her, causing her to shoot Eric's genitals off, killing them both in the process. Meanwhile, Mark shoots a distracted Rachel (by her mentally ill mother's appearance) into the pool with his flare gun. She manages to make it out (by using a discarded spear gun to cut a hole in the pool cover), but he doesn't after she pulls him underneath and we see a shot of his last moments alive complete with him regurgitating blood.
- Poor Sue Snell is suddenly impaled through the front door when trying to go to the party to check on Rachel. She is then set on fire along with everyone else left in the house.
- Even before the massacre, poor Rachel is caught in a Nasty Party where she is Forced to Watch the film of her and Jesse having sex as the classmates crowd around her and refusing to let her leave. Worse, after she finally collapses to the ground, the kids all either laugh at her, call her names, bark at her and a few even spit on her. For anyone who has ever been bullied in school, this scene is incredibly tough if not impossible to watch.
- Lisa's suicide (via jumping off of the school's roof) is rather disturbing and sudden. Aside from how graphic and realistic it is, she's also left Dies Wide Open.
- The football players. They not only bully Rachel at school before and after Lisa's death, but also harass her at home with phone calls, verbal threats or even trying to break in while knowing she's all alone.
The 2002 film
- Carrie's powers in general are less overtly beneficial in this one, bordering on Blessed with Suck. Almost all of her more impressive displays with her telekinesis are unconscious or even unwilling—when she shoves her mother in the prayer closet, she fearfully says "Watch your fingers!" as if she can't stop what's happening. Her powers are also given a sound cue that sounds jarringly creepy.
- The backstory scene where Carrie's neighbors overhear Margaret abusing her as a child...followed by meteors raining down on the property. Somehow, the scariest thing about the scene isn't the furniture flying through the window or the rocks falling out of the sky, it's Jodelle Ferland's screaming in terror, never seen but heard quite clearly from outside.
- In the scene in the remake, when the blood is poured, it slows down the scene so it's like there's a whole hose of it spraying at her, and when it's over she's completely covered in it.
- The scene following that has Carrie shaking in fear at the blood, and it almost looks like she's having a panic attack.
- Carrie gets covered in the most blood by far in this version, so much that from a distance it almost looks like her face has been flayed off.
- The implication that Carrie has completely lost control of her powers. Whereas in the novel and in the 1976 film, the Black Prom was quite clearly deliberate on Carrie's part, in part due to years of repressed rage and a possible power high, in this film, Carrie shakes in fear at the blood on her, then the screen turns negative, followed by an invisible force pushing the prom-goers away from the stage. We then see that Carrie's face is completely blank. No emotion whatsoever, almost as if she's in a trance. We see a few students trying to get Carrie to respond, with no success. And then, as several of the students laughing earlier were attempting to leave, her head violently jerks, and the doors slam shut.
- One promgoer gets his arm caught and crushed in the door.
- Tina getting crushed to death by a falling basketball backboard.
- One that's both nightmare fuel and tearjerker: Carrie appears to start the chaos unconsciously, her powers reflexively manifesting. For the first chunk of the massacre, she's completely unresponsive, frozen in a look of blank shock and stiff posture and not reacting to anything around her. The only hint it's even her that's doing all of this, or that she's still alive, is that the furniture violently flinging itself around the room breaks when it flies towards her. But after the water sprinklers turn on, Carrie's look changes. Her expression shifts from that of someone broken and helpless to one of...resignation. It's at this point where the killings start to become deliberate, and Carrie starts to slowly move across the floor, for all the world as though, if not now hellbent on murder, then at least unwilling to stop what her powers are doing.
- Pity poor Mrs. Desjardin, who was stuck hanging from a vent during and for a long time after the carnage, unable to lift herself and unable to leave as the floor below her was electrocuted. She actually survived, but it's still horrific to think of all the Survivor's Guilt she'd have to deal with.
- Carrie calmly leaving the burning gymnasium while everyone else falls dead from the electrocution.
- Special Effect Failure aside, the fact that Carrie destroys the entire town, much like she does in the book. Both impressively and terrifyingly, the movie's catatonic take on it means that Carrie simply strolls through the town at a walking pace, not even aware that her powers are causing a cataclysm around her. As she draws near, objects start coming undone at the seams, bolts unscrewing themselves and heavy objects flying away from her at high speed. When she happens upon Chris and Billy in their car, and Billy tries to run her down, the car slams into an invisible barrier just before hitting her, flies up, and is sent careening to the side, wrapping itself around a tree and killing the two. Carrie continues walking, not seeming to have even noticed.
- Margaret drowning her daughter and reciting a prayer while doing so. It's terrifying, and for a moment, she succeeds, as Carrie stops flailing in her grasp and goes still in the water...before waking up and grabbing Margaret's arm with the coldest of looks on her face, before turning her gaze towards her heart—which promptly stops beating.
The 2013 film
The moral here: Carrie White in a blood-drenched prom dress will always be scary no matter which version she is.
- In the theatrical trailer, Chloë Grace Moretz shows just how bone-chilling her screams sound. Said trailer begins with a lovely rendition of "Brightly Beams Our Father's Mercy"...before it cuts into Carrie shrieking her lungs out, trapped in the closet, off-screen, with the song still playing in the background, cheerfully as ever.
- The same hymn is also used in the first 1-minute teaser trailer to very unnerving effect, played alongside the crackling of the fires and the witness statements. "They say... they say... they say... they say..."
- The "Find Carrie" app if you connect with Facebook. While one of your Facebook friends acts as lookout, you sneak into her house, look at her yearbook and you find out she has a crush on you with the words "FOREVER" written underneath your picture and stars drawn all around it and all your Facebook friends in the yearbook are crossed out. Then your friend warns you that her mom's back and then you try to get out but then hide in the closet when her mom comes in. Then you turn your cellphone flashlight on and you catch a glimpse of Carrie. Then you hear her whisper your name. Cue Oh, Crap! and Jump Scare moment.
- There's a deleted scene where Chris and Billy are driving around at night, looking for Carrie's house. While the scene is mostly funny, Chris actually jokes about firebombing her house if they find it.
- Margaret reaching for sewing scissors and preparing to stab Carrie, who at this point is a newborn baby.
- Margaret harming herself with a sewing tool while talking with Sue's mother. It gives a clear idea of how much Margaret is disturbed and how much people around her are underestimating it.
- The pig slaughter scene is especially disturbing in this version. Billy tells Chris to pick out a pig that looks like Carrie the most, which Chris takes totally seriously. One of Billy's friends can't bring himself to kill the poor thing, only for Billy to gleefully do it instead, even kissing the hammer before bringing it down. Then Chris turns it up to eleven by slitting the pig's throat herself, and the look on her face leaves no doubt that in her mind, she's doing it to Carrie.
- At several times during the prom sequence and the showdown with Chris and Billy, Carrie can be seen sporting a Slasher Smile between her expressions of rage. It is also made abundantly clear that Carrie is in complete control of her powers during the sequences. Compare this with the 1976 and 2002 versions of the same sequence, which mostly give the impression that Carrie is in a trance rather than enraged. Here, you can not only tell she's enraged, but she's clearly on a Power High. This makes this scene much more like its literary counterpart, where the rampage was more or less premeditated to the point where Carrie even took action to thwart the fire department.
- Carrie bears the look of a real spree killer in this one. She takes full sadistic advantage of her powers, and can be seen looking around her, taking note of everything she can use to cause chaos and harm, searching for opportunities and bearing a Slasher Smile when she finds one. At other times, she channels Dark Alessa, taking in the fire sprinklers much as the ghoulish Alessa did the rain of blood and possessed of a curious, contemplative sort of mild interest in what's going on around her.
- Heather tries to flee and gets thrown face-first into the door's window. We just see the broken glass and blood as her body falls to the floor.
- The mean twins Nikki and Lizzy get trampled to death while Carrie watches in glee. She spots them fleeing toward the exits, and deliberately holds them down with her telekinesis so she can watch them get repeatedly stepped on!!
- Jackie Talbot, Billy's best friend, tries mobilizing some other students to pull open the gym bleachers so they can reach the windows. Carrie then folds the bleachers back and crushes them all between them, Jackie getting a special camera cut showing him throwing up blood as his spine is cracked in half.
- Perhaps the most tragic death in this version of the Black Prom is Freddy Holt, the student who taught Carrie how to use full screen on YouTube earlier in the movie, and one of the few people who only showed Carrie kindness the whole time. Maybe because Carrie thinks he helped to set up the shower video shown in the prom's projector screens and he's now filming the massacre on his camera, she flings a table at full speed towards the top half of his body. We then see his bloodied corpse crash onto the floor.
- The horrifying way Carrie tortures Tina Blake before executing her. Carrie first hurls a decoration to separate her from the teacher that's trying to help her. This leaves her isolated so Carrie can have her way with her. She is tortured with the electric cords whipping at her and then stumbles into an open fire, screaming with horror as she burns alive. There's an extended version of that showing even more. We also get a shot of Miss Desjardin and George looking horrified.
- In the middle of her rampage, Carrie suddenly uses her powers to lift Miss Desjardin into the air by her throat. Moments later, she throws live electrical wires onto the flooded gym floor, electrocuting everyone who hasn't escaped or already been killed. For a moment, Miss Desjardin is forced to watch her students writhe in agony as they die, not knowing if she's going to join them or be choked to death, before Carrie throws her to safety on the stage.
- In this version Sue is Forced to Watch as well. She sees the bucket hit Tommy and Heather get thrown into the door right in front of her. While the massacre is happening in the gym, she's frantically trying to call someone for help.
- Sue's resolve to confront Carrie at her home after the Black Prom. While Sue wants to help, it's evident she knows she's possibly marching towards her own death at Carrie's hands. Worst of all is, when she does finally reach Carrie, Carrie DOES consider it before letting her go.
- The apex of how truly sociopathic Chris and Billy are in this version is their brilliant decision to run Carrie over with Billy's car. They JUST dumped pig's blood on this girl, humiliating her, not to mention accidentally killing Tommy, but Chris is so hellbent on seeing Carrie suffer that even after just having their escape thwarted by Carrie tearing the street open with a single stomp, Chris is SCREAMING at Billy to run her over.
- Carrie then stops the car with her telekinesis, which looks as if it ran against an indestructible wall. Billy then dies when we see his neck violently jerk forwards and his head crash against the steering wheel, busting his nose open.
- Chris's death right afterwards, after she still tries to run Carrie over with the car. Carrie lifts it with telekinesis and, for a split second, seems to look regretfully at Chris, as if ready to give her an out and let her go... But when the psycho popular girl insists, the car is let go with Carrie out of the way and crashes onto the nearby gas station, resulting in Chris getting thrown face-first into the windshield. Carrie then blows up the car to incinerate her. Trying to run over Carrie twice was obviously a very bad idea.
- The alternate ending is a mix between this and Narm. One particular creepy moment features a Freeze-Frame Bonus of a blood soaked Carrie just standing in her room, holding Sue's baby.
The musical
- "And Eve Was Weak"—the demonstration of Carrie's mother's abuse, starting right after the calm and loving "Open Your Heart" where Margaret get steadily more panicked and desperate about "praying for forgiveness" as Carrie confronts her about her period and trying to get her to actually talk to her for a change. It ends with Margaret locking her in her "prayer room", although there's one version at least that had her slice Carrie's hand open before doing so. The fact that this version's Margaret seems to genuinely love Carrie to some extent makes her violent fanaticism even more unsettling.
- "The Destruction" on the revival's official soundtrack, which is sung right after the blood is dumped onto Carrie. You hear her freaking out, people laughing at her, and then... chaos, things falling, fire, and screaming. Then, as the screams die away, you hear Carrie's Leitmotif playing, and one last explosion, which is followed by the sound of sirens. It's chilling. At least one production of the prom scene had the prom-goers actually run to the exit doors of the theater (which were locked) trying to escape while Carrie killed them by melting their spines with her powers, one by one. She even kills some actors that were planted as audience members who also tried to escape.
- The original "Destruction" wasn't exactly a slouch on the terror-front either (lasers aside). A couple of boys drag Tommy back after the blood is poured on Carrie and hold him there while he struggles to get to her, and the rest of the students begin jeering at Carrie - to the extent of quite literally throwing her around the stage and shrieking laughter directly into her face - all while the music grows increasingly manic and Carrie sings various disjointed phrases from previous songs in the show in an increasingly panicked tone. Then the music stops being so manic and takes on an incredibly dark tone as Carrie repeats lines from her title song ("Doesn't anybody ever get it right?/Doesn't anybody think that I hear?") followed by her repeating her mother's words in "Eve Was Weak" ("God has seen your sinning/Just beginning!/Pray for your salvation/From damnation!/Pray or/He will burn you!/He will burn you!") as she actually begins burning the gym, targeting Tommy and the boys holding him back first as though she believes he was in on the whole thing. The lyrics and sheer conviction of Linzi Hateley's performance make it seem as though this is a Carrie who, despite clearly Jumping Off the Slippery Slope, is still well aware what she's capable of doing and now sees herself as a genuinely god-like figure who is consciously wreaking Old Testament style vengeance on those who have wronged her and even going a step further to taunt them with the possibility of "salvation" if only they somehow fight through the pain and terror of burning alive to apologise to her.
- The opening song "In" was originally pure Narm with its cheesy synth orchestration and choreography resembling an exercise video. The 2012 rewrite turned it into a much more serious rumination on the social pressures of high school, complete with an introduction of all the overlapping anxieties of the students that's sure to resonate with anyone who was an outsider in school.
