40 Years Today: 20 Facts About Brian De Palma’s Carrie

Brian De Palma’s Carrie turns 40 today! Originally released on November 3, 1976, Carrie, based on the bestselling Stephen King book and his first, tells the story of high school student Carrie White, who is bullied both at school by the popular girls and at home by her own religious fanatic mother. With the onset of her first period, Carrie begins to experience supernatural powers she can’t explain. When the bullying goes too far, Carrie unleashes a horrific wrath around her.

Brian De Palma’s adaptation features a young Sissy Spacek in the titular role along with numerous young actors, Nancy Allen, William Katt, Amy Irving and John Travolta, all whose careers were either launched or escalated by Carrie‘s release. Piper Laurie, who played Carrie’s mother, relaunched her career with this role. She had been inactive in show business since 1961.

While many young actresses auditioned for the lead role, including Melanie Griffith, it was Sissy Spacek who beat them all out. She auditioned by rubbing Vaseline into her hair, not washing her face and arriving at the screen test wearing a sailor dress with the hem cut off. It was this spectacle that landed her the role.

Carrie is both Stephen King’s first published novel and the first of more than 100 film and television productions adapted from or based on his works. The film went on to receive two Academy Award nominations, one for Sissy Spacek as Best Actress and for Piper Laurie as Best Supporting Actress. They lost to Faye Dunaway and Beatrice Straight for Network that year.

In celebration of its 40th anniversary, Reel Talk brings you 20 facts about the film that you might not have previously known.

1. Stephen King was paid only $2,500 for the film rights. While he was 26 at the time it was published, King never worried about the amount of film money feeling “fortunate to have that happen to my first book.”
2. The book was written while King was living in a trailer and on his wife’s typewriter, on which he also wrote Misery.
3. Five years after the film came out, King praised De Palma’s adaptation starting that,”De Palma’s approach to the material was lighter and more deft than my own—and a good deal more artistic … The book seems clear enough and truthful enough in terms of the characters and their actions, but it lacks the style of De Palma’s film. The book attempts to look at the ant farm of high school society dead on; De Palma’s examination of this ‘High School Confidential’ world is more oblique … and more cutting.”
4. Brian De Palma and his good friend and fellow director George Lucas held joint auditions for Carrie and Star Wars. Many of Carrie‘s actors could have been cast in Lucas’ intergalactic soap opera. Amy Irving, who played Sue Snell, was considered for Princess Leia. William Katt also auditioned for a role, alongside Kurt Russell. To watch the auditions, click here.
5. Carrie was John Travolta’s first film. While he was becoming famous for his role in Welcome Back, Kotter, Travolta made his big screen debut with Carrie and later followed it up with hits like Saturday Night Fever in 1977 and Grease in 1978. 
6. While filming Carrie, Sissy Spacek kept completely to herself. She wanted to feel the alienation her character felt in the film, so she did what she thought best by spending most of the production isolated from the rest of the cast. In a recent interview, her co-star P.J. Soles commented that she recalled on the first day, Sissy coming over to her to explain how happy she was to be in the film with them and that she would be isolating herself, so they wouldn’t take it personally. Soles added that,  “We all really respected her for that, and that made us even more eager and able to be as mean as we could to her, because we knew it was going to help her.”
7. Carrie pays homage to Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. Brian De Palma had hoped to hire Bernard Herrmann to score the film, but sadly he passed away in 1975 before Carrie went into production. In honor of him, De Palma used Hermann’s four note violin theme from Psycho over and over in this film. “When we originally put temporary music tracks on the film, we used a lot of Herrmann’s music,” De Palma told Cinefantastique. “In the end, we used a very famous Italian piece of music for the processional walk to the grave—Albinoni I think it was … The flexing sound is very Psycho. I put in a temporary track and for all the flexes I put in a Psycho violin. We couldn’t find the right sound, but anyway, it worked. Bernard came up with it, and Bernard, I’m glad we used it again!”
8. Carrie’s school was named Bates High School in tribute to Psycho.
9. The dizzying camera shot during the prom scene was achieved by placing William Katt and Sissy Spacek on a platform that was spinning in one direction, while the camera was being dollied in the opposite direction.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXCkYqofuqE
10. The prom scene took over two weeks to shoot and required a total of 35 takes.
11. Originally, Brian De Palma had used the split screen effect extensively during the prom scene. Disappointed with the results, he re-edited most of the scenes into full frame shots leaving only a few split-screen moments that he felt worked. Split screen segments are his director’s signature, an effect he also used in his 1972 film Sisters.
12. Adding to the mother’s psychotic character is the fact that none of the Bible passages in the film are real. For example, she quotes Genesis chapter 3 to say that sexuality is evil. That chapter is actually the story of Adam and Eve eating the forbidden fruit. The Bible doesn’t say anything the mother says it does.
13. The ending of the movie is different than the ending of the Stephen King novel. Stephen King even liked the ending in the movie better than the ending of his own book.
14. Carrie was Brian De Palma’s first commercially successful film taking it $33.8 million at the box office with a $1.8 million budget.
15. When Carrie flips Billy’s car, the interior shot shows them spinning along with it. This effect was achieved by spinning the film frame in post production.
16. Quentin Tarantino cites Carrie to be one of his favorite movies ever.
17. The original trailer for the 1976 version 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.
18. The film shares similarities with 1976 “The Exorcist”. Coincidentally, Linda Blair, who played Regan, was offered the role of Carrie but turned it down, feared being typecast.
19. Ever the stickler for realness, Sissy Spacek insisted that she – not a double – be the one whose hand shoots up out of Carrie’s grave during Sue Snell’s nightmare sequence in the final scene.
20. It was almost made into a TV series. After the original Carrie film in 1976 and the more recent remake last year, not many are aware that a 2002 TV adaptation was also made with Angela Bettis and Patricia Clarkson. Carrie survived at the end as they were hoping it would spin off into a TV series.