Prom night is one hell of a nightmare in Mike Flanagan’s Prime Video adaptation of Carrie, and bringing Stephen King’s most infamous high school dance to life was an absolute madhouse.
The new series stars Summer H. Howell as Carrie White, stepping into the iconic role made famous by Sissy Spacek in the 1976 film. While Flanagan put his own spin on Stephen King’s classic horror story, the infamous prom massacre remains a major part of the series, and filming it turned into one of the biggest challenges of the director’s career.
Speaking with People, Flanagan explained just how much work went into pulling off the blood-soaked sequence. “Logistically, it remains the most difficult sequence of my career.”
“So many things went wrong,” he says. “So many things surprised us along the way. The trick with that one is you’ve got hundreds of extras; a dozen principal characters whose arcs and performances you have to track; fire, water, stunts, sparks, exploding Sternos, people on wires being hurled into the air; all the furniture flying through. And we had built this set to destroy it.”
That’s a pretty insane amount of destruction to coordinate, especially when you’ve only got one shot at some of it.
“You’re taking an event that takes barely more than a minute, but you’re seeing it through so many perspectives that you’re talking about a half-hour sequence, and if you move on too early, you can’t reset and go back once you’ve burned it down and thrown everything across the room.”
The massive sequence took two weeks to shoot and happened about halfway through production. For Howell, who spends much of the finale drenched in fake blood, the experience was both exciting and overwhelming.
“I felt comfortable going in, but I also had no idea what I was stepping into. I don’t think any of us did, at the time. But it was beautiful in a chaotic way.”
Of course, playing Carrie means getting absolutely covered in blood, and Howell got plenty of experience with that.
“I probably, in total, had 12 days covered in blood. Two of those, they dropped it on me. One day they did it once, another day they did it twice, so I had to get back into the look, and that was interesting. I think we maybe would’ve gotten away with two [takes] if my tiara didn’t get knocked off in one of them.”
Getting Howell ready for those scenes was a production in itself, requiring a dedicated area where the makeup team could carefully apply all that fake blood.
“There was a blood tent,” Howell says. “I would get it applied — the makeup team was incredible and very precise, and I would wear these goggles.”
Once she was covered, the transformation also helped her get into Carrie’s headspace.
“It’s like wearing a costume,” she adds. “It’s like, this is the character, I’m in the moment. She goes into kind of a trance mode for a lot of it, and so focusing on physicality more and facial expression was a thing.”
While Howell had to endure the sticky aftermath, Alison Thornton, who plays Carrie’s tormentor Chris Hargensen, had a blast recreating one of horror’s most recognizable acts of cruelty.
A huge King fan, Thornton admitted she was geeking out over the opportunity: “Dumping the blood felt so cool,” she said, adding that she was “fangirling the whole time.”
“The fact that I got to actually dump blood — never on Summer, always on a tarp — but I maybe dumped 20 buckets of blood or something. I don’t even remember how many,” she says. “It was so satisfying every time.”
Thornton also praised the crew for pulling together such an elaborate sequence, saying: “Every single department killed it,” she said. “Every single department just came swinging for prom, and it was incredible to see.”
Amber Midthunder, who plays teacher Rita Desjardin, was equally impressed with the scale of the production and Flanagan’s ability to keep everyone working together through the chaos.
“It’s incredibly exciting,” she said. “It is a huge privilege to show up and be a part of this iconic moment. Prom is obviously a huge undertaking, for a number of reasons, and I think it’s very impressive how well [Flanagan] led our ship in that moment specifically.”
There was also an emotional moment before the first major blood dump, when Flanagan gathered the cast and delivered a speech about the significance of what they were creating.
Josie Totah, who plays Tina, recalled how much that moment meant to everyone involved. “It was incredible,” she says. “We’d been working towards it for an entire week, and that’s the beauty of Mike’s intelligence and his brilliance, is that in a moment like that, that was so intense and on such short time, [he] was able to actually take a beat and speak to everyone.”
“It left us completely emotional and just reminded us of why we’re all a part of this in the first place, and that’s Stephen King’s amazing novel.”
For Matthew Lillard, who plays the school’s principal, the real standout was Howell and her commitment to the role, particularly considering how physically uncomfortable the shoot became.
“The one thing I think we don’t talk about enough is that Summer Howell was covered in blood for weeks on end. And not one time did she have a moment of complaint,” Lillard said.
“[She was] stiff and sticky, and miserable because she would be painted every day head to toe in blood, because there’s a whole sequence in the middle of the episode and then from that point on, she’s in blood. It’s intense. It’s another reason to marvel at who Summer is.”
It’s pretty wild to think that a moment that unfolds in just over a minute within the story required two weeks of filming and expands into a roughly 30-minute sequence told through multiple perspectives.
Flanagan clearly had some ambitious plans for Carrie, and the scale of this prom scene suggests he took full advantage of the television format to explore the horror from several different angles. He pulled it off in an awesome way!
The original prom massacre remains one of the most memorable sequences in horror movie history, and I was very happy and impressed with this new interpretation. Flanagan did a great job bringing the prom scene to life!
