Even if you’ve never read Stephen King‘s classic chiller Carrie or watched Brian De Palma’s 1976 film version starring Sissy Spacek, the image of the titular character drenched in pig’s blood while wearing a prom dress and tiara remains one of the most iconic moments in horror lore.
Mike Flanagan’s new Prime Video adaptation offers a contemporary retelling of the story, grounding it firmly in the digital age. The eight-episode first season finds telekinetic Gen Z teen Carrie White (Summer H. Howell) living with her deeply religious mother, Margaret (Samantha Sloyan), and navigating a high school environment fueled by smartphones, social media, and an unrelenting desire to go viral.
Once again, the prom serves as the tragic climax of the story — although more is still to come in a just-announced Season 2. After being crowned prom queen, Carrie is doused in a bucket of pig’s blood as part of a cruel prank engineered by her tormentors, Chris Hargensen (Alison Thornton) and Billy Nolan (Arthur Conti). Although remorseful classmate Sue Snell (Siena Agudong) desperately tries to help Carrie, Sue is powerless to prevent the havoc that follows. Flanagan’s version of the prom massacre follows the core beats of the original narrative, while also weaving in modern technology and heightened visual flair to ground the nightmare in the present day.
Gold Derby previously spoke with the cast about their experiences making the prom a night(mare) to remember. Now, we’ve assembled key members of the creative team — including visual effects supervisor Becky Philpott, costume designer Tammy Joe, co-hair department lead Julie McHaffie, and makeup department head Krista Young — for an in-depth oral history that spills all of the bloody tea.
Suiting up for the prom
Tammy Joe (costume designer): This was such an important and iconic look for Carrie. The dress itself is definitely an homage to De Palma’s version in the ’70s, keeping the integrity of something that felt classic. A lot of people were really curious about the choice of color because in all the different iterations we’ve seen of Carrie, we’ve always seen something on the side of pink. The decision of it actually being pale blue came from many factors. One was that the prom itself was lit very blue, and when you shine a lot of blue onto existing colors, it shifts what things look like.
Very intentionally, the iconic pink was used in different parts of the series. In De Palma’s version, the final dress is pink and she starts school in a blue sailor dress. In this series, she starts the school year in a pink sailor dress and ends up in a blue prom dress. Then, in the mud trench episode, we chose a silhouette that would look like a prom dress in pink as foreshadowing. But with the actual prom dress, there were so many practical elements that had to come into play because Summer also had to be harnessed. When you put an actor in something fitted with a harness, a lot of the design choices are built around making that harness work.
Krista Young (makeup department head): I didn’t want Summer to look made up; I wanted her to look different from the rest of the cast, so I kept her look really simple. I gave her a soft pink blush, a soft pink shimmer on the lids, and we added mascara, which we didn’t use at any other time in the show. With the way the lights and camera were moving, Summer just exuded this joy that came from inside of her. She looked so excited and hopeful, and you really could feel like this was the best moment of her entire life, which also made it all the more tragic.
Julie McHaffie (co-hair department lead): Because Mike wanted to direct the first episode and the last episode, we shot those together. We had to shoot Episode 1 and Episode 8 all within the same time span at the beginning. For me, there was a lot of plotting and planning because we had a real arc within the storyline between every character, specifically Summer. We had to figure out the hairdos we were going to start with that were very clean, very tight, very conservative ponytails, and then take her to that last scene where she’s come out of her shell. We had to come up with a prom look that was soft, pretty, and really showed that she had grown.
Joe: The funny thing is, Tommy’s suit is actually gray — and this is the power of the blue light! When you have blood coming your way, you want it to be something that feels visually impactful, so finding palettes that are on the lighter side was intentional so the blood would read.
A drop in the bucket
Becky Philpott (visual effects supervisor): When I read the script, I knew the prom was going to be our biggest sequence. Except for the phones, it’s pretty close to the original version. What we did for the phones is every actor had a phone that was linked up to a master phone that shone a light on their faces at the correct cue, because interactive light is so important for visual effects. We had to add the little sharp glass, and we found the bigger the explosion, the less realistic it was. Mike didn’t want this to be too over the top; he wanted it to act like the way a phone would. It turned out subtle enough, but impactful enough to give us the shock and see those little shards of glass hitting the background actors’ faces.
Young: The blood that drops from the bucket is not the blood that you see on camera. My co-artist Brooke Fenton and myself hand-painted the blood that you see on Carrie with a lot of reference photos. We did it about 12 different times over a number of weeks. But for that specific shot after the drop in the prom, Mike needed the blood to look like it was dripping, and we had blow-dried it in to set. As they rolled cameras, Brooke and I would stand on stage right beside Summer with squeeze bottles of blood. We’d go in and put drip points on her earlobes, along her jawline, and down the tips of her fingers so the blood looked like it had just freshly dropped and was literally still dripping.
Joe: There were blood drop tests done early on where we tested it not only on Summer, but also on stand-ins and doubles. It was a massive collaborative process with the makeup team in terms of getting Summer redressed with blood. It wasn’t always just the aftermath of an actual drop, it was often continuity for a different day, so you had to recreate what had happened from her hair to her face to her body to the costumes, running down together in one direction.
McHaffie: We shot that prom for nine days, and we did shoot it in order, with the blood at the end. We could only do one blood drop a day because we had to clean Summer up, which meant she went to shower and then we completely redid her. We set up for a massive blood drop with a five-camera setup, and her crown fell off because of the force of the blood! The tiara flew off, so we couldn’t even use that take.
Mike spun over to me and went, “Why did that tiara come off?” From that moment on, that tiara was locked and loaded with about 10 hairpins in it. That particular day, the shot became unusable, so what we ended up doing was finding a double for Summer. In prep, I had made double wigs of her hair for stunts, so we took a double, put the wig on her, stood there, and did the blood drop from the back to get the shot that day.
Chaos reigns
Young: The first time we ever shot the blood drop was for the second-to-last shot where you see Carrie covered in blood on the show. I had to imagine how it would break down and change between the time the blood dropped inside the gym when the sprinklers go off, to the fire, to throwing tables, to when she’s out on the street dancing, and then when she crushes Chris and Billy’s car. There’s so much distance traveled in that time. I really felt it was important to show that progression and blur the direction of the blood so it still felt alive and evolved, all the way until her mom hugs her in the kitchen.
Philpott: The fire was the biggest challenge for visual effects because of modern safety rules. We worked really closely with the special effects and lighting departments to incorporate as much practical lighting that gives off that fire flicker glow, and then as much real fire as we could use safely. Mostly every shot is a lot of VFX fire, adding smoke and that gorgeous heat shimmer.
For Miss D (Amber Midthunder) being thrown into the blazing curtain, we had a stunt double do the first part on rigged wires as far across the gym as we could, and then a digi-double took over to fly into the blazing curtain. When the kids got electrocuted, we couldn’t fill the gym with a foot of water, so we did practical water for tighter shots of feet, but for wider shots, we did CG water on the ground.
McHaffie: The prom crew was massive. In addition to my trailer team of five, I had another team of 20 hairdressers processing background. Then we brought in stunt performers — many of whom were 17- to 20-year-old kids of stunt people in town that I’d worked with over the years — so we ended up styling over 30 people, making sure everyone was in a full prom hairstyle.
Philpott: For Chris and Billy’s car scene, special effects rigged the car to flip, and we really needed it to land tires down. It took three times, and the third time it landed perfect and we all cheered. The crushing moments were visual effects. Then we had the gorgeous scene of Emaline (Thalia Dudek) and Carrie dancing on Main Street with all the destruction happening in the background. We timed glass breaking to hit with each beat of the song, and I think that’s my favorite sequence of the whole show because it’s so cinematic.
For the final showdown with Margaret and Carrie, we had practical shakers in the house to have props fall down, but visual effects added big streams of falling dust, plaster, and cracks going up the wall. We melded the practical location with the destroyed set, adding billowing smoke and firelight. To me, why the visual effects worked so well on Carrie is because we did as much practically as we could, sticking with classic filmmaking — and then visual effects came in to sweeten it.
This interview was edited and condensed.
