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If there's one thing Stephen King has always understood with his books, it's that teens can be mean as hell. The opening scene of the 1976 film "Carrie" follows the source material by beginning with — not any terrifying introduction to some supernatural entity — but with poor Carrie White (Sissy Spacek) in her high school gym class. It starts off bad enough, with Carrie getting picked on by the rest of her classmates during a volleyball game, but then class ends and they hit the showers.
Locker rooms are bad enough in modern high schools; they're worse if you're going to school at a time when students are forced to shower in the same room as their bullies, without even any stalls to provide some semblance of privacy. They're even worse when your extremely religious mother never taught you about periods, and now you're getting your first one right now, in front of all your classmates, with no idea what's going on.
Carrie's panic (and her classmates' less-than-empathetic response) makes for a cruel yet effective opening scene that firmly places Carrie in the viewer's sympathies. So much of the movie relies on us believing that this character is someone who's been treated terribly her whole life, that she's someone so isolated and sheltered that she could go 17 years without learning about the menstrual cycle, and Spacek sells it all perfectly.
Filming the scene didn't come easily for the actress, however. "It was terrifying," she told the Independent in a May 2022 interview. "I went to [director] Brian De Palma and said: 'Tell me about this scene, what is it like?' And he turns to me and he says: 'It's like getting hit by a Mack truck.'"
A surprising approach
It turns out that Sissy Spacek's husband, Jack Fisk, had been hit by a car as a child, and she could use his experience to help herself out. "In that scene, what's going on in my head is [Jack] walking along the side of the road when he was about 11 or 12," Spacek explained. "It's snowing, and he's looking at Christmas lights. And then he saw car lights. There was a car coming down the road right at him, and it ran him over."
It's a surprising comparison to the shower scene, but it makes sense. Carrie's initial deer-in-the-headlights reaction to what's happening to her is, in hindsight, remarkably fitting. "When Carrie's in the shower, I'm seeing those Christmas lights, and then the horror of the blood ..." Spacek said. "Ain't it bizarre that something like that could work?"
So much of the emotional resonance of "Carrie," both the book and the 1976 movie, is how much the tragic finale feels plausible from Carrie's perspective. The horror isn't just that a teenage girl murdered all her classmates; it's that viewers and readers are made to fully believe she's been pushed to that point. No one condones her actions at the end, but as early as that opening shower scene, we can certainly understand.
