Pig’s Blood at the Prom: Ranking Every Carrie Adaptation

Let’s start off with one of the most notorious adaptations of Carrie—and the only one on this list that was on the stage rather than the screen. You might not have known this, but Carrie was in fact a musical in NYC back in 1988. 

With a price tag of around $8 million, it has gone down in history as one of the biggest failures in theater history, especially since it closed after only a handful of performances. 

While this one premiered on Broadway far too long ago for me to have ever seen it in person, I have stumbled upon video of a performance, and I can confirm it was just as weird as you would imagine. 

The show has been revived a couple times since, so there’s always a chance you might still be able to catch it at some point. 

And in the meantime, you can look for the spoof musical, Scarrie! The Musical, which isn’t an official adaptation but still sounds like a super fun time. 

Any movie trying to follow-up on De Palma’s original was going to have a tough hill to climb, and unfortunately, The Rage: Carrie 2, released in 1999, just doesn’t make it there. 

While Emily Bergl is aptly cast as Carrie’s outcast half-sister who happens to have the same telekinetic powers, the story itself is too much of a retread, rendering the whole thing more of a Millennial cash grab than anything else.

Plus, Amy Irving returning as Sue Snell should have been an intriguing chance to see what’s become of the character, but ultimately, she feels entirely underused, despite a strong performance from Irving. 

As a result, this missed opportunity lands at the bottom of the screen adaptations.  

Putting the 2013 Carrie this low on the list almost physically pains me. 

Many of the right elements were in place: the brilliant Kimberly Peirce as director, Julianne Moore picking up the mantle from Piper Laurie, and the opportunity to see how modern technology could reshape the story of Carrie. 

But ultimately, too many scenes rely on images from De Palma’s original, and the film does little to expand upon the Carrie iconography. 

And while she gives it her best, Chloe Grace Moretz as the eponymous character looks like a movie star through and through in the film, and the fact that you could swap the actresses playing Carrie White and Chris Hargensen feels like it undercuts the overall story. 

Unfortunately, this is a version you can safely skip. 

The latest Carrie adaptation already has lots of fans and defenders. And it’s been great to see how Mike Flanagan has positioned the story in the wider King universe. 

That being said, some of the changes feel like they move away from the source material’s inherent power. For one, like the previous adaptation, the actress playing Carrie could believably be swapped with the actress playing Chris. 

But more than anything else, a pivotal choice at the climax removes Carrie’s agency in a way that fully destroys what many Carrie fans, in particular women, love about the story. 

Based on subsequent interviews with Flanagan, it seems like he didn’t want Carrie to be too terrible, especially since she starts off so sweet in the series, but that unfortunately feels like it misses the mark entirely. 

We need complex depictions of female characters in all their monstrous glory, and sadly, this version refuses to go there, which is why it lands right in the middle of the pack in terms of adaptations. 

Another small-screen adaptation, this one was written by an early-in-his-career Bryan Fuller. 

If you’re a fan of Hannibal, you can definitely see some of those flourishes on display in this iteration of Carrie, including the casting of Katharine Isabelle as one of Carrie’s bullies, years before she’d go on to play Margot Verger in Hannibal. 

The rest of the casting in this one is equally spot-on: Patricia Clarkson does a fine job as Margaret White, and Carrie’s circle of bullies and would-be allies all turn in believable performances. 

But it’s Angela Bettis who truly hits it out of the park as Carrie White; she imbues the character with all the curiosity, awkwardness, and tragic sweetness that you need for that climactic prom scene to be even more devastating. 

This TV movie was a setup for a longer series, and it still makes me sad that we never got to see that full vision come to fruition.

The ultimate version of Carrie, and possibly the ultimate film adaptation of any book in cinema. 

While it’s not entirely true to the source material (no version has made the most of the epistolary elements), director Brian De Palma took a path of his own and managed to amp up the female characters even more than the novel; Chris has more agency in this version than in the book, and there’s more inner life to Sissy Spacek’s version of Carrie herself. 

Every scene is a work of art, from those fabulous split-diopter shots, especially in the high school classroom, to that glorious continuous shot at the prom. 

This is truly one of the most perfect horror films ever to grace the silver screen, and it remains the definitive version of Carrie. Sissy Spacek and Brian De Palma, we give you your flowers.  

Feature Image: Unsplash