Sissy Spacek Went to Disturbing Lengths to Play ‘Carrie,’ Including Sleeping in a Blood-Soaked Dress

CARRIE, Sissy Spacek, 1976 — Everett Collection

What To Know

Sissy Spacek underwent intense method acting for her role in Carrie.
Despite director Brian De Palma’s initial reluctance, Spacek secured the lead role by altering her appearance.
Spacek endured significant physical and emotional discomfort during filming.

If you saw Brian De Palma‘s Carrie in a darkened theater way back in 1976 or maybe stumbled across it late at night on TV years later, chances are there are a bunch of scenes that you still remember vividly even today. Yep, without a doubt, even though it is now a half-century old, Stephen King‘s first feature film adaptation still holds up pretty darn well. And what occurred when the cameras weren’t rolling on the set of Carrie is almost as intense as the story on screen. Because, you see, to play the ultimate high school outcast, the movie’s star, Sissy Spacek, put herself through a dark method acting process that really took a toll on her mentally.

Ironically, De Palma didn’t even want Spacek for the lead. According to Samantha Graves, writing for Collider, the director “originally had his eye on someone else for the lead role, and Spacek only received an audition as a friendly favor.” At 26 years old, he thought that she would be a much better fit for the mean rich girl, Chris Hargensen. However, Spacek knew that she was meant to play Carrie and went to some rather unorthodox, great lengths to prove it.

Before her screen test, Spacek rubbed Vaseline into her hair to make it look unkempt and unwashed, skipped applying any sort of makeup, and squeezed into a really old and faded ill-fitting blue sailor dress her mother had made for her way back in the seventh grade. When she walked in looking like a teenager who everyone could see not really fitting in with her peers, no one could disagree that the part had to be hers.

Everett Collection

Once filming began, actors like John Travolta, Amy Irving, and William Katt were becoming fast friends. Spacek naturally wanted to join in. However, she held herself back, realizing that Carrie would never be part of the in-crowd. To make that loneliness seem as real as possible, Spacek made the difficult decision to isolate herself from the rest of the cast. After finishing a scene, she would walk right back to her dressing room, shut the door, and stay by herself. And inside that quiet and lonely studio trailer, that’s where our story takes an even darker turn.

To get inside the mind of an extremely fragile girl raised by the fanatical and terrifying Margaret White (Piper Laurie), Spacek said on Fresh Air with Terry Gross that she decorated her dressing room with a variety of different religious pictures, in an attempt to surround herself with the guilt and fear that Carrie lived with every day. Her main guide was a 19th-century illustrated Bible filled with engravings of martyred saints and all sorts of other suffering souls. She studied the way the people in those pictures twisted their bodies in fear and pain and came up with a plan to use those exact postures for how Carrie moved, how she held herself, and, then finally, how she lost control.

The fake pig’s blood used during the movie’s prom night scene was actually a mix of Karo syrup and food coloring. Filming that sequence took three long days. Rather than washing up each night and worrying about matching the dried streaks, Spacek told the crew to leave it on. She went back to her quiet trailer and slept in that sticky, blood-soaked prom dress.

Looking back on the movie now, speaking to Entertainment Tonight, Spacek says wearing that dress is her biggest memory from the movie, describing the feeling as “terrible, terrible, terrible.”

Even on the very last scene, where Carrie’s hand shoots up from the dirt, ever the professional, Spacek insisted on doing it herself. In order to pull the scene off, crew members lowered her into a buried wooden box and pumped air through a tube while she waited in the dark to punch through the soil. Putting herself through all of that discomfort paid off. Spacek earned a well-deserved Academy Award nomination and gave us a timelessly creepy performance in a movie that is now considered to be one of the true classics within the genre of horror cinema.