Mike Flanagan’s Carrie has no scarcity of cruelty, however there was one notorious second from Stephen King’s novel and Brian De Palma’s 1976 movie that the filmmaker determined audiences didn’t must see once more. The pig slaughter.
It’s a nasty a part of the plan Chris Hargensen and her boyfriend put collectively earlier than promenade. They want a bucket of pig’s blood to dump on Carrie White after rigging the vote to make her promenade queen, and King’s 1974 novel describes the pair breaking right into a farm and killing the animal themselves.
De Palma took issues additional in his movie. Billy, performed by John Travolta, and Chris, performed by Nancy Allen, are proven killing the squealing pig, with each characters clearly having fun with what they’re doing.
Flanagan selected a distinct strategy for his Carrie TV adaptation. The killing occurs off-screen throughout the pre-prom montage. As an alternative of specializing in the animal, the scene stays with Chris and her response to what’s occurring.
Flanagan defined to GamesRadar+: “Yeah, I did not have a lot of a abdomen to observe the pig get slaughtered. There’s a lot cruelty within the present, but it surely was additionally seeing the dearth of horror on Chris’s face that turned extra horrific to me.
“And seeing how far down that highway she’d gone and her sort of fascination with that. Yeah, that was how we determined to strategy it. I simply felt like we have endured a lot and are nonetheless going to endure a lot on the present that to sort of maintain an viewers’s face to the slaughter of the pig was…” he suggests, trailing off. “Plus, I simply love how Alison performed that.”
It’s an fascinating selection as a result of Flanagan definitely hasn’t prevented disturbing animal deaths in his earlier horror tasks. Midnight Mass featured the horrifying loss of life of Joe Collie’s canine, whereas The Haunting of Hill Home had its lifeless kittens. With the pig slaughter showing in each King’s e book and the 1976 film, it appeared like one thing his adaptation may embrace.
As an alternative, Flanagan discovered one thing uglier in Chris herself. Watching her stand there excited and unfazed tells us the whole lot we have to know with out displaying the precise killing. The horror shifts away from the pig and towards the particular person watching it occur. Chris has reached a degree the place slaughtering an animal is just one other step in humiliating Carrie.
That additionally suits Flanagan’s bigger level about how a lot cruelty already surrounds Carrie. The story doesn’t precisely depart viewers trying to find one other horrible factor to endure. Carrie is surrounded by folks keen to torment, humiliate, manipulate, and abuse her, and Chris takes that cruelty to an excessive.
Displaying her fascination with the slaughter reasonably than the slaughter itself makes the scene about character as a substitute of shock.
All eight episodes of Mike Flanagan’s Carrie are actually streaming on Prime Video.
