Amazon Prime “Carrie” Prom Sequence — Mike Flanagan Interview

Even if it’s only relegated to film and TV clichés these days and a thing that haunts actual high schoolers, the Senior Prom is a formidable set piece. This is in no small part thanks to the film adaptations of Stephen King’s “Carrie.” The titular, doomed prom queen finally snaps in everything from Brian de Palma’s 1976 film to the Kimberly Pierce remake in 2012. But the Prime Video adaptation created by Mike Flanagan expands on both the original and its extra hours of runtime to achieve even greater impact.

Don’t worry, Carrie’s (Summer H. Howell) prom rampage will still haunt your nightmares: a sudden burst of telekinetic violence after seven episodes that recontextualizes the original story of a bullied teen lashing out. But in order to craft a modern prom disaster at Ewen High School, first Flanagan needed to figure out why do yet another version of “Carrie” at all, after three previous filmed versions, a stage musical, a sequel (1999’s “The Rage: Carrie 2”) and even a semi-parody episode on The CW’s “Riverdale.”

“I had the same kind of skeptical reaction I think that everybody had at the beginning,” Flanagan told IndieWire. “I went off and thought about it for a long time, and it wouldn’t really leave me alone.”

Realizing he could reinvent the King novel from the ground up, similar to what he did at Netflix with “The Haunting of Hill House,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Flanagan began to break down what elements could change, and what elements needed to be left unchanged. He kept coming back to the prom. “It began to haunt my dreams, and it turned out to be… It’s the most logistically challenging and elaborate sequence of my entire career, by quite a bit, actually. It was brutal, but I got to spend 10 days on set at the prom with Carrie White, and I’ll have that forever,” Flanagan said.

Beyond Carrie White, and the balloons, and the buckets of blood, of course, there are also “The Others,” a group of powered kids who are monitoring Carrie for unknown reasons, led by frequent Flanagan collaborator (and wife) Kate Siegel, and Emaline West (Thalia Dudek), a girl who Carrie thinks is her split personality, but is actually another powered kid with AP (Astral Projection) who takes over Carrie’s body when things get to be a bit too much at the school dance.

When you have more magic brewing, you have to expand on the original template. Flanagan, for his part, looked at all the previous executions of the prom, as “it’s such an incredible sequence in the way it can be approached from so many different perspectives. You’re in a space full of established, principal characters, all of whom are going to have their own vantage point on the events of the prom. We’re already changing the fundamental events of the prom and the players on the board. And then you look at Brian de Palma, who used the prom sequence in order to deploy an astonishing grab bag of cinematic techniques, which to me are things you do not do, because that just becomes an echo of de Palma.”

Little things change no matter what. In the de Palma version, Chris is underneath the stage and discovered by Sue (though not stopped), while in the 2002, 2013, and 2026 versions Chris is over the stage. The blood drop varies, too, as sometimes it’s a rope and pulley system, or in this most recent version Chris is holding the bucket and pouring it from above.

Who lives and who dies, and how, is fungible, as well.

Usually, loose electrical equipment from the wiring sets the gym ablaze and electrocutes various characters; sometimes just students, often the school’s principal. Carrie’s focus is also shifted, with the 2013 version finding Chloe Grace Moretz’s Carrie more akin to an X-Men villain than the traumatized, feverish teen Sissy Spacek played in 1976. But de Palma looms large over all versions – perhaps even over the novel.

De Palma’s use of split screen is something Flanagan expressly avoided, and a gonzo shot before the disaster of Carrie and Tommy (William Katt) spinning as they dance isn’t reproduced in any subsequent version. But what Flanagan did look to the director’s work for (de Palma gets an Easter egg shout-out on a movie theater marquee as Carrie obliterates the rest of the town, post-prom), as well as the other versions of the prom, was how to move the camera in the space itself.

Flanagan “exhaustively” planned the shot list weeks, or sometimes months, in advance, alongside his director of photography Michael Fimognari. Fimognari has worked extensively with Flanagan before, starting with 2013’s feature film “Oculus,” and continuing all the way through next year’s “The Exorcist: Martyrs.” To start, they physically draw the prom on a whiteboard about five months out from shooting.

“The chaos only means something if we’ve earned that degree of care about the fates of our characters, and I found the time building up to the prom to be some of the most suspenseful on the page that we were working on in the whole series,” Flanagan said. From when the bucket drops to when Carrie steps off the stage, in real time, is about 90 seconds. It’s not a long event. She gets hit with the blood. Chris and Billy run, and she follows them out. That’s what happens. Everything else that happens around it, we get to dive into. But that event itself is not drawn out. So, how do we earn that and set it up properly? That was the challenge.”

Part of how the show tries to earn it is through the entrances. Flanagan had the opening of the prom and the tragic promise most viewers know won’t be fulfilled, from the beginning. “That shot, that whole montage, before I wrote a word of the pilot, or had opened the writers’ room… I would go out on long walks around my home in my neighborhood in L.A. and listen to that Lana Del Rey song and imagine that montage,” Flanagan said.

That song is “Did you know there’s a tunnel under Ocean Blvd” from Del Rey’s 2023 album of the same name. In the finished cut, you see Carrie enchanted as she enters the prom with Tommy, passing by various characters like Ms. Desjardin (Amber Midthunder) and Principal Grayle (Matthew Lillard) in slow motion as the tune plays in the background. The goal is to show off how the high school gym has transformed into a high school prom, with all the stars and tinsel that implies. To Carrie, it’s exactly what she dreamed it would be — before it turns into a nightmare.

Despite always being in the script, the shot was “enormously complicated,” according to Flanagan. There are different frame rates given it goes from full-speed to slow motion, and it’s timed to the beats of the music, which then have to be played two or three times as fast in order for the actors to properly hit their marks. Plus, star-patterned lights ostensibly reflecting off the prom’s decorations pass by at specific intervals, and Flanagan was hoping it would light the face of the actors during the slow motion. In total, they did nine takes as the AD called out numerical cues timed to the song’s beats and frame rate changes, almost like the waltz Carrie and Tommy dance to later in the sequence.

While Flanagan was razor-focused on the entrance, there’s one iconic shot that viewers know is coming, and carries (no pun intended) perhaps the most anticipation in the series: the moment when Carrie gets hit with pig’s blood, in this case from above, while the school watches.

In order to make this work, the production first attempted a number of test drops with crew and stand-ins, without Howell. Then there was a “line on a tennis ball that would lower down to touch Summer’s head, so we knew it wouldn’t miss. If you had a person up there with a bucket, the odds are very high they would miss her,” Flanagan said. “Even then, we need multiple angles, and you can only put a camera on one or two of them at a time, so we knew we were going to drop it at least three times.”

Once the tennis ball was lined up, Howell couldn’t move her mark, lean forward, or change her position in any way because then the blood would hit in the wrong place. And once they did drop it on her, the blood – which Flanagan noted was about five gallons, more than a bucket – needed to stay on. “Your best-case scenario is that we end it with Summer covered head to toe with blood for a week, sitting on a plastic tarp. She called it the ‘Dexter’ tent, full of blood and unable to touch anything. And when she would stand up, you would hear it peel off of the chair… Summer is a real trooper,” Flanagan said.

Adding that there were multiple bloods; some waterier, some viscous, others stickier, Flanagan explained that blood for dropping was different from what needed to be painted on Howell, which could not drip off. And when it came to the drop itself, needless to say, dropping a bucket of (fake) blood is messy, and because of that they could only splash the actress with the blood at the end of the shoot day, “because once Summer got hit, she’s done for the day. We can’t clean her up and start again.” …Though they did do that, once, when the blood knocked her tiara off.”

It’s not just Carrie, either, that makes this shot logistically tricky. The blood needs to be shot from overhead, from wide behind her, a close-up, and a wide frontal from the back of the auditorium. Plus, Joel Oulette, whose Tommy is standing next to Carrie, gets splashed differently every time.

Howell, however, wasn’t in the shot where you actually see Chris and her loser boyfriend Billy (Arthur Conti) pouring the blood. So the VFX team laid a green screen down. “We shot one plate of the blood pouring down, and then cleaned that all up,” VFX Supervisor Becky Philpott explained. “Brought Carrie back in, and basically you stitched the two plates together, which it was easy to do because Mike said he never wanted to see the blood hit her while we were looking down from that angle. But there is a beat later, just before the catwalk falls, where we look down, and Carrie is standing in blood… That blood is all VFX. There was painted blood on the ground, so we did CG blood on the ground when we’re looking down at Carrie in the aftermath.”

“But once that was done,” Flanagan added, “it just meant we were halfway through.”

The blood is far from the only complex shot in the sequence. On the VFX end, while Carrie’s floating was merely editing out the wires, Lillard getting electrocuted was a little more trial and error. “Mike actually wanted to have a glow from his eyes as well, and a lot more arcs coming from his fingers and stuff,” Philpott said. “We did a test of that, and it looked very Marvel, very superhero, and it was just too much. So every time we showed him, we dialed it back and dialed it back and dialed it back, and I think we landed in a good spot where I didn’t feel like it looked too cheesy.”

After Grayle is dead and Carrie has begun her exit from the prom, another tragedy happens: our telekinetic teen instinctually, accidentally throws Ms. Desjardin to the back of the gym, through a wall of flame that has engulfed the stage. Naturally, they couldn’t throw Midthunder through real flames, though she was on “a long wire rig.” And helping things, Flanagan and company built the gym set knowing all of the stunts ahead of time. “We had taped out a footprint of the gym set, and I walked it and blocked it so that we knew where everyone who had to fly into the air, like Carrie’s levitation, all the other students who were launched into the air… That’s all wire work.”

As Flanagan walked, they would pick a starting point and a landing point, then build the set to accommodate the necessary wire track to make sure the rigging was accounted for in the overall build of the set. Midthunder’s long track, for example, was “non-negotiable,” because she can’t move two feet to the right or left. “It’s a really aggressive wire pull, and then because we need to send her through a flaming curtain, we have a digital element that takes over for the flames for that ending of the shot,” Flanagan said.

There’s actually a digital element that takes place at the beginning of the shot, as well. Philpott explained that there was no way to yank Midthunder the entire length of the gym, so instead they started with her stunt double, with a shot where Ms. Desjardin’s hair is covering her face to obscure the double. Then, halfway through, the character is replaced with a digi-double, a digital version scanned both from Midthunder and the stunt performer, which then allowed the team to animate the character “however Mike wanted.” Add in a CGI fire curtain, and they decided to suck her through it for a very simple reason: if they didn’t, her dead body would be on the stage for the rest of the scene.

Speaking of fire, that had to be a huge team effort between special effects, stunts, and VFX, because VFX fire on its own can look really bad if it’s not done properly. “We needed as much practical lighting that produces a fire flicker, but you also want some flame bars and some practical lighting,” Philpott said. “There were areas of that gym where we didn’t have practical lighting or flame bars, so they were very dark corners of the gym, and there were times when we got into post where the question was, ‘can we put fire there?’ And of course, the answer is always ‘yes.’ But when you have to push CG light coming out from CG fire, that’s when it starts to look fake, in my opinion.”

From there, there are multiple other VFX decisions, like whether the flames need to be bright white and super hot, or darker and more orange. Given the DP exposed the footage for the fire on set, that helped guide the VFX team. But where there’s fire, there’s smoke. “You’ve got to have the right amount of smoke,” Philpott continued. “We went light on the smoke because we didn’t want it to obscure the action going on in the gym, but we had to make it realistic because there’s a lot of fire in there. There’s also heat shimmer; it gives off that wavy look. I’ve seen some CG fire on other shows where that’s missing, and I think that was the final chef’s kiss to a lot of the stuff that we did.”

Take all of these elements together, and what have you got?

“The Everest of Shot Listing, and the edit for the prom is my Everest of Editing,” Flanagan said. “It remains the most insane and intense and logistically difficult sequence of my career, and that’s including the midnight mass sequence of ‘Midnight Mass’… We had this great moment where we all got to take a second. Take a breath, look around, and remind each other that we were at the prom with Carrie White, and that’s a thing you don’t get to do in your career. That’s a pretty amazing thing.”

“Carrie” is now on Prime Video.