Mike Flanagan says he opted to skip the infamous pig slaughtering scene in his adaptation of Carrie.
"Yeah, I didn't have much of a stomach to watch the pig get slaughtered," Flanagan tells GamesRadar+. "There's so much cruelty in the show, but it was also seeing the lack of horror on Chris's face that became more horrific to me. And seeing how far down that road she'd gone and her kind of fascination with that. Yeah, that was how we decided to approach it. I just felt like we've endured so much and are still going to endure so much on the show that to kind of hold an audience's face to the slaughter of the pig was..." he suggests, trailing off. "Plus, I just love how Alison played that."
In the 1974 novel, it's described, though not in explicit detail, that Chris Hargensen and her delinquent sociopath boyfriend Billy Thornton decide to break into a farm while the farmer is away and slaughter a pig for its blood. Why? So they can dump it onto Carrie White's head when she's announced as prom queen. In the 1976 movie, we see Billy (John Travolta) and Chris (Nancy Allen) excitedly kill the pig as it squeals to death.
In Flanagan's TV adaptation, however, the pig slaughtering is done off-screen during a pre-prom montage while an excited yet unfazed Chris looks on. Not to be that guy, but because Flanagan does have a bit of a history with dead animals in his TV shows (i.e., the dog in Midnight Mass and the kittens in The Haunting of Hill House), I kind of expected him to go all out with this one, especially since the pig scene is double-canon. However, he's right: the cruelty from all the human beings around Carrie is intense enough.
All eight episodes of Carrie are streaming now on Prime Video. For more scares, here's our round-up of all the upcoming horror movies you need to know about.
