CARRIE's Mike Flanagan Explains Why He Cut the Infamous Pig Slaughter Scene: "I Didn't Have Much of a Stomach"
Mike Flanagan’s Carrie has no shortage of cruelty, but there was one infamous moment from Stephen King’s novel and Brian De Palma’s 1976 film that the filmmaker decided audiences didn’t need to see again. The pig slaughter.
It’s a nasty part of the plan Chris Hargensen and her boyfriend put together before prom. They need a bucket of pig’s blood to dump on Carrie White after rigging the vote to make her prom queen, and King’s 1974 novel describes the pair breaking into a farm and killing the animal themselves.
De Palma took things further in his film. Billy, played by John Travolta, and Chris, played by Nancy Allen, are shown killing the squealing pig, with both characters clearly enjoying what they’re doing.
Flanagan chose a different approach for his Carrie TV adaptation. The killing happens off-screen during the pre-prom montage. Instead of focusing on the animal, the scene stays with Chris and her reaction to what’s happening.
Flanagan explained to GamesRadar+: “Yeah, I didn't have much of a stomach to watch the pig get slaughtered. 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."
It’s an interesting choice because Flanagan certainly hasn’t avoided disturbing animal deaths in his previous horror projects. Midnight Mass featured the horrifying death of Joe Collie’s dog, while The Haunting of Hill House had its dead kittens. With the pig slaughter appearing in both King’s book and the 1976 movie, it seemed like something his adaptation might embrace.
Instead, Flanagan found something uglier in Chris herself. Watching her stand there excited and unfazed tells us everything we need to know without showing the actual killing. The horror shifts away from the pig and toward the person watching it happen. Chris has reached a point where slaughtering an animal is simply another step in humiliating Carrie.
That also fits Flanagan’s larger point about how much cruelty already surrounds Carrie. The story doesn’t exactly leave viewers searching for another horrible thing to endure. Carrie is surrounded by people willing to torment, humiliate, manipulate, and abuse her, and Chris takes that cruelty to an extreme.
Showing her fascination with the slaughter rather than the slaughter itself makes the scene about character instead of shock.
All eight episodes of Mike Flanagan’s Carrie are now streaming on Prime Video.