Carrie was the novel that put Stephen King on the map as a horror author. And even now, these scenes are still capable of some serious chills.
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- The scene where prom-goers are electrocuted by broken power cables. We're given a description of Rhonda Simard convulsing from the electricity, before her full skirt bursts into flames. While she's still convulsing. Yikes.
- At one point Carrie loses "sight" of the gymnasium doors and some try to escape - only to have Carrie regain focus and slam the doors again, severing one poor guy's fingers off.
- Sue is at home during prom. When the town's fire sirens go off, she rushes to the window and sees the high school on fire. Sue gets into her mother's car and, being a novice driver, is unable to start it quickly and must force herself to sit and wait until the car is ready to try again. Once she is moving, she drives to the school - only to witness the entire gymnasium wing explode into a massive fire ball.
- Tommy's death is especially chilling in the book because Chris and Billy rigged two buckets of blood, one of them intended for him. Unlike Carrie, Tommy couldn't be blamed in any way for Chris being banned from the prom, but they specifically wanted to get him too, just to punish him for being nice to Carrie. Worse, everyone is so busy laughing at Carrie that they don't realize what happened at first, and once the chaos starts, he's pretty much forgotten and left to bleed out on the stage. It's also mentioned earlier that the pig blood had frozen solid when Billy first rigged the buckets. Imagine if that had hit him, or if Carrie's bucket had hit her. They would have both been killed instantly.
- Even worse than this somehow, is that this fate could have hit any of the candidates for prom king and queen. Unlike in the films, Chris never rigs the ballots. It's by some sick luck that Carrie just happens to be voted. So, let's say that some girl and guy come onto the stage and get the crowns, and before anyone even realises what happened one of them is dead, and the other is hopelessly drenched in blood.
- Later on, a woman, Cora Simard (Rhonda's mother) describes the horrific deaths of much of the town's populace, many of them having been awoken from their sleep by the disaster unfolding outside. Carrie used her powers to snap the surrounding power lines. The downed lines horrifically electrocute many of those present. Cora then describes the death of her friend, Georgette Shyres, as she runs away from Cora in a panic. Georgette runs straight into a power line and we are treated to a truly squicky description."She let go of my hand and started to run for the sidewalk. I screamed at her to stop-there was one of those heavy main cables broken off right in front of us — but she didn't listen. And she ... she ... oh, I could smell her when she started to burn. Smoke just seemed to burst out of her clothes and I thought: that's what it must be like when someone gets electrocuted. The smell was sweet, like pork. Have any of you ever smelled that? Sometimes I smell it in my dreams. I stood dead still, watching Georgette Shyres turn black."
- Carrie getting her first period was like nightmare fuel to her. This was a girl whose mother never told her about female biology, let alone stuff normal for women, like how to deal with your period, so when she got her first she initially thought she was bleeding to death. To make matters worse, when her mother, a religious fanatic with a pathological fear of sexuality, does find out about it, rather than do the rational thing and calm her down or explain what happened, she beats her and locks her in the praying closet claiming that she must have sinned, because from her viewpoint her daughter was blighted with the curse of blood. The girls throwing tampons at her and recording the event to post all over the Internet in the 2013 version is equally horrifying. It's sickening to even think that teenage girls could be so cruel.
- While the book describes some of Chris's past transgressions in school before the shower incident, an incident from her junior high days is borderline sociopathic; she slipped a firecracker into a classmate's shoe and lit it, nearly mutilating the poor girl's foot, all because she had a cleft lip.
- The 'Prom Night' section of the book features an AP news ticker later on. As time progresses, the news becomes more and more serious...
- Chamberlain after Prom Night, especially when people are still finding and burying bodies. One can only imagine how many families and friend groups were ripped apart that night, all because one girl took her bullying a bit too far...
- Carrie's life, for the most part, is a total nightmare. Her classmates bully her, her mother punishes her for everything she does, she has no-one to turn to, and in the end her mother tries to kill her.
- The book also makes clear that the pig blood prank didn't just send Carrie over the edge all of a sudden; she'd been harboring violent revenge fantasies for years. After the likes of Columbine and Parkland, every time this comes up is incredibly eerie to see back in the '70s. (Stephen King has talked about this in interviews.) This premeditation also comes through in how her first act after leaving the school is to burst all of the nearby fire hydrants in order to kill the water pressure, leaving the town unable to put the fire out so it will burn down completely.
- Even Carrie's birth is described like this! A neighbour describes hearing hysterical, anguished screaming coming from the family home; the noise is so prolonged and awful that eventually people start calling the police. The officers get there to find Margaret covered in blood, her new baby screaming and bloody.
- Carrie killing her mother is chilling as well. Yes, she is doing it partially in self-defense, and her mother completely deserved it, but the description of Carrie's telekinesis manifesting as a hand that is traveling Margaret's blood stream till it reaches her heart, then squeezing it until she has a heart attack.
- The sheer cruelty and pettiness of Chris is pretty horrifying in its own right. She easily makes Regina George look like Fred Rogers.
The musical
- "And Eve Was Weak"—the demonstration of Carrie's mother's abuse, starting right after the calm and loving "Open Your Heart" where Margaret get steadily more panicked and desperate about "praying for forgiveness" as Carrie confronts her about her period and trying to get her to actually talk to her for a change. It ends with Margaret locking her in her "prayer room", although there's one version at least that had her slice Carrie's hand open before doing so. The fact that this version's Margaret seems to genuinely love Carrie to some extent makes her violent fanaticism even more unsettling.
- "The Destruction" on the revival's official soundtrack, which is sung right after the blood is dumped onto Carrie. You hear her freaking out, people laughing at her, and then... chaos, things falling, fire, and screaming. Then, as the screams die away, you hear Carrie's Leitmotif playing, and one last explosion, which is followed by the sound of sirens. It's chilling. At least one production of the prom scene had the prom-goers actually run to the exit doors of the theater (which were locked) trying to escape while Carrie killed them by melting their spines with her powers, one by one. She even kills some actors that were planted as audience members who also tried to escape.
- The original "Destruction" wasn't exactly a slouch on the terror-front either (lasers aside). A couple of boys drag Tommy back after the blood is poured on Carrie and hold him there while he struggles to get to her, and the rest of the students begin jeering at Carrie - to the extent of quite literally throwing her around the stage and shrieking laughter directly into her face - all while the music grows increasingly manic and Carrie sings various disjointed phrases from previous songs in the show in an increasingly panicked tone. Then the music stops being so manic and takes on an incredibly dark tone as Carrie repeats lines from her title song ("Doesn't anybody ever get it right?/Doesn't anybody think that I hear?") followed by her repeating her mother's words in "Eve Was Weak" ("God has seen your sinning/Just beginning!/Pray for your salvation/From damnation!/Pray or/He will burn you!/He will burn you!") as she actually begins burning the gym, targeting Tommy and the boys holding him back first as though she believes he was in on the whole thing. The lyrics and sheer conviction of Linzi Hateley's performance make it seem as though this is a Carrie who, despite clearly Jumping Off the Slippery Slope, is still well aware what she's capable of doing and now sees herself as a genuinely god-like figure who is consciously wreaking Old Testament style vengeance on those who have wronged her and even going a step further to taunt them with the possibility of "salvation" if only they somehow fight through the pain and terror of burning alive to apologise to her.
- The opening song "In" was originally pure Narm with its cheesy synth orchestration and choreography resembling an exercise video. The 2012 rewrite turned it into a much more serious rumination on the social pressures of high school, complete with an introduction of all the overlapping anxieties of the students that's sure to resonate with anyone who was an outsider in school.