CARRIE 1976. The striking lost deleted prologue.

Brian De Palma's unsettling 1976 film "Carrie" is known and admired for its faithful adaptation of the scenes described in Stephen King's bestseller. However, there was a sequence intended to open the film that, despite meeting that criterion, was ultimately discarded and classified as “Lost Media.”

The striking sequence.

Described as a documentary report in the original material, the original opening sequence featured 6-year-old Carrie interacting with a young neighbor who was sunbathing topless, but when she was discovered by her fanatical mother (Margaret White), Carrie was violently dragged away and locked inside her house. The girl’s panic and fear unleashed her powers, causing an inexplicable and violent shower of rocks and ice to fall from the sky, striking only the White family’s house.

Production issues.

Because the film's budget was only $1.8 million, a pittance by the special-effects standards of the time, Brian De Palma came up with the unusual and risky idea of having Sissy Spacek herself play Carrie at age 6, using camera techniques and forced perspective instead of hiring a child actress.

To simulate the damage, the crew had to mechanically hurl hundreds of rocks at the set. The noise was so unbearable that the actual neighbors of the filming location, enraged by the commotion, called the police and forced the production to stop.

Practical effects failed to make the phenomenon look realistic. Since it was impossible to make the scene look convincing on camera, De Palma decided to take the drastic step of cutting the sequence entirely.

Impact.

In the filmmakers’ own words, removing the childhood backstory and opening directly in high school with the volleyball game and the harrowing shower scene greatly improved the film. It immediately immersed the viewer in the trauma of bullying, grounding the story in a very human and painful reality before introducing the supernatural. 

However, it is known that the script was intended to be circular. A hail of stones severely damaged the house at the beginning, and another hail of stones completely buried it at the end. Since the prologue was cut, a gap was created in the plot. In the final scene, when Sue Snell dreams of the lot where Carrie’s home once stood, it appears covered in rubble, a detail that goes unnoticed by those who haven’t read the original material.

Lost.

Because the sequence was never fully edited, after filming was abandoned due to technical issues with the special effects and problems with the local police, the only footage that remained were individual shots and unedited test footage.

Since in the 1970s there was neither a home video market nor any interest in selling “deleted scenes” or “director's cuts,” United Artists (later MGM) destroyed the small amount of footage that had been shot to save storage space in its vaults, so it is considered lost forever.

Script description.