This episode of WTF Happened to This Horror Movie? was Written by Cody Hamman, Narrated by Jason Hewlett, Edited by Joseph Wilson, Produced by Lance Vlcek and John Fallon, and Executive Produced by Berge Garabedian.
Everyone knows the story of Carrie White and how bad prom was for her. And everyone around her. But did you know that Carrie had a sister? It took a couple decades for this information to be revealed, but in 1999 we were introduced to her sibling. Her name was Rachel Lang… and in its own way, Rachel’s high school experience was as horrific as Carrie’s was. Rachel’s story was told in The Rage: Carrie 2 (watch it HERE), a film that many seem to have forgotten about. But we still remember it, and we’re going to let you know What the F*ck Happened to This Horror Movie.
Carrie was the first published novel from author Stephen King. The first step on his path to becoming a legendary literary master of horror. Inspired by two unfortunate girls he had known in his youth, King wrote about Carrie White, a put-upon teenage girl who uses her telekinetic abilities to fight back against the bullies that have been making her life hell. Including her own insane mother. Unfortunately, a whole lot of innocent bystanders also fall victim to Carrie’s telekinetic rampage. The first King book led to the first King movie when director Brian De Palma brought CARRIE to the screen two years later. Scripted by Lawrence D. Cohen, the film adaptation toned down some elements of King’s story. For example, Carrie nearly destroys her whole hometown in the book. She is much less destructive in the film. But Cohen and De Palma also let us get to know some of the characters even better than King had. As a result, Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie received Oscar nominations for their performances as Carrie and her mother. Released by United Artists in 1976, the movie was a critical and box office success. And once the film adaptation was released, King’s novel finally hit the bestseller list.
Carrie was a hit, and it gained a reputation for being one of the best horror movies ever made. It remained popular as decades went by. But there didn’t seem to be any way to follow up on that success, beyond making other Stephen King movies. Carrie White and her mother were dead. There was nowhere for the story to go. The door to a sequel appeared to be closed. Then, twenty years later, MGM – the studio that had purchased United Artists in the 1980s – found a loophole.
Some say that the Carrie sequel began as an original project called The Curse. MGM was working on this with Rafael Moreau, who had just written Hackers for them, and it wasn’t until Moreau turned in the script that everyone realized it was so similar to Carrie that it should become Carrie 2. This is odd to consider, since MGM has never been shy about wanting to cash in on popular titles in their library, like Rocky, RoboCop, and Poltergeist. MGM would be happy to keep their franchises going on forever. In the years since Carrie 2 was released, they have made two more Carrie adaptations – one for TV, one for the big screen – and announced they were developing a third. Clearly they see this as one of their most important properties. It would make more sense for them to see this Rafael Moreau project as a Carrie sequel from the start, even if it was simply being called The Curse. Especially since it was always going to be about a teen girl using telekinetic powers to strike back against those who have wronged her. The project was also a Paul Monash production, just like the original Carrie.
Whatever the origins were, Moreau did dig into King’s text to find a way to make a Carrie sequel work. In the book, King tells us that telekinetic abilities are genetic, and this TK gene can only become dominant in a female carrier. In other words, only females are gifted or cursed with telekinesis. Carrie’s great-grandmother had been telekinetic, so her mother Margaret had the TK gene. But it was recessive. Margaret didn’t have any TK abilities. Carrie’s father Ralph White also carried the TK gene. Recessive, as it always is in males, according to King. So when these two TK carriers got together, they produced a daughter where the gene was dominant, so she had strong TK abilities. In the book, Ralph was killed in a construction accident before Carrie was even born. But in the De Palma film, it was said that Ralph left his family and ran off with another woman. Now we have the set-up for a sequel: Ralph was still out there and still carrying the TK gene.
Moreau’s script, which received uncredited revisions from future Writers Guild president Howard A. Rodman, centers on a teen girl named Rachel Lang. Like Carrie, Rachel has an insane mother – but in this case, the mom has been a patient in a mental hospital since having a breakdown years ago. Rachel lives in a less-than-ideal foster family situation. She’s also an outsider at her high school, but in her own edgy, moody way. She isn’t bullied, she just keeps her distance from the popular crowd. She and her best friend Lisa are so close, they have matching tattoos of thorn-wrapped hearts on their arms. One morning before school, Lisa reveals to Rachel that she has lost her virginity. She’s going to introduce Rachel to the boy she slept with during their lunch break. But that introduction never comes. Lisa commits suicide by jumping from the roof of the school. Soon we find out why: a group of football players are screwing their way through the female population of the school. They have a notebook where they use a point system to keep track of each other’s sexual activities. Turning this into a competition. Lisa lost her virginity to a boy named Eric, who only slept with her to score some points. When he confessed this to her, she killed herself.
While mourning her friend, Rachel unexpectedly starts to fall for someone in Eric’s social circle. Football player Jesse, who proves to be a much better person than the guys he hangs out with. And when the other members of the popular crowd see Jesse hanging out with Rachel, they strongly disapprove. It’s a star-crossed lovers, Romeo and Juliet situation. The movie, not being very subtle, even has Jesse and Rachel discussing Romeo and Juliet in a classroom scene early on. The jocks and their groupies decide to put Rachel in her place and make Jesse see the error of his ways. They put together an awful prank that would land some of them in prison in a just world. But there is no justice in Carrie 2 aside from what Rachel is able to deal out herself. Throughout the film, she has demonstrated that she has some level of telekinetic abilities. And when she is heartbroken and humiliated at a party, she unleashes her powers to get deadly vengeance.
Robert Mandel, the director of such films as F/X, School Ties, and The Substitute, was hired to take the helm of Carrie 2. Filming began in North Carolina in the spring of 1998… and two weeks into production, Mandel left the project due to creative differences with the studio. Katt Shea, best known for directing the thriller Poison Ivy, received a call on a Thursday, offering her the chance to take over as director on Carrie 2. She arrived in North Carolina the following Monday, and filming resumed with Shea as director that Friday. During the one week she had to prepare to take over a movie that had already started shooting, she read the script twice. And once she was on set, she had to take an instinctual approach to bringing the story to the screen. She decided to reshoot everything Mandel had shot. She didn’t want the finished film to be a mixture of her footage and his footage. She wanted to bring her style to every moment in the movie. This caused a bit of trouble, because the studio didn’t extend the schedule to accommodate the reshoots. Shea still had to finish the movie on the same date Mandel would’ve finished it. So reshoots of the scenes Mandel had taken two weeks to film had to be crammed into what was left of the existing schedule.
Shea was able to bring in her own cinematographer. She chose Donald M. Morgan, who had worked with John Carpenter on Elvis, Christine, and Starman. The credit that really sold her on his work was The Wall… But she thought it was the 1982 Pink Floyd movie. The Wall Morgan worked on was a 1998 movie that hadn’t even been released yet. Despite that mix-up, Shea stuck with Morgan and they worked well together.
No prominent roles were recast. For the most part, Shea inherited a full cast. She did rework some performances and scenes so they would play differently than in the Mandel footage. Chicago stage actress Emily Bergl was making her screen debut as Rachel. Bergl was initially cast in 1996, when the project was still called The Curse. It had been shelved for a couple years, but Bergl stayed on board the whole time. She was playing the character in a tougher way for Mandel, but Shea wanted her to bring more vulnerability to the role. It worked, because Bergl’s performance is what makes Carrie 2 more effective and engaging than you would expect a Carrie sequel to be. Jason London plays nice guy jock Jesse, Rachel’s love interest. The pair does fall very deeply for each other very quickly, but Bergl and London make the love story easy to buy into. Mena Suvari has a small amount of screen time as Rachel’s friend Lisa. She had a bigger role in American Pie this same year. So did Eddie Kaye Thomas, who plays Arnie, one of Rachel’s fellow outcasts. John Doe and Kate Skinner are her foster parents. J. Smith-Cameron is her troubled birth mother. Who, late in the running time, reveals that Carrie’s father Ralph White is also Rachel’s father. But we still don’t meet Ralph himself.
One cast member would have the characters in the more recent Scream movies calling this a requel. Or a legacyquel. Carrie cast member Amy Irving reprises the role of Sue Snell. Since we didn’t have the terms requel or legacyquel in ‘98, Bergl had to give this description to Fangoria magazine: “We want everyone to know Carrie 2 is a continuation, but at the same time it’s also a very different movie. It’s not really a remake, and it’s not even a sequel. I see it more as the equivalent of how West Side Story relates to Romeo and Juliet. It’s the same kind of story, but a very different take on it.”
Sue Snell is the girl who tried to help Carrie White by having her boyfriend take her to the prom. That had terrible consequences, but Sue is still dedicated to helping others. She works as the guidance counselor at Rachel’s high school, and she tries to help Rachel as well. When she realizes that Rachel has telekinetic abilities, she’s the one who digs up the truth about the girl’s parentage. She tells Rachel and tries to connect with her. To make things easier for her. She even takes her to the ruins of the high school Carrie destroyed. Showing her what could happen if she doesn’t figure out and control her telekinetic abilities. But these attempts to help Rachel turn out just as poorly as her experience with Carrie did. It doesn’t help that Rachel doesn’t fully believe that she is telekinetic. Instead, she’s worried that she has inherited her mother’s madness.
When Shea joined the project, she was told she couldn’t include any footage from the first Carrie. Sissy Spacek didn’t want anything to do with the sequel and wouldn’t allow them to use footage of her from the original film. But Shea wanted to show that Sue was having flashbacks of Carrie throughout the movie, so she cut them into the film. The movie was then shown to Spacek to see if she would give them permission to include the archive footage. She liked it, so she made a deal to let them use the footage of her.
The group of despicable jocks are played by the likes of Dylan Bruno, Zachery Ty Bryan, Justin Urich, and Eli Craig. These days, Eli Craig is best known to horror fans for directing Tucker and Dale vs. Evil. The popular girls who aid them in their scheme against Rachel and Jesse are played by Charlotte Ayanna and Rachel Blanchard. All of these actors do a great job of making sure we absolutely hate each one of their characters. There is nothing redeeming about any of these people. Their behavior is disgusting. And worse, it’s completely believable. There are people out there who act just like this. In fact, the jocks are based on teens who were caught up in a real sex scandal. They called themselves the Spur Posse, and did score each other’s sexual activities. Much of which was allegedly criminal in nature. But the courts couldn’t prove most of the cases, so only one member of the posse received any sort of punishment. He served one year in a juvenile detention center for lewd conduct with a 10-year-old. The cinematic version of the Spur Posse gets a much more severe punishment from Rachel.
Moreau said he agreed to write a Carrie sequel because it would allow him to write an honest portrayal of high school on the way to a telekinetic bloodbath. He told Fangoria, “Stephen King talks about the book being like High School Confidential. There was stuff in the movie before anything like Fast Times at Ridgemont High came out. If you took the supernatural aspect away, it was really like a lot of people’s experiences in high school. … So that part of it interested me, because I’d just been reading about some really brutal things going on in high schools. I thought, ‘Man, things haven’t changed at all in twenty years. If anything, they’ve gotten worse!’”
Shea was also interested in that aspect of the story, and character development was her number one priority. She said, “It’s not just superficial, like you see in a lot of teen horror movies. Here we really get into what motivates the characters. Even with the bad kids, you get a really good understanding of why they’re so ruthless. And Rachel is just heart-wrenching.”
We may understand the bad kids, but they’re still irredeemably bad. Viewers can’t wait to see Rachel wipe out this bunch of douchebags. And she does so in a spectacular sequence set at a house party. Shea was facing a serious time crunch when shooting this sequence. The house had been built inside a convention center that was going to be demolished in two weeks. The demolition date was non-negotiable. So the cast and crew had to make sure they got the entire sequence on film during that window of time. There would be no going back. There were times when this meant the first unit crew would have to work for twenty hours straight. Then Bergl would go from working with the first unit to working with the second unit for a couple hours. Sleeping in between shots. But the hard times and effort were worth it, because the party rampage is a lot of fun to watch. Especially when some of the villains try to use spearguns against Rachel and that goes terribly wrong for them. The script had called for the teens to grab regular guns, but a studio executive requested they use something else. It was set decorator Linda Spheeris who suggested the spearguns. Ironically, despite what happens with a speargun in this movie, Dylan Bruno became an avid spearfisher a decade later.
The climactic sequence of Carrie 2 is a real crowd-pleaser. Or it would have been, if crowds had showed up to see the movie. Filming wrapped in July of ‘98, and the movie was given a wide release in March of 1999. Critics didn’t give it a warm reception. Its Rotten Tomatoes approval rating stands at twenty-three percent. It was a financial disappointment as well, making less than eighteen million dollars at the box office. The movie had a budget of twenty-one million, so the studio didn’t profit from the theatrical release. It reached more of an audience on home video, where it was given a special edition DVD release. Sixteen years later, it reached Blu-ray as well… But that Blu-ray release has since gone out of print. The Rage: Carrie 2 never caught on in the way anyone involved would’ve hoped it would.
It’s easy to understand why movie-goers would disregard a Carrie sequel. No one was asking for one to begin with. On the surface, the fact that it focuses on a completely different character makes it even less appealing. But it’s also a shame that The Rage: Carrie 2 isn’t more popular. Against all odds, Shea and Moreau managed to make this cash-in project a solid, emotionally engaging movie. Rachel Lang is an interesting character, and Emily Bergl played her very well. While a Carrie sequel sounds like a terrible idea, this one actually works when judged on its own merits. Rachel will never be as popular as her sister. But if you give her a chance, you might find yourself getting more into her story than you expected to. It draws you in and wraps around you. Just like that thorn wraps around her heart tattoo…
A couple of the previous episodes of WTF Happened to This Horror Movie? can be seen below. To see more, head over to our JoBlo Horror Originals YouTube channel – and subscribe while you’re there!