Buckets of Blood
Each portrayal of Carrie leads to her climax in enjoyment as she steps up onto the stage and is crowned Queen of the Prom, with Tommy Ross as her King. As the crowd of prom-goers and teachers applaud them, it is then that Chris Hargensen pulls the cord connected to two buckets (only one bucket in the movies) of pig blood, covering Carrie from head to toe and ruining her dress. The girls' gym teacher, Rita Desjardin (Miss Collins in the 1976 film), punished the taunters with a week's boot-camp style detention, but Chris skipped out on it and was banned from the prom as a result. Believing Carrie was responsible for her missing the prom, Chris sought revenge by humiliating Carrie in front of the entire school. It turns out that Chris and her henchwoman Tina Blake (Norma Watson in the 1976 movie) replaced the real ballots with fake ones as part of their larger plan to humiliate Carrie.
In both the novel and the 1976 film versions, Carrie remains unaware of the buckets until the blood actually splatters down on her, while in the 2002 film version, she happens to look up in time to see the bucket fall, sending the wave of blood down on her and Tommy. In the novel and both films, Tommy is visibly outraged, but before he can react, the bucket falls from the rafters and lands on his head, fracturing his skull and eventually killing him.
One of the difficulties in staging the musical was that when Carrie was drenched by the blood, it would clog Linzi Hateley's body microphone. Since her song "The Destruction" began almost immediately, there was no time to clear the microphone before it was needed. To solve this problem, an actor was dispatched to daub Hateley's face with stage blood and then invert an empty bucket on her head. In the 2012 Off Broadway revival of the musical, the bucket of blood is tipped on Carrie from above as done in the novel and movies. This is done by use of projections and red lighting, the actress playing Carrie is then doused in fake blood after the prom scene without clogging her body microphone.
Read more about this topic: Carrie White
Famous quotes containing the words buckets and/or blood:
“The great British Library—an immense collection of volumes of all ages and languages, many of which are now forgotten, and most of which are seldom read: one of these sequestered pools of obsolete literature to which modern authors repair, and draw buckets full of classic lore, or “pure English, undefiled” wherewith to swell their own scanty rills of thought.”
—Washington Irving (1783–1859)
“The blood of Abraham, God’s father of the chosen, still flows in the veins of Arab, Jew, and Christian, and too much of it has been spilled in grasping for the inheritance of the revered patriarch in the Middle East. The spilled blood in the Holy Land still cries out to God—an anguished cry for peace.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)