How Brian De Palma's crew shot the prom in Carrie, 1976.
The art director on a ladder
The blood was Karo syrup and food coloring. Jack Fisk, the film's art director and Sissy Spacek's husband, climbed a ladder above her and poured it himself.
“I think everybody else was scared to.”
The budget left little room for a second try. Costume designer Rosanna Norton remembers one take. Spacek remembers two: “They warmed it up beforehand, and both times I remember it feeling like a warm blanket.”
Norton says Stephen King's book had the dress red. She told De Palma and Fisk the blood wouldn't show on it, so she chose a blush peach.
It stuck like honey
“It sticks to your skin, so people had to follow her around with water bottles, squirting water on her to unstick her arms from holding to her body.”
Makeup artist Ron Snyder photographed the spatter and matched it for all her closer shots, which took a few days. Then came a couple of weeks shooting everyone else, with Spacek back on stage in the stiff, dried dress so the other actors could react to her. She is reported to have slept in the bloody clothes to hold continuity.
A gym on a soundstage
“We didn't have much money, and high school kids don't have much money to decorate a prom, so we used mostly cardboard, tin foil, and crepe paper.”
The gym was a set built at Culver City Studios, where Citizen Kane was shot. De Palma and cinematographer Mario Tosi put lights at the top of the set looking down, which a real gym wouldn't have. Behind the king and queen's chairs, Fisk remembers “a lot of blue in there just to make it seem kind of out of this world.”
Faster, faster, faster
For the first dance, the crew laid a circular dolly track 13 or 14 feet across. Spacek and William Katt danced one way and the dolly ran the other, with camera operator Joel King lying a couple of inches off the floor and lights bursting around Spacek's head. De Palma kept calling for more speed.
“Everybody was going so fast that at the end when the shot was over, everybody collapsed on the floor because we were spinning.”
A twelve-hour shot
One crane move runs nearly two minutes without a cut, from the couple's table to the ballots, around the stage and up to the bucket. There was no video assist, so De Palma left the call to his operator.
“Joel, when you tell me it's right, we're going home.”
They shot 12 hours that day, with producer Paul Monash telling De Palma to break it up.
Fire, once
“I've gotta be good once, period.”
The destruction couldn't be repeated, so Tosi ran at least three cameras on what Fisk calls “kind of a controlled burn,” with the crepe paper going up for real. P.J. Soles broke an eardrum taking a fire hose at full force, on her last day.
De Palma cut the whole sequence in split screen himself, working through 150 setups over six weeks. “It lasted five minutes and it was just too complicated.” He and editor Paul Hirsch kept split screen only where they needed it.
Make your own
Ingredients
1 cupKaro light corn syrup
2 tbspBeet powder up to 3 tbsp if you want it deeper
1½ tbspWater
1 tbspUnsweetened cocoa powder
1 to 2 tspStrong black coffee
½ tspLemon juice to start up to about 1 tsp, or a small pinch of citric acid
A tiny pinchTurmeric about 1/16 tsp
1 tspCornstarch mixed with 1 tsp water optional, for extra opacity
Method
Stir the beet powder and water into a smooth paste so it doesn’t clump in the syrup.
Whisk the paste into the corn syrup.
Add the lemon juice a few drops at a time. Stop as soon as the color moves from purple to red.
Mix the cocoa with the coffee into a paste, then whisk it in. This darkens the color and takes away what’s left of the purple.
Add the turmeric and mix well. If it starts looking orange, you’ve used too much, so add a bit more beet paste to balance it.
Add the cornstarch slurry last, and only if the blood still looks too see-through. Too much makes it look pink and milky.
Adjusting
Fresh arterial blood
Use half the cocoa, skip the coffee, and thin it with a teaspoon of water.
Darker venous or drying blood
Add another ½ tbsp of cocoa and more coffee.
Before the shoot
Patch test
Test the full finished recipe on your actor’s inner forearm 24 to 48 hours ahead, with the lemon and turmeric in it.
Storage
Make it the day of the shoot, or the night before at the earliest. Keep it sealed in the fridge away from light, since beet color fades with heat, light and air.
Camera test
Check it on skin under your real set lights before you roll.
Removal
Use lukewarm water and the actor’s usual gentle cleanser. Any faint pink or yellow tint left on the skin will fade within a few hours without scrubbing.
Sources
Chris Eggertsen, “Carrie's Prom Scene: An Oral History,” Birth.Movies.Death, 2016: part one, part two