Carrie | 1976
- Locations |
- Los Angeles,
- California
- DIRECTOR |
- Brian De Palma
Discover where Brian De Palma's classic film of Stephen King's Carrie was filmed around Los Angeles – including the three schools which stood in for 'Bates High School' along with the notorious pig farm.
Arguably the best filming of a Stephen King story so far, with repressed teen Carrie White (Sissy Spacek) wreaking revenge on her cruel classmates and her religious-nut Mom (Piper Laurie).
‘Bates High School’ (what else would it be called in a De Palma movie?) is a conflation of three schools, but is mostly Hermosa Beach Community Center (which used to be the Pier Avenue School), Pier Avenue at Pacific Coast Highway, Hermosa Beach between Manhattan Beach and Redondo Beach, Highway 1 south of LA International Airport.
The rear of the community center is still instantly recognisable as the school where Carrie is tormented by her peers.
The climactic prom is held in what was the school's gym, though for the final fiery conflagration, the interior was reconstructed at Culver City Studios, 9336 Washington Boulevard, Culver City – the same studio where they burned 'Atlanta' for Gone With the Wind.
The track and playing fields are those of Pacific Palisades High School, Temescal Canyon Road in Santa Monica. Other movies filmed at Pacific Palisades include Old School, the 2003 remake of Freaky Friday, and TV series Modern Family and Teen Wolf.
The briefly-glimpsed frontage of the school is Morningside Elementary School, 576 North Maclay Avenue at 5th Street in San Fernando in – where else? – the San Fernando Valley, north of LA. A bright coat of paint means it's looking a lot more colourful today than it did in the movie.
The bucket of blood that ends Carrie’s night out is obtained by bad boy Billy Nolan (John Travolta) and co from a pig farm in the industrial town of Vernon, southeast LA.
The farm coyly hides behind images of porkers scampering in green meadows. It’s the cutesy Farmer John’s Pig Mural, one of the biggest murals in the world. Covering an entire city block, it was begun in 1957 by movie industry artist Les Grimes, who died in a fall from scaffolding while working on the project.
Good news for the piggies but bad for the landmark – Farmer John's has since closed down. It couldn't survive being hit by both the pandemic and a fire. Since the mural is not protected, it's destruction has already begun. I don't know if any of it is able to be preserved.
You can glimpse the mural again in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point, and see it for real at 3049 East Vernon Avenue, Vernon, LA.
Carrie White's house was 124 North 7th Street, Santa Paula, a city north of the Simi Valley in Ventura County. Unfortunately it's since been demolished – the plot still standing empty.
