Betty Buckley Was Scared She’d Actually Die on the Carrie Set in 1976: ‘The Terror You See Was Real’ (Exclusive)

Betty Buckley didn’t need much help getting into character when it came time to film her death scene Carrie.

In the 1976 classic, Buckley, now starring in a horror film Conceived, she played Miss Collins, a PE teacher who shows little sympathy for bullied, telekinetic teenager Carrie White (played by Sissy Spacek). The film is an adaptation of Stephen King’s bestseller of the same name, which was published 50 years ago next month.

In the film’s chilling climax, Carrie is humiliated at her high school dance when villainous classmate Chris (Nancy Allen) douses her with a bucket of pig’s blood just as she is crowned prom queen. Her peers point and laugh, infuriating the teenager.

Using her mental powers, she locks the door, trapping everyone in the school gym, where the graduation party is taking place. An electrical fire breaks out, killing many, while poor Miss Collins is crushed by a basketball backboard.

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“That was my first death scene. It was pretty classic,” Buckley recalls.

But she was nervous while filming it because the stunt coordinator working on the film was seriously injured while doing another scene where he was thrown backwards into the air as one of the children who were killed.

Sissy Spacek in the climax of the movie ‘Carrie’ from 1976.

Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty

“There was a mattress for him to land on, and they miscalculated the distance and he fell to the ground and was seriously injured,” says Buckley.

“So we’ve all witnessed it and we’re like, ‘What? Are we in safe hands?” says Buckley, who panicked that she was going to get hurt too.

In the scene, Miss Collins is pinned against a wall when the basketball backboard collapses. A pendulum-like mechanism was on the ropes, and Buckley says there was a balsa wood foot to prevent any injury.

“It didn’t crush the person in the frame,” she says. “It was a safety mechanism.”

Buckley says she was told, “Oh, this is going to work,” but she wasn’t convinced: “I’m like, ‘Are you sure?’ And so the terror that you see from Miss Collins when that happened was absolutely real.”

Sissy Spacek and Betty Buckley in ‘Carrie’.

MGM

Buckley survived, but Miss Collins did not. For the next scene, when her character is writhing in agony before death, director Brian De Palma told her what to do.

“I had [fake] blood in my mouth that I had to spit out and all that, and his direction was, ‘Wiggle like a bug on a pin.’ And I thought that was one of the funniest things a director had ever said to me,” she says.

Taegen Burns and Betty Buckley in ‘Imaginary’.

Parrish Lewis

In the five decades since that film caused a sensation, Buckley has often returned to the horror genre: she played the terrifying mother of the main character in the 1988 Broadway adaptation of the film. Carrieappeared in two films by M. Night Shyamalan (2008 Happeningand his creepy 2016 hit Division) and played the soul-stealing grandmother in Season 3 of AMC’s spooky supernatural series Preacher.

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Her last film Conceived revolves around Jessica (DeWanda Wise), a Louisiana woman who moves into her former childhood home with her husband (Tom Payne) and his two children from a previous marriage, Alice (Pyper Braun) and Taylor (Taegen Burns).

Young Alice finds a teddy bear in the basement, but the toy turns out to be the stuff of nightmares.

Buckley has a supporting role as Gloria, a seemingly kind neighbor who watched over Jessica when she was a little girl. But things are not quite what they seem.

The actress, whose 50-year career has included stints on Broadway and television, is happy to return to horror, the genre that helped launch her career. “I thought this might be a fun way to get out of here,” she says.

Conceived it’s in theaters now.

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Source: HIS Education