Carrie Trivia
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49 free Carrie trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Carrie started as three pages Stephen King threw in the bin. His wife Tabitha fished them out, he finished the novel, and the paperback rights bought him out of teaching for good. Two years later Brian De Palma's film turned the prom-night bucket of pig's blood into one of the most famous images in horror and earned Oscar nominations for Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie. This quiz covers both the 1974 novel and the 1976 film: the plot and characters of each (and where they differ), King's writing and publication story, the casting and shooting of the film, the score, the box office, the awards, and everything that came after, from the notorious 1988 Broadway musical to The Rage: Carrie 2, the 2013 remake and the 2026 series. Difficulty runs from questions any horror fan will get to details for people who have read the book twice. Every answer was checked against the Wikipedia articles on the novel and the film, and each question shows its source.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The trailer for the 1976 film Carrie misspelled Stephen King's first name in which way?
Steven
Steven was the trailer's spelling, a sign of how unknown he still was: Carrie was his first published novel and the first of his books to reach the screen.
Q 02In which fictional Maine town is Carrie set?
Chamberlain
Chamberlain is all but destroyed on prom night: walking home, Carrie opens a gas main that levels the downtown and pulls live power lines onto the streets.
Q 03In Stephen King's novel, Carrie is short for which unusual first name?
Carietta
Carietta White was drawn from two girls King had known at school, one mocked for wearing the same outfit every day and one from a strictly religious home.
Q 04Where does Carrie's mother lock her up as punishment for getting her first period?
A closet
A closet is her punishment for what her mother calls sin; never having been told about menstruation, Carrie had believed she was bleeding to death.
Q 05Which supernatural power does Carrie White unleash on her classmates at the prom?
Telekinesis
Telekinesis reached King through a Life magazine article suggesting that, if such a power existed, it would be strongest in adolescent girls.
Q 06Which popular girl leads the locker-room bullying of Carrie and later plots the prom prank?
Chris Hargensen
Chris Hargensen refuses the detention handed out for the bullying and is barred from the prom; when her lawyer father fails to get her reinstated, she plots revenge.
Q 07Which classmate, feeling guilty, asks her boyfriend to take Carrie to the prom?
Sue Snell
Sue Snell is later blamed for setting the disaster in motion, and she writes a memoir to defend herself and express her sympathy for Carrie.
Q 08Which popular athlete takes Carrie to the prom at his girlfriend's request?
Tommy Ross
Tommy Ross is knocked out by one of the falling buckets at the moment of the prank and never wakes up, one of the many who die that night.
Q 09What is dumped on Carrie at the moment she is crowned prom queen?
Pig's blood
Pig's blood is collected in a raid on a farm, then rigged above the stage to pour down as the prom king and queen are crowned.
Q 10In Stephen King's novel Carrie, what is the gym teacher called before the 1976 film renamed her?
Miss Desjardin
Miss Desjardin became Miss Collins in the 1976 film, but later versions restored her name, including the 2013 remake and the 2026 series.
Q 11How does Carrie kill her mother in the novel?
She stops her heart
She stops her heart by will alone, moments after being stabbed with a kitchen knife; the flying knives that kill her mother belong to the 1976 film.
Q 12What nickname does Stephen King's novel Carrie give the night of the disaster at the school dance?
The Black Prom
The Black Prom makes national news in the novel, and a federal inquiry called the White Commission is set up to investigate what happened.
Q 13What fate awaits Carrie's hometown after the novel's prom night?
Slow abandonment
Q 21What did Carrie do in King's original ending, which his editor had him cut?
Grew horns and downed a plane
Grew horns and downed a plane: the first draft made Carrie a lightning-throwing giant until editor Bill Thompson urged something just as lethal but less like a comic book.
Q 22Which novel followed Carrie in 1975 as Stephen King's second published book?
'Salem's Lot
'Salem's Lot grew from King wondering aloud what would happen if Dracula turned up in a sleepy American town; its working title was Second Coming.
Q 23Brian De Palma's film of Carrie renames the novel's Ewen High School in tribute to which Hitchcock thriller?
Psycho
Slow abandonment follows: survivors move away from a town unable to recover from a night that killed hundreds, among them most of the students at the prom.
Q 14How does Stephen King's novel Carrie end?
A letter about another gifted girl
A letter about another gifted girl closes the book: a mother tells her sister that her little daughter shows the same strange talent, which runs in the family.
Q 15What literary form does the novel partly take, mixing narrative with reports and excerpts?
Epistolary
King enjoyed faking documents in the style of Esquire and Reader's Digest.
Q 16What do Carrie's classmates chant as they pelt her with tampons in the locker-room shower?
Plug it up!
Plug it up! is the chant in a scene King nearly gave up on: unsure he could write about teenage girls, he threw his first pages in the trash.
Q 17Who rescued the first pages of Carrie from the trash and urged King to keep going?
His wife Tabitha
His wife Tabitha did more than save the pages: she guided him through the girls' side of the story, starting with the locker-room scene he had felt unable to write.
Q 18What was King's day job while writing Carrie?
Teaching high-school English
Teaching high-school English at Hampden Academy paid so little that the Kings lived in a trailer, and he sold stories to men's magazines to help make ends meet.
Q 19Which publisher released the Carrie hardback in April 1974?
Doubleday
Doubleday kept half of the paperback money under its standard contract, and King later said that 50-50 split was why he eventually left the house.
Q 20After a $2,500 hardback advance, how much did the paperback rights to Stephen King's Carrie fetch?
$400,000
$400,000 was split evenly with his publisher, and King's half let him give up his day job and write full time.
Psycho gave the film Bates High, named for Norman Bates, and its shrieking violins too: De Palma cued the famous strings whenever Carrie flexes her powers.
Q 24Sissy Spacek, Carrie's doomed prom queen, had been a real-life homecoming queen in which US state?
Texas
Texas: she was crowned at Quitman High School, yet on the Carrie set she kept apart from the rest of the cast so that her character's isolation would feel real.
Q 25Who plays Carrie's mother in the 1976 film?
Piper Laurie
Piper Laurie had been away from films for 15 years, and when she signed on she took the script for a comedy rather than a horror story.
Q 26Which future Grease star plays Billy Nolan in the 1976 film Carrie?
John Travolta
John Travolta's Billy is goaded into the prank by his girlfriend and dies with her when Carrie wrecks their car as she walks home.
Q 27Who plays Carrie's chief tormentor in the 1976 film?
Nancy Allen
Nancy Allen's mean-girl turn led to more than a career: she later married De Palma and appeared in three more of his films.
Q 28Who plays the remorseful classmate who finds Carrie a prom date in the 1976 film?
Amy Irving
Amy Irving's real mother, Priscilla Pointer, plays her screen mother, and Irving returned to the part 23 years later in the film's sequel.
Q 29Who plays the gym teacher Miss Collins in the 1976 film Carrie?
Betty Buckley
Betty Buckley returned to the story on Broadway in 1988, this time as Carrie's abusive mother in the ill-fated stage musical.
Q 30How has Stephen King rated Brian De Palma's film of Carrie against his own novel?
Better than the book
Better than the book is his repeated verdict: when a remake was announced in 2011, King asked why anyone would bother when the original was so good.