The Rage: Carrie 2 (1999)

The Rage: Carrie 2 1999 poster

The Rage: Carrie 2 (1999)

Director: Katt Shea

Plot Summary

A massacre strikes up after an outcast girl is taunted by a group of high school jocks, all of them unaware of her violent, cutthroat psychic power.

Male Deaths

• Dylan Bruno [Mark Bing]
• Zachery Ty Bryan [Eric Stark]
• Eli Craig [Chuck Potter]
• Justin Urich [Brad Winters]

Female Deaths

• Charlotte Ayanna [Tracy Campbell]
• Emily Bergl [Rachel Lang]
• Rachel Blanchard [Monica Jones]
• Amy Irving [Sue Snell]
• Deborah Knox [Party Girl]
• Mena Suvari [Lisa Parker]

Gallery

Emily Bergl

Dylan Bruno

Rachel Blanchard

Eli Craig

Amy Irving

Deborah Knox

Mena Suvari

Trivia

• This film is a sequel to the 1976 horror film Carrie.
• Sissy Spacek (the original star of Carrie) was offered a cameo in this sequel to the 1976 teen horror film Carrie which she turned down. However, she did give the director of the film Katt Shea permission to use some of her scenes from Carrie for flashbacks.
• During filming of the climatic party/bloodbath sequence, it took three attempts to shoot Rachel using her telekinetic powers to shatter the glass doors. On the first take, Emily Bergl flinched, and on the second take, she showed her clenched teeth. On the third take, they were able to finish the scene as they wanted it with her showing no facial reaction. Real glass, shattered by the blowers, was used for this scene, and Emily received multiple cuts on her skin (back, arms, legs, and backside) after the shooting of each take. She is deliberately not shown afterward from the back to hide her injuries.
• Loosely based on a real-life 1993 incident in which a group of high school jocks, the Spur Posse, were involved in a sex scandal.
• The film began as an original story, before producers realised how similar it was to the horror film Carrie and so they made it a sequel.
• Amy Irving is the only cast member from the original film Carrie to return for the sequel.
• Originally entitled "The Curse" and later "Say You're Sorry", before the final title "The Rage" was chosen. Curiously, the Brazilian-Portuguese title for this film is "A Maldição de Carrie" ("The Curse of Carrie").
• "Rage" was also the title of the first novel that Stephen King published under his pseudonym, Richard Bachman. That novel climaxed with a school shooting and, after a string of real school shootings, King decided not to allow the book to be published anymore. Interesting enough, this sequel was released only one month before the Columbine shooting.
• A few weeks into production, the original director Robert Mandel quit over creative differences and Katt Shea hurriedly took over the reins with less than a week to prepare to start filming, and two weeks' worth of footage to reshoot.
• Originally titled The Curse, the film was scheduled to start production in 1996 with Emily Bergl in the lead, however production stalled for two years.
• Katt Shea took on the role of director after Robert Mandel reportedly quit over creative differences. But according to Shea in a 2019 interview, the studio told her they fired the original director and only brought her in because they were desperate to "salvage something out of the mess" rather than cancel the film entirely. She ended up reshooting two weeks worth of footage. Only her name is listed as director in the opening credits.
• The burnt down high school that Sue Snell takes Rachel to was actually a yarn factory that had burned down and the remnants of which were left there. Katt Shea had also filmed a scene of Rachel kicking a metal bucket aside, but cut it out of the final edit as she found it to be too silly.
• Charlotte Ayanna plays Tracy Campbell in this film, a popular girl who takes part in the cruel prank to mock Rachel and turns fatal. In the 1999 teen black-comedy Jawbreaker (1999), Ayanna played another popular girl, who died in the beginning due to a terrible prank gone wrong. Additionally her parents were played by William Katt and P.J. Soles who starred in Carrie as popular kids who played different parts in altering Carrie's life through prom night.
• This film narrowly escaped being shelved and locked away in a vault, as it was theatrically released only 3 weeks before the tragic Columbine High School shooting. MGM studio heads said that if this film had been finished any later, it would have been shelved and not released out of respect for any victims of the shooting and their families, as this film is also about a high school outcast getting revenge on their bullies, and it would have been in poor taste to release this film after the shooting.
• Near the film's ending, Jesse (Jason London) is studying in his dorm room at Kings University. This is a tribute to Stephen King, the author of the novel and eventually made into a film Carrie.
• This was the final film produced by Paul Monash, who secured the rights to the Stephen King novel and produced the original 1976 film Carrie when no other Hollywood studios would touch it. His next and final film before his death was the 2002 television adaptation, Carrie, on which he only worked in a consultant capacity.
• This film was originally supposed to be released earlier on October 16, 1998 two weeks before the weekend of Halloween but MGM pushed back to March 12, 1999.