October Writing Prompt: Carrie & The Horror of Adolescence

Happy Halloween! Go deep into the black, angsty heart of your teenage self for this month’s writing prompt featuring the Carrie (1976) and Carrie (2013).

Happy Halloween! The veil is thin, today. If contacting the spirit world isn’t your thing, let some film adaptations of Stephen King’s Carrie help you get in touch with something even more terrifying: your past selves.

The work of film remakes necessarily involves reckoning with the past, honoring what’s good, jettisoning what no longer works, and updating for new audiences. For this month’s spooky writing prompt, you’ll use a piece of your own writing from the past, exorcise your old demons, and hopefully Frankenstein something new from the remnants.

For inspiration, take a beat from Carrie and its remakes and examine the poems they contain along the way.

A Tale of Two Carries

In the original 1976 film adaptation of the novel, Tommy writes a poem and Carrie speaks up to praise it. We don’t know how it’s lineated, but the text of what he writes follows. Perhaps we can think of it as a kind of prose poem: