Here’s All The Easter Eggs and References You Missed In Mike Flanagan’s Carrie

From horror legend cameos to the Red Door from The Haunting of Hill House, Mike Flanagan hid SO many Easter eggs in Carrie that you probably missed. Did you catch these?

Carrie’s dad Ralph dies in the premiere episode while on the job at his construction site. If you look closely at the signs, he’s working on a LaMerk Industries project. The company is featured in Stephen King’s The Dark Tower. 

When the police discover Carrie and her mother in their home, you can see that the door to the White house is red. This could be foreshadow the nickname Carrie Red, as well as be a nod to the iconic Red Door in The Haunting of Hill House and the name of Flanagan’s production company Red Room Productions.

There’s a nod to John Carpenter’s They Live as you can see an alien mask from the 1988 film appears the desk of one of the teachers.

When Margaret is told she needs to get a job to keep custody of Carrie, she gets a gig as a cashier and then janitor at S-Mart. That’s the same store Ash works at in Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead franchise. 

In episode five, Carrie goes to the junkyard with Emaline to flex her powers. We see her cause an explosion that set a beat up red car on fire that could be a reference to Christine.

Did you know the voice heard over the radio in episode one was actually Mike Flanagan’s himself? He teased several other fun voice cameos including Carla Gugino, Hamish Linklater, and Sauriyan Sapkota. Of course Flanagan regulars Samantha Sloyan, Kate Siegel, Rahul Kohli, and Michael Trucco appear in substantial roles in the season as well. 

There’s some major Battlestar Galactica reunions in Carrie. Michael Trucco, who plays Chris’s dad, also starred as Anders in Battlestar Galactica. Tahmoh Penikett, who plays Carrie’s dad, was Agathon in the show. Oculus star Katee Sackhoff is Starbuck in BSG and plays Amanda West, Emaline’s mother who is part of a group against people with powers. There are also two concerned parents worried about going through with prom played by Aaron Douglas, who played Chief Tyrol, and Tricia Helfer, who played Number Six, in Battlestar Galactica.

Mark Hamill is nearly unrecognizable as Greg McMurry in episode six. He plays a con artist posing as psychic Damon Nostra.

Scream star Matthew Lillard appears as the Principal in Carrie with a surprising parallel. He is electrocuted to death in Scream when Sidney drops the TV on him and he also died by electrocution in Carrie. That iconic Red Door in The Haunting of Hill House is also seen on the shirt Lillard’s character wears at the prom.

Meanwhile Scream 2’s Heather Graham plays Chris’s mom, and I loved seeing Delainey Hayles from Interview With The Vampire appear in the show.

One of my favorite Easter eggs has to be in the seventh episode just before the infamous prom scene goes down. Just as Carrie and Tommy take the stage as King and Queen, the camera pans to the crowd revealing cameos from horror legends Bryan Fuller and Don Mancini. Best known for Hannibal and Pushing Daisies, Bryan Fuller also wrote the 2002 Carrie TV movie. Don Mancini, the legend behind Chucky, actually gave an 8-year-old Summer H. Howell her first acting role. She played Alice, a little girl who befriends Chucky, in Curse of Chucky. 

Chris and Billy get blood to drop on Carrie from a pig farm owned by Sombra Corporation, another reference to The Dark Tower. Both also have connections to young people with telekinesis.

After the prom massacre, Carrie and Emaline dance through the town on fire, stopping in front of the movie theater with a marquee celebrating a Brian de Palma retrospective screening. De Palma directed the original Carrie adaptation in 1976 that Sissy Spacek starred in. There are also some great visual homages to that film with de Palma’s signature split-diopters.

Carrie also has The Shine, the term for telekinetic in many of Stephen King’s books. Kate Siegel’s character Adelaide even mentions the term. There are groups of people with The Shine working together to find Carrie and other people looking to take those groups down. 

Finally, the Carrie slate at the beginning of each episode slowly changes from white to blood red over the course of the season.

The first season of Carrie is streaming on Prime Video.