The fourth and final Stephen King-inspired Ice Nine Kills song we’re exploring this spooky season as Halloween looms in “Hell in the Hallways,” which closes out the band’s Every Trick in the Book (2015) album, inspired by King’s first novel, Carrie (1974). 

First things first: Carrie turned 50 just last year and I really, really wish more had changed in the half century between then and now. The novel still feels incredibly relevant and the cruelty, bullying, and ostracization King addresses in the book haven’t gone anywhere. The video for “Hell in the Hallways” captures this resonance with a present-day frame narrative that draws parallels between Carrie’s 1976 experiences and a 2016 narrative in which a young male student is bullied by his peers. While this frame narrative highlights how little has changed in the intervening decades, it also offers a more optimistic take on the all too familiar story, with a teacher confronting one of the bullies—rather than being a passive bystander who wishes later on that she had done more, like Rita Desjardins in King’s novel—with a conversation and narrative engagement that changes his behavior and (hopefully) the trajectory of that story moving forward. The final moments of the video offer another affirming reworking, as the teacher shuts her classroom door with telekinesis, with the name plate there reading “C. White,” raising the possibility of a Carrie story in which she isn’t relegated to the tragic fate of a doomed, sacrificial heroine, allowing us to consider who she might have become had she survived the trauma of her peers’ abuse and the horror of prom night. 

This alternate reality and Carrie’s survival indicate another thread that connects King’s Carrie and INK’s “Hell in the Hallways,” which is the understanding and empathy with which Carrie is presented in both. While she is responsible for overwhelming death and destruction, both of these narratives foreground Carrie’s humanity and suffering, refusing to present her as the “monster” that she becomes in the public eye in the aftermath of prom night, as evidenced by the White Commission transcripts in King’s novel. A repeated line from the chorus of “Hell in the Hallways” captures this sense of empathy, describing Carrie as “The girl that was lost / The girl no one saved, with blood on her face.” Carrie’s loneliness and isolation, as well as the failed responsibility of those who should have protected her, are front and center here. 

One of my very favorite subgenres of horror is “good for her” horror, in which a female character who has experienced abuse and trauma gets revenge through often violent actions, and Carrie White is pretty much the queen of “good for her” horror. Lots of people die, some of them in really horrific ways, but the catharsis of Carrie finally pushing back and standing up against those who have ridiculed and abused her is undeniable. When Carrie unleashes her destructive power at the prom in the “Hell in the Hallways” video, with editing and cinematography reminiscent of Brian de Palma’s classic 1976 film adaptation, there is retribution and release, frenetically coupled with joy and hysteria, as the lyrics demand that we “look who’s laughing now.” They have pushed Carrie too far and now, after a lifetime of abuse, she’s pushing back. Good for her. 

My favorite—and the most haunting—line of “Hell in the Hallways,” though, is “maybe now they’ll remember her name.” Carrie’s legacy is simultaneously horrifying and heartbreaking. Bullied by her peers and in many ways, a non-entity to the adults who should be looking out for her (like the assistant principal Mr. Morton, who repeatedly calls Carrie “Cassie” in King’s novel), no one really knows who Carrie is or what she is capable of until she is pushed to her breaking point. While Carrie is the one who committed the prom night massacre, there is plenty of responsibility—or at the very least, complicity—to go around and which ought to be shouldered by those who didn’t pay attention or looked the other way, the ones who failed to support or protect Carrie. Ignored and misunderstood, in this act of violence, Carrie makes sure that they will have to notice, fear, and remember her now.