The Rage: Carrie 2 was not a box office success, but it wasn't the disaster a lot of people remember either. Finishing at #91 for the year, just ahead of Go and (somehow) just behind the Melissa Joan Hart/Adrian Grenier vehicle Drive Me Crazy, The Rage: Carrie 2 opened in late March at an impressive #2 behind the 1999 comedy hit Analyze This.
But it didn't quite make back its budget, and it as since largely been forgotten about.
Which is a shame, because it has a lot to offer. While the film was initially called The Curse and had nothing to do with 1976's Carrie, the similarities led the studio to call for a retooling that set the production back a couple years. And actor Amy Irving, who played Sue Snell in the original, was called in to reprise the role. A last-minute change of director (Poison Ivy director Katt Shea) further impacted the production.
But both the fact that The Rage: Carrie 2 finally hit cinemas just a few weeks before Columbine, and its use of a real-life true crime story (the notorious Spur Posse) has led to a lot of revision of its legacy in the quarter century since. As such, we invited horror fan and true crime guy Paul Haynes (collaborator on Michell McNamara's 2018 book I'll Be Gone In The Dark) to talk it out with us.