The Stephen King novel and the classic film Carrie are among history’s most terrifying texts. But the threat of horror did not stop celebrities from coming to the musical’s opening night at the Lucille Lortel Theater.

Actress Edie Falco was prepared to see the musical after being familiar with the film, but didn’t know what to expect from the new production. “I saw the movie after it came out and I had been warned that it was very scary. But no one told me about the hand at the end!”

Falco also said she had a far more pleasant experience at the prom than Carrie.

“No correlations there. No blood.”

Charlotte D’Amboise, who played one of Carrie’s nemeses in the original run of the production in the 1980s, was excited to see the revival.

“I am interested to see how they conceive this production. I know it well,” D’Amboise said.

“I consider it [the film] to be one of the top horror films ever. I have a little girl at home and I told her I was going to see the play and she asked me to tell her what it was about. So I told her and then I said ‘And then she kills everybody at the end’. But if I had been Carrie I would have killed them all too,” she said with a laugh.

Molly Ranson, who plays Carrie White, has a different take on how she would have treated the bullies in her school.

“I just wanted them to look at themselves and see what they were doing to people,” Ranson said.

The actor Jay Armstrong Johnson had never seen the movie and was intrigued to see what the musical was going to be like. He was prom king at his small school.

“Oh my god. I would have gone apeshit! My prom was nothing like that,” Johnson said.

Marin Mazzie and her husband Jason Danieley, who both starred in the musical Next to Normal, had long discussions about Ms. Mazzie’s role as Margaret White, Carrie’s overbearing and highly religious mother.

“It isn’t so crazy to see [Ms. Mazzie] playing a mentally ill person after she recently played bipolar in Next to Normal. But it is a different kind of crazy because Margaret is a religious fanatic. She really researched religious fanatics for the role. And I think trying to rationalize that behavior is hard,” Mr. Danieley said.

Ms. Mazzie agreed, to a point but finds the two instances of mental illness are very different.

“[Margaret’s] fanaticism takes her mind to a place that’s unstable. I wouldn’t call her crazy.”

But even though Ms. Ransom wouldn’t have done what Carrie did to the bullies at her prom with her telicanetic powers, she would like a superpower of her own.

“I’d like to fly. Who wouldn’t want to fly?” she said with a smile.