Betty Buckley Asked “Carrie” Director to Keep Her Character Alive: ‘She Didn’t Die in the Book’ (Exclusive)

Stephen King’s novel was released 50 years ago on April 5 and adapted into a movie two years later

Happy Birthday, Carrie!

Stephen King’s debut novel, which was first released 50 years ago on April 5, tells the chilling story of a telekinetic teenager, Carrie White, who’s an outcast at school and bullied by her peers. She exacts her deadly revenge at the high school prom during the book’s terrifying climax.

When the novel was adapted into the classic, Oscar-nominated horror movie two years later in 1976 with Sissy Spacek in the lead role, several elements of the story changed, including Carrie’s physical appearance, the manner of her mother’s death and the fate of the gym teacher who shows compassion toward the titular character.

In the book, the gym teacher was named Rita Desjardin, but called Miss Collins in the movie. Future Broadway and Eight Is Enough star Betty Buckley played Miss Collins on screen. She also petitioned director Brian De Palma to let her character live!

“I kept saying to him, ‘She shouldn't die. She didn't die in the book,’” Buckley, 76, tells PEOPLE. “And I'm like, ‘Seriously, Brian, don't kill Miss Collins off. Let her go to the end.’”

Related: Stephen King Surprised Mom with 'Carrie' Book Advance So She Could Quit Job as She Fought Cancer

Unlike in the novel, which saw the gym teacher survive, Miss Collins becomes one of Carrie’s victims at the prom after Carrie is doused in a bucket of pig’s blood in a humiliating prank pulled by her chief tormenter Chris (Nancy Allen).

Furious and embarrassed, Carrie locks the doors of the school, trapping everyone inside while an electrical fire breaks out.

As chaos ensues, Miss Collins is crushed to death by a falling basketball backboard. “That was my first death scene. It was pretty classic,” says Buckley, who felt uneasy about filming it after seeing a stunt coordinator working on the movie get seriously injured.

The coordinator was doing another scene in which he was thrown in the air as one of Carrie's classmates who gets killed. “There was a mattress for him to land on, and they miscalculated the distance and he hit the ground and hurt himself badly,” recalls Buckley.

“So we all witnessed that and we’re like, ‘What? Are we in safe hands?” adds Buckley, who became nervous that she’d be injured, too.

Related: 18 Actors You Totally Forgot Starred in Horror Movies

Buckley’s character is pinned against a wall when the basketball backboard falls. The pendulum-like apparatus was on ropes, and Buckley says there was a piece of balsa wood that was supposed to prevent any injury to her: “That was the safety mechanism.”

“Oh, this'll work,” Buckley says she was told, but she was not entirely sure: “The terror you see from Miss Collins when that happened was absolutely real.”

Despite that, Buckley, who starred alongside Spacek, Allen, John Travolta, Amy Irving and William Katt in the film, loved making Carrie.

“We all had so much fun, and there were seven of us making our film debut, including John Travolta,” she says. “And the group of us were just so excited to be doing it. Sissy Spacek had done some films, and so she was a veteran, all chill and everything. And the rest of us were like, ‘Oh, Hollywood, we're so excited to be here!’”

Carrie is available to stream on Max.

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