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Susan D. Snell is a fictional character created by American author Stephen King in his first published 1974 horror fiction novel, Carrie.
This character is portrayed as a popular teenage girl who torments Carrie White in the locker room but then begins to feel remorse for her actions. In the novel, she asks her boyfriend to take Carrie to the prom in an attempt to make Carrie feel accepted and to ease her own conscience. In this, she has been described as the "Fairy godmother" in King's "dark modernization of Cinderella". The disaster that takes place at the high school prom is set in place when Tommy accepts.
The character of Sue also appears in the 1999 film sequel, , played by Amy Irving reprising her role from the 1976 film version of King's novel.
Staying home on prom night, she begins to doubt her own motives: worry about her late menstrual cycle – she both fears and hopes she is pregnancy – and the possibility of Tommy falling for Carrie. When the town whistle begins blowing, Sue looks out her window, sees the fire at the school and rushes to her mother's car. Speeding towards the school, Sue is horrified when the school explodes. She slams on the brakes, and the car screeches to a stop, throwing her against the steering wheel. She gets out of the car, and is knocked down by the explosion of a gas station nearby. She later flags down a deputy sheriff, who interrogates her. The deputy later recalls Sue stating "They've hurt Carrie for the last time", indicating that she had no part in what happened.
Three hours later, Sue finds Carrie lying by a wrecked car driven by Billy Nolan and Chris Hargensen, near death from being stabbed by her mother Margaret. Sue and Carrie have a brief telepathy conversation as Carrie uses her telepathy to communicate with Sue, in which she convinces Carrie she had no part in Chris's plan. Carrie cries out for her mother and dies, every detail of her death witnessed by a horrified Sue, who later identifies Carrie's body for the official records. As Sue flees the scene, her period begins, insinuating that the trauma of the night has caused her to miscarriage and that she is not pregnant.
Sue is soon targeted by a blue-ribbon panel investigating the "Black Prom" as a partial instigator of the setup to humiliate Carrie at the prom. Sue accuses the commission of wanting a scapegoat, admitting that she only wanted to help Carrie have a normal life and that schools should do more to prevent bullying. In 1986, she publishes a book, My Name is Susan Snell, which details the events of the prom from her perspective, reminding readers that "we were kids" and apt to make faulty choices even while trying to do right.
Sue helps lead Carrie's locker room humiliation; she even opens a counter where pads and tampons are stored and starts throwing them at Carrie while starting the chant of "Plug it up! Plug it up!" However, feeling guilty about it, she eventually asks her boyfriend, Tommy Ross (William Katt), to take Carrie to the prom. Unlike the novel, Sue doesn’t seem to feel worried over the possibilities of Tommy falling in love with Carrie. She instead heads over to the school and sneaks into the prom to check on them, and is happy to see Carrie smiling and being elected prom queen. Sue then notices the cord running along the stage, leading up to the bucket of pig blood above Carrie. When Sue investigates the inside of the stage, she catches Chris briefly, but is forced out of the auditorium by Miss Collins (Betty Buckley) (who erroneously believes her to be interrupting the ceremony out of jealousy and does not listen to her protestations), seconds before the cord is pulled and Carrie is splattered with the blood. Before Sue can get back in, Carrie mentally closes all of the gym doors, locking Sue out while the chaos begins inside, with her presumedly escaping the building before it burned down.
Following the death of all of her classmates, Sue is seen in her bedroom some time later after seeming to have had some sort of mental breakdown. Her mother did not let her attend any of the funerals and is seen talking to a friend about the aftermath, saying the family will leave town to avoid the media circus. Sue has a dream in which she lays flowers on the burnt lot of Carrie's house, only to have Carrie suddenly reach her bloody arm through the rubble to grab Sue. She wakes up in hysterics and is quickly comforted by her mother Eleanor (Priscilla Pointer, who is also Irving's mother in real life).
Sue visits the mental institution housing Rachel's mother, Barbara. Knowing that telekinesis is a trait passed on through the father, she tries to find out the identity of Rachel's father. Barbara reveals that Rachel's father was Ralph White – Carrie's father.
Sue tries to first get Rachel to admit to her abilities before trying to help her in an attempt to prevent another meltdown, even bringing Rachel to the site of the original high school that Carrie destroyed in the first film. This only distresses Rachel further, even more so when Sue tells her that she is Carrie's half-sister.
Desperate to prevent a repeat of Carrie's experience, Sue sneaks Barbara out of the asylum. Sue rushes to an after-game party at Mark Bing's mansion, but Rachel has already been humiliated and is in a rage. She closes off the mansion doors and launches a fire poker at a boy, unaware that Sue and Barbara are trying to get inside. The poker tears through the front door and through Sue's head, killing her.
One critic wrote that the audience had a "considerable amount invested" in Snell by this point in the film and although her sudden death was "certainly powerful in terms of shock effect", it "also makes the rest of the film seem incomplete".
Sue feels sorry about how she treated Carrie, especially after learning that Chris and her top henchwoman, Tina Blake, vandalized Carrie's locker and filled it with tampons. She asked her boyfriend, Tommy Ross, to take Carrie to the prom instead of her. Once Carrie accepts, Sue helps her get ready for the prom, something she did not do in any other portrayal. She assists Carrie with her make-up, helping her choose a good shade of lipstick.
Following the destruction at the prom and the death of Carrie's religious fanatic mother Margaret, Sue eventually finds Carrie, unconscious in a bathtub full of bloody water. Sue pulls her out and successfully revives her; Carrie telepathically links with Sue's mind and Sue sees Carrie's entire life (in the book, Carrie sees Sue's entire life, proving her innocence and a little later Carrie later shows Sue her entire life, too). Sue is interrogated by the police, and claims to have found Carrie dead and left her. In truth, she hid Carrie in the ruins of the school until things calmed down. The police initially suspect that Sue was somehow in on Chris and Billy's scheme to humiliate Carrie, but are convinced of her innocence when Jackie Talbot reveals Sue had no knowledge of it. Later, Sue drives Carrie to Florida to help her start a new life.
In an alternate ending, Sue is seen in the hospital giving birth, when suddenly a bloody hand comes out of the birth canal and grabs her. Sue then wakes up screaming in her mother's arms, still visibly pregnant.
In a reading in November 2009, Sue was played by Tony nominee Jennifer Damiano.
In the 2012 Off-Broadway revival at the Lucille Lortel Theater, Sue was played by Christy Altomare. In this adaption, Sue is telling the story of the night of May 28 while she is interrogated from the beginning to the end of the show.
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