Riverdale Homaged Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa’s Remake of Carrie in Its Season 4 Opener

Before he launched Riverdale, executive producer Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa had a pretty solid history in the horror genre. In addition to adapting Stephen King stories to comics form for Marvel and launching both Afterlife With Archie and The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina at Archie Comics, Aguirre-Sacasa wrote the 2013 remake of Carrie — a movie that turned out to be ahead of its time if only because it was a precursor to every movie ever based on a Stephen King book getting a remake or a sequel in the years that immediately followed. And that movie got a bit of a callback in “In Memoriam,” last night’s episode of Riverdale.

At the end of “In Memoriam,” we get a final montage of people responding to the death of Fred Andrews, including several characters who had not yet appeared in the episode. Buried in those tear-filled final moments, Betty steps away from Fred’s gravesite, where the whole town has joined Archie in his mourning, and goes to see her own father’s headstone, which has been broken from its base and stands vandalized with the phrase “The Black Hood burns in Hell.” Betty kneels before the grave and takes stock in the moment — even though her father killed a lot of people and tore her family apart, it’s clearly hard for her to see, and Lili Reinhart nails a sense of quiet sorrow.

The scene, as one Riverdale fan pointed out on Twitter (you can see it below) is a clear callback to the final scene in Aguirre-Sacasa’s Carrie, which Sue Snell, Carrie’s kinda-sorta-friend, kinda-sorta-antagonist, visits the young woman’s grave and finds it smeared with “Carrie White burns in Hell.”

With all eyes on last night’s heartbreaking season premiere, in which the town of Riverdale said goodbye to Fred Rogers and the cast formally bid farewell to Luke Perry, there has been little said so far about what is coming up this season on Riverdale. Teased with a piece of key art that offers sex, lies, and videotapes, we know that a local charter school will play a prominent role in the early part of the season — and between that and the very white-collar cult led by Edgar Evernever (Chad Michael Murray), don’t be surprised to see the north side/south side class struggles flare up again in a way that they haven’t in a while.

While Jughead deals with that, Betty and Cheryl will have troubles with the new principal, and Archie is trying to take a new football player under his wing, next week in “Fast Times at Riverdale High,” the season’s second episode and likely the first one where fans will get a real sense for the big bad of the season.

Riverdale airs Wednesday nights at 8 p.m. ET/PT, before episodes of Nancy Drew on The CW.