Carrie exclusive first look: How Mike Flanagan gives the Stephen King classic a modern TV twist

An obvious question comes to mind when talking about the upcoming Carrie TV series: How does one turn Stephen King’s 1974 debut novel, one of the literary icon’s shortest books, into an eight-episode drama? 

“That’s the big question,” showrunner Mike Flanagan acknowledges in an interview with Entertainment Weekly. “Well, the big question’s always, Why? Typically, when you’re adapting a Stephen King book, the mission is completely different. It’s about, How do you make it smaller? ... This was the complete inverse. If we’re going to tell the story of Carrie White in longform, how do we make it expand?”

The main events surrounding a bullied girl unleashing dormant telekinetic powers on her classmates during one blood-soaked prom prank historically fits more comfortably into a feature film format. Director Brian De Palma cemented our cultural awareness of Carrie with his 1976 classic, starring Sissy Spacek as the repressed Carrie White and Piper Laurie as her religious fanatic mother, Margaret.

This was followed by a B-movie horror sequel (1999’s The Rage: Carrie 2), an NBC made-for-TV affair (2002), and the most recent Chloë Grace Moretz-fronted interpretation (2013). 

“De Palma adapted it faithfully and beautifully 50 years ago,” says Flanagan, a frequent adapter of King’s works between Gerald’s Game (2017), Doctor Sleep (2019), The Life of Chuck (2024), and now The Mist (upcoming). “Then it’s been adapted twice after that, officially and unofficially. It’s been imitated scores of times. So for me, this was never going to be a straight adaptation. The only way to approach it was to build something new out of the ingredients of Carrie. Otherwise, there’s really no purpose in trying to retread ground that’s been so beautifully walked before.” 

Carrie faces present-day high school

Alison Thornton as Chris Hargensen and Siena Agudong as Sue Snell on ‘Carrie’.

Robert Falconer/Prime

When Flanagan struck a splashy television deal with Amazon, after a years-long stint at Netflix, those who gleefully follow his horror work were expecting him to launch into The Dark Tower, a TV passion project he spoke of repeatedly over the years. That, however, became “one of the most complicated properties to get started,” he says. “Getting the green light on Dark Tower is a much longer and more involved process than anything else I’ve ever approached in my life.”

By contrast, Carrie (premiering this fall on Prime Video) was something Amazon brought to Flanagan to launch their partnership. And with a new take that excited even King — an executive producer on the series — the showrunner assembled the “Flana-fam,” the nickname for his club of frequent collaborators, to bring the horror author’s it girl back to screens.

“The themes that Steve was talking about half a century ago of kindness versus cruelty, of empathy and bullying, and violence at school have become even more relevant today than he could have contemplated because of our relationship to technology and the degree to which violence encroaches on our high schoolers, especially in the United States,” Flanagan says. “So that meant we had an opportunity to tell a story about a modern teenage experience that could use the seeds of these characters King created 50 years ago, but express them completely differently.”

With a present-day setting, Summer H. Howell is our new Carrie White. She’s spent her life hidden away at home with her mother, Margaret (Flana-fam regular Samantha Sloyan). Not even the state knew the two existed until the sudden death of Carrie’s father, Ralph, forces a spotlight onto their household and prompts the teenager to enter public school for the very first time.

Flanagan’s fresh vision for these iconic characters couldn’t be more different than previous depictions. He describes Spacek’s performance as “a clenched fist who’s absolutely shaking out there in the world.” Meanwhile, the character that Howell plays is “wide open,” “eager,” “curious,” and “earnest,” he explains. “[She’s] walking into the forest of her teenagehood without any sense of danger and with an innate trust in people and in goodness.”

Summer H. Howell as Carrie White and Samantha Sloyan as Margaret White on ‘Carrie’.

Liane Hentscher/Prime

The team saw more than a thousand actresses for the titular role. Flanagan calls it one of the biggest casting searches of his career. Many candidates were, understandably, tempted to emulate Spacek’s performance, though that’s something the team was quietly trying to avoid. Coincidentally, “Summer looks a lot like Spacek looked at the time,” Flanagan mentions, but the rising star, who’s been acting in horror since 2013’s Curse of Chucky, brought a take that was entirely her own.

“Her performance was too good that we were willing to live with the physical similarities as a result,” he says.

As for Margaret, Flanagan wrote the role specifically for Sloyan, calling it “the part she was born to play.”

The mother, as originally rendered in King’s novel and the De Palma film, is an abuser, tyrannical in her parenting. She’s a figure who shares some common DNA with Bev Keane, Sloyan’s corrupt character from Flanagan’s Midnight Mass. Similar to Carrie herself, everyone wanted to take a different approach.

“Our Margaret White is a woman who fiercely loves her daughter and wants to protect her from this world and the dangers that Margaret’s aware of that Carrie is not,” Flanagan explains. “[She] doesn’t know how to do that and thinks the way to protect her is to close her off; not punitively, but to create this private utopia and to let her daughter exist earnestly and curiously and wide open by protecting her from the world. It’s a completely different dynamic.”

Blowing up Carrie’s world

Matthew Lillard as Principal Grayle on ‘Carrie’.

Robert Falconer/Prime

To steal a phrase from the Spider-Verse, the serialized Carrie drama will still maintain the core “canon events” of the original story, including familiar characters.

There’s Chris Hargensen (Alison Thornton), Carrie’s chief tormentor at public school — the one who famously pours pig’s blood on the girl at prom. There’s also Sue Snell (Siena Agudong), the teen who takes pity on the bullied teen; Tommy Ross (Joel Oulette), Sue’s charming jock boyfriend; Billy (Arthur Conti), the town bad boy; Miss Desjardin (Amber Midthunder), the girls’ gym teacher; and Principal Grayle (Matthew Lillard).

Josie Tota (The Buccaneers) appears as another student, Tina, while Thalia Dudek (The Running Man) plays a new character named Emaline.

Summer H. Howell as Carrie White on ‘Carrie’.

Prime

As for other book staples, we’ll still get moments like the period scene in the high school bathroom that sets off a wave of bullying. And, of course, there’s the prom. “We’re getting there a completely different way and the events of that prom are going to be completely different,” Flanagan prefaces. “That’s a wonderfully delicious and irresistible opportunity for someone who loves adapting things.”

In keeping with the idea of expansion, Flanagan’s story further builds out the mythology of Carrie, using the novel’s often underused moments as launching pads. The previous adaptations hone in on just the main events leading up to and during the prom, but there are various chapters in the source material that zoom out to highlight panicked 911 calls, police reports, courtroom testimonies, and scientific investigations that attempt to explain the Carrie White phenomenon.

“Stephen King also talks about the ‘TK gene’ [for telekinesis] and the science behind Carrie’s abilities,” Flanagan says. “Something that the De Palma adaptation ignored was Carrie’s place in the larger universe, that she’s part of a sorority of very gifted women and just doesn’t know it. The book absolutely points at that, but that was something we could pick up and run with.”

Siena Agudong as Sue Snell, Josie Totah as Tina, Alison Thornton as Chris Hargensen on ‘Carrie’.

Prime

Beginning with episode 2, each installment of the season will, according to the showrunner, open with “a different, unique story of a different woman, somewhere else in the world and in time, coming to terms with their own abilities.” He notes, “Carrie’s specific place among that group of women is part of the real joy that we get to discover over the course of the season.”

Flanagan admits it was an intimidating experience bringing this dramatically different approach for Carrie to King in the first place. Anyone who knows the modern maven of horror understands how much of a self-described “King fanatic” he is.

“One of the things I’m the most sensitive to is when people change things,” he says broadly of adaptations. “This would require an enormous amount of change and invention and re-contextualization, but that’s kind of why I wanted to do it.”