WHEN MIKE FLANAGAN was first presented with the possibility of adapting Stephen King’s Carrie into a new series, he had a quick answer: “Nah.” “Why?” he recalls asking, “I didn’t see the need.” Like everyone else, Flanagan is a colossal fan of the 1976 Brian De Palma-directed take on King’s iconic debut novel. Why would anyone want to go up against something as foundational as that? But as time went by, he kept coming back to the idea.
He thought about his oldest son, who was about to start high school, and how different that experience would be from the one he had in the ’90s, and the one that existed in the ’70s, when King’s Carrie novel was first released. He was thinking about a story out of Albany, California, where a bullying Instagram account created by a high school student essentially destroyed an entire community. And he was also also thinking about a 2018 case that involved revelations that 13 children had been imprisoned and tortured by their parents in the family home for essentially their entire lives.
As he thought about Carrie, these three things kept circling his mind—and eventually revealed to him a way to bring this story into modern times. The horrors of King and De Palma’s takes on Carrie are evergreen and universal, but people today have a litany of new ones to deal with, too. His Netflix series The Haunting of Hill House and The Fall of the House of Usher were based on the works of Shirley Jackson and Edgar Allan Poe, respectively.
Flanagan took the bones of those stories and applied them to modern characters and their struggles. It’s a style of adaptation that may frustrate the purists, but always helps to create something new for viewers. And so I love when I see an event in the real world that makes me think of something that was written 100 years ago.” The story of Flanagan’s Carrie is broadly the same—with some twists mixed in: Carrie White (Summer H.
Howell) goes to public school for the first time after her conspiracy theorist father dies in a construction accident, and it’s discovered that he’s been keeping Carrie and her mother, the devoutly religious Margaret (Samantha Sloyan, a Flanagan regular), locked up in their home. At school, Carrie runs into the characters everyone knows if they’ve ever taken in any version of this story: the kind(ish) Sue Snell (Siena Agudong), the bully Chris Hargensen (Alison Thornton), popular jock Tommy Ross (Joel Oulette), and the troublemaking POS Billy Nolan (Arthur Conti). Flanagan’s new version also fleshes out some of the adult characters, including gym teacher Ms.
Desjardin (Amber Midthunder) and school principal Mr. Grayle (Matthew Lillard). In expanding to eight episodes ranging between 45 minutes and an hour, the show also allows for deeper dives into characters who previously were only seen briefly.
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