Carrie is a story very much associated with the 1970s. Stephen King’s debut novel was published in 1974, and Brian De Palma’s 1976 film is one of the decade’s defining horror classics. But that hasn’t stopped multiple filmmakers from tackling the story in the years since—and Mike Flanagan, whose series adaptation hits Prime Video this fall, is very aware of Carrie‘s legacy and potential for redundancy.
Suffice to say, he’s respectful of the former and feels confident that he’s avoided the latter. At the show’s San Diego Comic-Con panel—featuring several castmembers, a first teaser, and a number of first-look clips shared with the audience—Flanagan explained how his eight-episode adaptation takes the story in a fresh (but still deeply disturbing, of course) direction.
“I think bullying has changed a lot in the 50 years since this novel was written … I think our understanding of the cycles that create that kind of behavior has also evolved quite a bit. I do think though that bullying can take many, many forms. And we were very careful,” Flanagan said. “We brought several high school students into the writer’s room to ask if they could share their experiences and the things that they dealt with, either in these shocking one-off situations or just the constant kind of treatment and the microaggressions and the things that don’t necessarily immediately present themselves as the kind of targeted harassment that they really are.”
The internet, of course, has been a big part of how bullying has evolved, and that will be foregrounded in the new Carrie. As Flanagan explained, the internet has “encouraged that kind of cruelty, rewards it, celebrates it, amplifies it, and lets it hide behind the anonymity. This is awful for adults to deal with, much less teenagers.”
In keeping with that, the series’ version of Carrie, played by Summer H. Howell, is also different than the version horror fans are familiar with. “Carrie White as a character in every other incarnation of this story, you meet her, and she is trembling with trauma from the very first time you ever lay eyes on her,” Flanagan explained. “Our Carrie has lived her whole life sequestered in her house with her mother and her father, and has never stepped foot outside of that into our world. And so she comes into that, earnest and eager and curious and wide open, and through her eyes we get to look at kind of the things we have normalized in our high schools. We get to see what the modern experience is.”
That includes having to pass through a metal detector and participate in active shooter drills. But it also means having her personal struggles amplified by social media. “I made mistakes in high school, plenty of them, as I tried to figure out who I was. But those mistakes were private. They were kind of confined within the walls of my school,” Flanagan said. “My son is a high school freshman right now, and he lives in a world where that kind of torment and those kinds of mistakes are public and can be memorialized online forever. That’s an incredible, incredible change. That’s the world that we get to scrutinize through this innocent character’s eyes, and that turned out to be one of the big parts of the show.”
Another big part of the show is, obviously, the prom. But Flanagan insists that even if you think you know what happens with that moment, “you don’t.” He called the sequence “the most complex scene I have ever, ever filmed” as well as “a showstopper and one of my favorite sequences I’ve ever gotten to be a part of in my career in any capacity.”
The “you don’t know about the prom” vibe translates to the show as a whole, to hear Flanagan tell it. He explained that while he’s done faithful adaptations in his career, he’s also had plenty of experience doing more creative takes on existing works, like the Netflix series The Haunting of Hill House. Carrie, he said, is decidedly in that second category.
“It’s a thrilling way to adapt something, to take it apart into its essential pieces and use that to build something new. That is how we were approaching Carrie,” Flanagan teased. “That’s what got Stephen King very excited about this adaptation. I think a lot of people think they know what the show is. And the biggest thing I’m excited about today is just knowing what a big surprise our Carrie is going to be.”
We’ll get to go back to high school with Carrie White when Mike Flanagan’s Carrie hits Prime Video on October 7.
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