Writer/director Mike Flanagan has long had a habit of working on projects for the big and small screen that, at a glance, seem like bad ideas, but he somehow manages to pull off a miracle and deliver something that satisfies audiences and proves the doubters wrong. He did it with his follow-up to the poorly received Ouija movie, but also in his Stephen King adaptations. Flanagan made one of the few novels by the horror master that was considered unfilmable with Gerald’s Game, and managed to outdo himself with the sequel to The Shining, Doctor Sleep, and again last year with The Life of Chuck. Suffice to say, he knows how to take what seems like a bad idea on paper and make it compelling.
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Flanagan is set to try this once again with his next TV series, the upcoming miniseries adaptation of Stephen King’s Carrie. Despite his track record of homerun after homerun on ideas that seem iffy at first, fans once again expressed some doubt and uncertainty about why Flanagan would try to adapt a story that has already been put onto film three times, with varying results. Speaking with the hosts of Flanagan’s Wake: A Mike Flanagan Podcast, the creator went into detail about how he came to Carrie as a project that he would even develop, and teased how his take on the material won’t be at all what audiences are expecting.
Mike Flanagan’s Carrie Will Modernize the Story in Unique Ways
As longtime King fans know, Carrie was King’s first novel, published in 1974, which was made into the Brian De Palma feature film just two years later. Despite the success of that film commercially and critically, Carrie has also become something that has been adapted multiple times, including the 2002 television movie and the 2013 feature film remake, all of which largely tell the same story. A young, sheltered girl has supernatural abilities unlocked by a horrifying event, set against the backdrop of high school bullying and a traumatic upbringing.
Flanagan began his tease of the new Carrie series, which has actress Summer H. Howell set to play the titular character, by addressing how the reaction that many had to learning he would be adapting King’s first novel was “the most understandable reaction” he’s ever had, and that he even had the same one. He went on to reveal that Carrie wasn’t a project he initially intended to develop, but it was brought to him by the team at Prime Video who asked it it was something he might have a take on. The writer/director took the idea to Stephen King himself, who apparently had the same reaction everyone else did to news of a new Carrie.
“My thing, especially with (King), I’m not interested in doing something he’s not interested in doing,” Flanagan teased. “But I kept chewing on it, and I kept playing out these kinds of increasingly radical variations of (Carrie). And there was something underneath it that struck me that had never actually been done with the story, and that the fundamentals of the story, which is a half-century old now, are more relevant today than they were when Steve wrote it. And what teenagers deal with when it comes to social media, when it comes to the true nature of bullying and its effect on modern teenage life and on modern adult life in society.”
He continued, “This image of Carrie White walking through a metal detector as she goes to her first day of high school, these things started to chew on me. At the end of the day, I stumbled upon a couple of real-world examples just in the past few years of situations at American high schools that are not at all a consideration of any of the original source material or any of the other adaptations.”
Flanagan went on to note that the hook for his upcoming adaptation of Carrie is modeled in the same way that he adapted Edgar Allan Poe with Netflix’s The Fall of the House of Usher, which remixed the ideas that were baked into the original stories and poems by making them distinctly modern but never shying away from the iconic imagery bound to them.
“What if we’re telling a very contemporary story using ingredients and characters that are familiar but are so played out that the only thing to do with them is reinvent them?” He added. “That got very exciting, and kind of to my own surprise, I came back to Steve and said, I’m actually kind of excited to show you something. And I know how we all feel about we don’t need another Carrie adaptation. What if it’s not that? What if it’s something new? So I typed out a long document that kind of outlined the season and, and I gave it to him and he came back and he said, I really, really love this. And so off we went.”
Flanagan further noted, “It’s faithful to the ideas that inspired Steve to create those characters at the time he did from the vantage point he had as a teacher and as an educator, and has put it very squarely in an undeniably contemporary world. And our Carrie White is not a character who’s ever appeared before in any of the other adaptations. She won’t be recognizable in that way, which is great.”
Prime Video has not officially confirmed when Carrie will release, but the series is expected to premiere on the streamer this year. The series will feature plenty of familiar faces from Flanagan’s other projects, with Samantha Sloyan playing Margaret White, plus Matthew Lillard, Kate Siegel, and Rahul Kohli set to appear as well.
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