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.”
