Flanagans Carrie Goes Viral

The first teaser for Mike Flanagan’s Carrie does not lead with blood. It leads with a girl trying to work out why she was chosen.

“All I ever wanted was to go to school. I never did anything to you,” Summer H. Howell’s Carrie White says in voiceover, addressing the classmates who turned her into a project. “You put in all this effort to make it look like you were my friend. So why? Why not just do that?” Then the line that actually does damage: “And the worst part is that I really could have been your friend.”

Prime Video debuted the footage at San Diego Comic-Con on July 25, and Flanagan closed the panel with a premiere date. All eight episodes arrive Wednesday, October 7, in more than 240 countries and territories, according to Amazon MGM Studios. New key art built around the prom came with it.

She Wanted In First

Leading on that voiceover is a choice worth noticing. Carrie has never really been about a monster arriving. It is about a disaster that a dozen ordinary people could have interrupted and did not. She wanted to be let in long before she wanted anyone dead, and every version of this story lives or dies on whether the audience feels that order of events.

Flanagan has moved the isolation somewhere new. Howell plays a girl who has spent her life inside her house with her mother, Margaret (Samantha Sloyan), and gets shoved into public school after her father dies with no warning. The official logline promises “a viral bullying scandal that tears through her community” plus “the relentless pressure and casual cruelty of the social-media age.” Humiliation in 1974 stayed in the locker room and the hallway. Humiliation now gets recorded, uploaded, screenshotted by people who were not in the building, and handed back to her every few months for the rest of high school. A teenager who has never been allowed to make a friend is not equipped for that. Neither is anyone else, but she has less practice than most.

The People Who Could Have Stopped It

Around Howell and Sloyan, the series regulars include Siena Agudong as Sue Snell, Alison Thornton as Chris Hargensen, Joel Oulette as Tommy Ross, Arthur Conti as Billy, Amber Midthunder as Miss Desjardin, Josie Totah as Tina, Thalia Dudek as Emaline, and Matthew Lillard as Principal Grayle. Flanagan writes, showruns, and executive produces, and he directs four of the eight episodes. Stephen King is also an executive producer on the Amazon MGM Studios production.

King published Carrie in 1974. It ran 14 weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list and has been translated into more than 35 languages, and Brian De Palma’s 1976 film turned Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie into Oscar nominees and the pig’s blood into shorthand. Screen versions kept coming: The Rage: Carrie 2 in 1999, an NBC television film with Angela Bettis in 2002, and Kimberly Peirce’s feature with Chloë Grace Moretz in 2013. This is the first time the novel has been built out as an episodic series, and it arrives on the 50th anniversary of De Palma’s film. That anniversary is not a gap in the market. It is the reason a new Carrie has to come with something to say.

The TK Gene Problem

What Flanagan appears to be saying involves the parts of the book earlier adaptations threw out. King’s novel is assembled from wreckage: testimony, reports, scientific speculation about what happened in Chamberlain. Flanagan told Entertainment Weekly that the series digs into “the ‘TK gene’ and the science behind Carrie’s abilities.” It also delves into “Carrie’s place in the larger universe, that she’s part of a sorority of very gifted women and just doesn’t know it.” Starting with the second episode, each installment reportedly opens with a different woman, somewhere else in the world and in another period, coming to terms with her own power.

Nobody official has called that a shared universe, and it should not be described as one. What it is, on paper, is an expansion of a telekinetic mythology King only gestured at. Eight hours leaves room for Margaret’s psychology, Carrie’s family history, Sue Snell’s guilt, and where these abilities come from, all of which two-hour features had to compress or cut. It also leaves room for a series to keep stepping away from Carrie to service lore. Which is the real risk here and worth watching for.

De-Monstering Margaret

Sloyan, on her eighth project with Flanagan, said at the panel that the extra runtime let her “de-monster” Margaret. “It’s her love that has kind of mutated into fear that creates the Margaret of this Carrie,” she said. Howell avoided the novel and every prior adaptation before she was cast. “We agreed that it was best that I make my own version of the character,” she said.

Flanagan is not being coy about where it all ends up. He called it the most complex scene he has ever filmed. “You think you know what happens at the prom,” he said. “No, you don’t.”

All eight episodes of Carrie premiere on Prime Video on October 7. The question the teaser raises, and the one the series has to answer, is whether this Carrie gets long enough to be a person before the world decides she is a weapon.