Everything You Need to Know About Mike Flanagan’s CARRIE Series
Flanagan and his writing team are taking Carrie in a new direction for this miniseries. Carrie is one of King’s shortest books, so this new adaptation will expand on the source material. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Flanagan explained, “Typically, when you’re adapting a Stephen King book, the mission is completely different. It’s about, How do you make it smaller? […] This was the complete inverse. If we’re going to tell the story of Carrie White in longform, how do we make it expand?”
Carrie will also be modernized in this new adaptation, exploring how technology has changed the way teens socialize with each other, engage with each other, and (yes) bully each other.
“The themes that Steve was talking about half a century ago of kindness versus cruelty, of empathy and bullying, and violence at school have become even more relevant today than he could have contemplated because of our relationship to technology and the degree to which violence encroaches on our high schoolers, especially in the United States,” Flanagan said in his Entertainment Weekly interview.
The series will also expand on Carrie’s backstory. After the death of her father, Carrie is sent to public school for the first time in her life, which helps explain her position as an awkward outsider from the very start of the film. Carrie will be played by Summer Howell (Hunter Hunter, Night of the Reaper).
Samantha Sloyan, who worked with Flanagan in Hush, The Haunting of Hill House, The Midnight Club, and Fall of the House of Usher, plays Carrie’s controlling, hyper-religious mother, Margaret White. Among the rest of the cast are: Siena Agudong as popular girl Sue Snell, Joel Oulette as Sue’s boyfriend Tommy Ross, Amber Midthunder as gym teacher Rita Desjardin, Alison Thornton as school bully Chris Hargensen, and Arthur Conti as Chris’s boyfriend Billy Nolan. And yes, Matthew Lillard (the actor you know and love from Scream) is also in the series as high school principal Henry Grayle.
Fans of the Stephen King novel can expect the themes and many of the major plot points of Carrie to remain the same. However, the series will deviate from the source material in many ways. Expect surprises and a reimagining of the story you know and love.
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