“A Story About The Choices We Make Between Kindness And Cruelty." Mike Flanagan Revamps Carrie For the Social Media Age

Sympathetic without being patronising, the legendary horror director has adapted the classic tale of high school bullying turned supernatural with his Prime Video miniseries remake of Stephen King's classic.

A legend of the horror genre, Mike Flanagan knows Carrie has been done before. The writer and director of Absentia, Gerald’s Game, and Before I Wake – and the showrunner of television series like The Haunting of Hill House, The Midnight Club, and The Fall of the House of Usher, to name a mere few of his stacked filmography, is not only a veteran of horror, but a graduate of the School of Stephen King, too, having directed adaptations of his novels Gerald’s Game, Doctor Sleep, and The Life of Chuck. “My initial knee-jerk reaction was no,” he says. But then, he explains, “my oldest son was about to start high school.”

“It wouldn’t leave me alone,” Flanagan, the director of the Stephen King novel's adaptation into a television series, tells me. “I couldn't stop thinking about it.”

That makes sense. King's 1974 debut novel, Carrie, is among the most hallowed tales of high school in the horror canon, a bona fide classic that unites teenage dramas of bullies and prom with the sheer supernatural. How could Flanagan – a frequent collaborator of King's, and widely considered one of his generation's premier horror directors – not think of Carrie with his own child entering that space?

"I started thinking, maybe I'm asking the wrong question," Flanagan continues. "Maybe it's not why do Carrie again. Maybe it's: you don't do Carrie again, [you] do Carrie different."

"There's so much to talk about today with what it means to be a teenager in 2026… cruelty and bullying and school violence,” he explains. “There's so much more to talk about."

He grew "kind of excited" by the idea of Carrie as a television series, in what will be the story's fifth adaptation. The 1976 film of what is now a franchise, Brian de Palma’s Oscar-nominated Carrie, is considered one of the best horror films ever made, with a considerable cult following to boot. Yet 1999’s The Rage: Carrie 2 was a box office bomb, with the reviews to validate it. Three years later, Carrie got the television film treatment, which was somewhat dismissed; 2013’s Carrie was a star-studded affair featuring Chloe Grace Moretz and Julianne Moore, was received better by critics and audiences, and yet was not really anything of note. It’s always a considerable risk, recreating a classic. 

And King himself wasn't particularly keen at first. "I went to Stephen King and said, 'Well, we're talking about Carrie,' and he said, 'Why? It's been done,'" Flanagan recalls. "And I said, 'I know, I agree with you, but check this out.' [The team] laid out the whole season, and he said, 'Actually, this is really interesting, and this feels really new.' And he got excited about it, and then was like, 'Oh, we're doing this.'"

And this week, Carrie premieres on Prime Video as an eight-episode mini-series. Early reviews are right to commend Flanagan's seamless ability to reinterpret this tale of a bullied teenage girl who develops telekinetic powers for 2026. "It's remarkable that this is a story that's more than half a century old now," Flanagan says. "And its central themes are just as relevant today, if not more so, because we've only increased and improved the number of and the effectiveness of the tools over the years."

Cruelty, Flanagan says, has been normalised. "We've accepted it as something that's just the way it is. Not just in high school, but in our adult interactions, in our politics, it has reshaped the face of the planet in a few short decades in ways I don't think Stephen King could have ever fathomed 50 years ago."

Carrie, like many of King's works, explores themes of isolation, fear and growing up: often, the supernatural is secondary to the very human emotions and experiences he depicts. But was there anything in particular about Carrie that made Flanagan approach the material differently? "Carrie is traumatised, and terrified of the world from page one," he replies, thoughtfully. "And what I was excited about was to look at how this world today targets and deals with earnestness and kindness. Our Carrie, to that end, is completely different. She's open and curious and eager and earnest and kind and authentically who she is, and that's what the world wants to destroy."

To Flanagan, Carrie is "at its heart, a story about the choices we make between kindness and cruelty." I tell him that I find it difficult to read the novel, or watch the former films, without getting a lump in my throat. "It was important to me not to alienate people because of how kind of one-dimensionally cruel a lot of the behaviour in the book and previous adaptations are. What was exciting to me [was] to look at that cruelty with what we've come to know and understand about that behaviour in fifty years."

"The cyclical nature of it, the nuance of it, so that you're not seeing these monstrous people behaving monstrously to Carrie," he expands. "You're seeing human beings who are complex and whose environments and home lives are difficult, and you're seeing them try to find outlets for their fears and frustration, and that presented a terrific opportunity. This might make you lean forward, and this might make you say, 'Oh well, as much as I identify with Carrie, as much as I identify with someone who's being mistreated, I also, to my own discomfort, maybe identify with Margaret White (Carrie’s abusive, hyper-religious mother), maybe sympathise with Chris Hargensen (the beautiful and popular main tormentor of Carrie at school),' and recognise that we all have that capacity within us too."

Carrie is surrounded at high school by brutal, merciless bullies, both teenage boys and girls, but also by occasional acts of compassion from other characters. While we can all relate to the feeling of being an outsider – especially as teenagers – luckily, or perhaps hopefully, not many can relate to that degree of humiliation and, at the tale's climax, physical torment. Most of us will engage with the text with a sense of unease. Would I have joined in with the popular kids? Would I have found the inner strength to go against the grain and do what was right?

I ask Flanagan what he hopes this generation of teenagers will take from the miniseries. "Well, I'd like them to feel seen," he says, firmly. "That was something that was very important to us." So much so that Flanagan and his team got teenagers into the writing room as consultants.

What was that like? "Incredibly enlightening," he replies. "I had thought, you know, I was in high school. I was bullied. I understand. No, I don't. High school in the '90s, completely different world. And so I came away with a very profound sense of respect for the fortitude that young people are asked to have today."

What shocked Flanagan most about teenage lives today is "the propensity for how public their lives are." When you're a teenager, he explains, "you're trying on a lot of different versions of yourself to settle on who you really are… you're frequently tormented by others, you know, for all sorts of reasons."

But what differs between his experience of high school and that of teenagers today, he says, is that bullying "was relatively private. It was confined to the people who were in that room or in that school or people who heard about it. But all of them have an innate expectation that all of this can be lived very publicly in full view of the entirety of the internet and may follow them for the rest of their lives, and that all of it – the bullying, the insecurity, the mistakes they make – all of that follows them home."

We’ve been pretty spoiled for shows about the school experience today. Whether Prime’s own The Summer I Turned Pretty and Off-Campus, Netflix’s Outer Banks or even its harrowing Adolescence, Carrie establishes itself as understanding, but never condescending, within this crowded landscape.

What Flanagan wants the teenagers of today to take from Carrie "is that every one of them and every one of us come across not big moments, but small ones every day, where we have a choice to make between being kind or being unkind, and often these moments feel utterly inconsequential," he says. Flanagan may have a son starting high school, but for all of us, those memories – whether past or present – are only a television show away from entering our homes, too.