“Carrie” is coming back.
A new adaptation of Stephen King’s novel is set to premiere next month on Prime Video. But those at the Toronto International Film Festival got a blood-curdling preview, when the first two episodes of the series, created by Mike Flanagan, were screened for audiences.
This isn’t the first time the novel has been adapted, of course. Brian De Palma’s brilliant 1976 movie was not only a watershed horror movie but helped catapult King to the mainstream. The original was given a long-in-the-tooth sequel in 1999 as “The Rage: Carrie 2,” and the novel was adapted as a standalone feature twice more – in 2002 as a TV movie written by future “Hannibal” creator Bryan Fuller and in 2013 as a theatrical feature by Kimberly Pierce. There was also an ill-fated Broadway musical that debuted in 1988 and was revived off-Broadway in 2012.
Flanagan told Jada Yuan at TheWrap’s TIFF studio that he too was unsure about yet another adaptation of King’s novel. (Flanagan had previously adapted King in the features “Gerald’s Game,” “Doctor Sleep” and “The Life of Chuck.”)
The director said that Amazon was keen on doing something with the property once they obtained the MGM library. “It was something they wanted to do very much,” Flanagan said.
When Flanagan moved his overall deal from Netflix to Amazon, it was the first project the streamer brought to Flanagan.
“My first reaction, I think, was the same as most everybody else, which was, why? It’s been done beautifully by De Palma, and then done again, and then done again. But the thing never really let me alone,” Flanagan said. “I went off to think about it.”
Flanagan’s oldest son was about to start high school and he was suffering from “a lot of parental anxiety about the experience he was going to have and the world he was walking into.” He thought to his adaptations of “The Haunting of Hill House” and “The Fall of the House of Usher,” where it wasn’t as much about a clean 1:1 translation “as much as thinking about how to take this apart and use those pieces to build something else.”
His hesitation turned into excitement.
“To my great surprise, I came back and said I actually I have a version of this and a way into this that I think I’m really in love with. I don’t know if it’s what Amazon would want to do, and I certainly don’t know if it’s something Stephen King would want to do,” Flanagan explained.
He first planned to show his pitch to King, “because if he’s not in favor of anything, I’m not going to proceed.” (Flanagan is also currently working on a feature adaptation of his short story “The Mist” and an ambitious television adaptation of King’s “Dark Tower” saga.)
King had the same reaction as Flanagan did to the property – why? – but the filmmaker pitched him anyway.
“I laid out a look at the whole season and he loved it. I actually think this feels really timely and really relevant, and we should do it … I’m really grateful because it turned out on the other end of it to be one of my all-time favorite projects,” Flanagan explained. “I never would have imagined that going into it, but it was certainly not something that was on my bucket list. I feel very lucky that that I fell into it.”
“Carrie” debuts on Prime Video on Oct. 7.
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