Stephen King’s 1974 novel, “Carrie,” has been a paperback best seller, an Oscar-nominated film, a Broadway flop, a network TV movie and a big-screen remake. Now, a month before the 50th anniversary of Brian De Palma’s 1976 film, comes the first series-length version, adapted and overseen by Mike Flanagan (“The Haunting of Hill House,” “Midnight Mass”) with King as an executive producer.
Flanagan, who updated the setting to contemporary times, has said that he is rebuilding the story rather than retelling it. And indeed some elements of his adaptation are new: Much has changed about teenage life since the 1970s, not least the advent of the internet and smartphones, which have added terrifying new dimensions to the eternal plagues of high school bullying and parental paranoia.
The full eight-part series arrives on Wednesday, on Amazon Prime Video, starring Summer H. Howell as the titular telekinetic teenager and Samantha Sloyan as her overprotective mother. Here’s what to know before watching.
The book Stephen King once gave up on
Stephen King was in his mid-20s, teaching high school English in Maine and living in a trailer, when he started writing “Carrie” in 1972. In “On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft,” he says that he grew frustrated and threw the opening pages in the trash, but his wife, Tabitha, fished them out and encouraged him to continue. “Carrie” became his debut novel, and when the paperback rights went for $400,000, King quit teaching. His inspiration for the story included two lonely girls he knew, a magazine article on telekinesis and a summer job cleaning a girls’ locker room.
Carrie’s story, as told in the book
The novel is set in Chamberlain, Maine, in the spring of 1979. Carrie White, the outcast of Ewen High School with an intensely religious and controlling mother, gets her first period in the gym showers and, not knowing what’s happening, panics; her classmates pelt her with tampons while jeering. The gym teacher, Miss Desjardin, punishes the class. One girl, Sue Snell, feels guilty and asks her boyfriend, Tommy Ross, to take Carrie to the prom in her place. Another, Chris Hargensen, is furious enough to plot revenge with her boyfriend, Billy Nolan, and two buckets of pig’s blood.
The buckets empty on Carrie just as she and Tommy are crowned queen and king, and one bucket knocks Tommy unconscious. Their classmates burst out laughing. Using her telekinetic powers, Carrie traps them inside and kills nearly all of them, then walks through Chamberlain, opening gas mains and downing power lines, leaving hundreds dead. At home, Margaret stabs her, so Carrie stops her mother’s heart. Even more carnage follows.
Telekinesis, according to King
The novel opens with a 1966 news item about a shower of stones falling on the Whites’ house; inside, Margaret had been punishing Carrie, then a young girl, for talking to a sunbathing neighbor. Carrie’s power goes dormant, then returns with a vengeance during puberty.
The book treats telekinesis as a medical condition. Scientists in the book’s documents argue that it is genetic and probably recessive. They warn that Carrie will not be the last of her kind.
The other Carries
Arguably the most indelible pop culture images of Carrie — drenched in blood, eyes wide with dissociative fury — come from De Palma’s film, a major box-office success starring Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie, both of whom were nominated for Oscars. In 1988, a Broadway musical starring Betty Buckley as Margaret met with less success, closing after five performances. (A 2012 Off Broadway version did much better.)
A 1999 film, “The Rage: Carrie 2,” directed by Katt Shea, was centered on Carrie’s half sister, Rachel, and it brought back Amy Irving from the De Palma film as Sue. A 2002 made-for-TV movie on NBC, starring Angela Bettis and Patricia Clarkson, was intended to be a pilot for a series that wasn’t made; unlike the novel, it let Carrie live. More recently, Kimberly Peirce’s 2013 feature-length remake, starring Chloë Grace Moretz and Julianne Moore, moved the shower scene into the age of cellphone video.
Flanagan and King
Flanagan is a longtime King adapter. He made “Gerald’s Game” into a 2017 Netflix movie. In 2019 he adapted “Doctor Sleep,” King’s sequel to “The Shining,” which preserves many of the details of the 1980 Stanley Kubrick film (which King has said he never liked). His movie “The Life of Chuck,” based on a King short story and starring Tom Hiddleston, won the People’s Choice Award at the Toronto film festival in 2024.
For “Carrie,” Flanagan worked with several frequent collaborators, including Sloyan, who played the scripture-quoting Bev Keane in his Netflix series “Midnight Mass.”
What King thinks of the series
The “Carrie” series is not a sequel, so there is no background reading or watching required. (But the novel is a quick read!) Flanagan draws much from the book’s various mock-archival chapters — fake news clippings, police transcripts and such — which the movies have mostly ignored.
King’s opinion? He described this adaptation as “brilliant” on Threads, adding, “What it has to say about social media is shocking and true.”
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