How Do You Remake a Horror Classic? Ask Mike Flanagan

By David Fear

David Fear

It’s one of the most iconic horror-movie images of the past 50 years: Sissy Spacek in a blood-soaked prom dress, her eyes blazing with rage, getting ready to unleash telekinetic hell on a auditorium full of her high-school tormentors. Mention Carrie, the 1976 adaptation of the novel that kickstarted Stephen King‘s literary career, and it’s inevitably the first thing that pops into your mind. (That, or maybe the mother of all jump scares.)

The movie helped turn King into a household name, transformed Brian De Palma from a cult-film Hitchcock enthusiast into a Hollywood player, and made Spacek a star. It’s imitable, which meant it was destined to be endlessly imitated, parodied, referenced, belatedly (and poorly) sequelized, and given not one but two next-gen remake treatments. Writer, director, and world-class Stephen King fanatic Mike Flanagan would be the first to tell you that both the book and the movie are sacred texts.

Which is why, when Amazon approached the Doctor Sleep filmmaker with the idea of doing a limited series based on the story of a young woman who turns prom night into a blood bath, he said: Dear lord, no! Until he said, “Well, actually… .”

Carrie, his eight-episode take on the saga of Carrie White that hit the streaming service on October 7, retains more or less the same structure of its predecessors: A mousy, sheltered young woman with supernatural powers and serious mother issues is forced to endure the waking nightmare that is high school. There will be pig’s blood. And then there will be payback. Flanagan’s version updates those elements for the cyberbullying era — which means our 2026 Carrie, played by Summer H. Howell, must endure fake-Instagram accounts and salacious memes as part of her public humiliation. Her mom (Flanagan repertory player Samantha Sloyan) is now a righteous parents-right advocate as well as a holy roller. Remember the passing mentions of a historical psychic sorority in King’s novel? That’s now a subplot. “Steve’s story is driving toward a grave,” Flanagan says. “Our story is driving toward an open road into a bigger world.”

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The man behind this new iteration is aware that some purists may take issue with his tweaks and expansions on this canonical King work. But talking at length over Zoom a few days before Halloween, Flanagan walked us through why a new version of Carrie could withstand the tinkering, and how it felt like her story felt especially relevant right now. He also touched on working in the shadows of not one but two Masters of the Macabre with this project, why he feels horror is the most empathy-generating genre of them all, and the pressure of taking possession of a different legacy franchise (The Exorcist: Martyrs, his addition to the series, comes out next spring). The conversation has been edited for clarity and length. Expect spoilers, etc.

You’ve done a number of Stephen King adaptations. What brought you to Carrie? This one was different. This was brought to me when I started my time over at Amazon. It was something that was on their priority list, and they asked, “Hey, this is something we’re considering. Do you have any interest in it?” And my initial reaction was no. My initial reaction was kind of the same as everyone else’s, I think, which was: Why? Why do Carrie again?!

A great question. But the thing was, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. My oldest son at the time was about to start high school, and the anxiety of him kind of going into that jungle was weighing heavily on my mind. I was thinking a lot about the high school world that he was about to step into, and how different that high school was from my experience in the Nineties, and then how different that was from the high school Steve was writing about in the Seventies. My son would deal with — active shooter drills, cyberbullying, social media — that Stephen King and De Palma never could have ever contemplated.

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It wouldn’t leave me alone. I kept coming back to imagining a different version of Carrie White entering that environment, and the question started to change for me. It wasn’t “Why do Carrie again,” because I think the answer to that was: you don’t.

Instead, the question turned into: Is this an opportunity to do a very different Carrie that amplifies a lot of the themes that Steve was talking about? Things that I think are even more relevant, and have even sharper teeth today than they did half a century ago. It started to look like a different kind of adaptation for me. It looked like what I did with [The Haunting of] Hill House and The Fall the House of Usher, where it was about taking apart something beloved and established, then trying to use those pieces to build something new out of it. And then I started to get excited about it. I kind of came back to Amazon and said, “Actually, I’m seeing something that would be a pretty big swing ultimately, but I think could be really exciting.”

At which point you went to Stephen King and went, “So you know that book you wrote that made you famous? I think I’m going to do something different with it… .” I couldn’t imagine moving forward on it if Stephen wasn’t excited about it, so that conversation had to happen. His work is something I’ve always ferociously protected. I said “I think there’s something interesting here that that we can only get to through radical change — and if you don’t want to do that, then I will not do it.” But he was just as excited about it as I was.

What were the radical changes you felt you needed to make? You know, it’s still a story about cruelty. It’s still a story about violence at school. I think the radical change for me, though, is that Stephen King’s story was always a story of revenge. It was story of violence perpetrated by Carrie onto her tormentors. To me, it’s not even necessarily a horror story. This is a tragedy.

Steve’s Carrie is someone who is trembling and traumatized and clenched and so closed off to the world, and ours is the literal opposite. You know, our Carrie is open and curious and eager and kind. She just wants to be in the world. His Margaret White is this fanatical abuser who hates her daughter, and our Margaret White is a very misguided woman who loves her daughter so ferociously that that love threatens to crush her, but is all out of intense parental anxiety more than fear and hate.

So that’s where the more radical changes were. I think the messages of the story are unchanged to a point, and that’s what makes it Carrie. That’s why we didn’t have to change the title. But I think our destination was quite different. I think you know Steve’s story is driving toward a grave, and our story is driving toward an open road into a bigger world.

A world in which Carrie drives off into the sunset with the psychics from Brian De Palma’s The Fury. [Laughs] It’s a world that Steve hints at and points at in the book. It’s really interesting to me that I saw some discourse from people who kind of claim to be book purists who were upset about the other women who were who were included in the story, but that’s all from the book. The book actually ends with yet another with yet another telekinetic girl realizing she has her powers, and Steve talks about the telekinesis gene and its place throughout history in this larger sorority of women that Carrie hadn’t lived long enough to know she was a member of. We had this this awesome chance to kind of take something that’s in the book and actually run it up the field for the first time. Honestly, I think if this book had been published later in Steve’s career, he would have done it on his own.

That’s where a lot of his excitement came from. He also didn’t want to just do Carrie again. He loves the De Palma movie. So do I. That’s the great adaptation of his novel. But with the show, it was like, “Oh, this is great. We can explore the bigger world. We can explore these other women, and we can kind of do it through the eyes of a Carrie and a Margaret, who are new and unfamiliar.” So yeah, it’s a strange balance to strike of the things that have to stay the same and the things that will always be kind of true in any iteration of Carrie. Some things you don’t want to change. Some things we had to change.

The question becomes: How much can you change before you simply end up making something completely new? That’s the North-Star question. What should you not change? And that question is something you have to ask 100,000 times over the over the life of the project. One of the things that we always were very careful to ask was, what is Carrie about at its core? What are the things that we must protect? I had a benefit on this one I didn’t have with Hill House or with Usher, which is that I could ask the author. You know, in all those other cases, those authors were dead.

You didn’t hire a medium to consult Shirley Jackson? I don’t think Netflix would cover the interdimensional costs of that, no. [Laughs] We always kind of had him to let us know if we were if we were straying off of the path. I haven’t had that benefit before when we’ve had to kind of employ this much level of invention on something, and then you always have to try to step as far back from it as you can, and imagine how you’d react as a fan. That perspective has tended to be the more reliable compass for me. I am a fan. I have strong opinions about adaptations of things I love. I try to imagine what I would write in the comment section if I encountered this choice.

Don’t write in the comments sections, Mike. [Laugh] I understand that’s a radically imperfect way to approach it because you know any choice you make will inspire every version of the reaction. You’ll get it all. It’s about proportion. But it’s a question we never stop asking. It’s a question that there’s no easy answer to, and it only ever really kind of comes out in the wash when it’s over. And you step back and be like, “Did we did we do it?” I hope we did it.

In the New York Times piece with you and Stephen King, there’s a moment where you talked about being on set and having to remind yourself as you were filming that last episode, that: I am at the prom with Carrie White right now. Yeah, that was… [exhales]. Yeah.

How do you choreograph that sequence and do it in a way in which it’s not a complete De Palma reprise? You constantly have to keep it in mind, even if it’s keeping it in mind to avoid stepping into it. There were certain aesthetic techniques that I feel like are so forever tattooed on that sequence by De Palma, so it was easy to embrace certain rules: No split screen, No split-diopter shots. None of the frenetic editorial choices that he was making. Even stepping an inch in that direction is theft in its way.

So you have to know what is too sacred to emulate. Then the secondary thing is to step back and say, “Well, how do I approach this my way, that’ll make it its own unique interpretation of the sequence?” And for me, that became about perspective. The De Palma sequence is told from two principal perspectives: that of Carrie herself, and that of the editor. It’s about this incredible teleportation and simultaneous action, and kind of putting the viewer in Carrie’s perspective while fragmenting the rest of our perspectives around the room. And I was more interested in: Okay, let me sit with certain individuals and try to attack this from their perspectives, so that in the epistolary nature of the book, I never showed the prom sequence from start to finish. I show it from certain perspectives with certain starting points, limitations, and endpoints.

I felt like that was a fundamentally different engine than De Palma was deploying. It still meant that I have to keep an eye on his — and not just his, but everybody else’s too. I mean, there are three other prom sequences to look at; you don’t want to be stepping into any ground that has been thoroughly explored before. But you also want to know how people approached it, what was effective and and kind of areas where you might have felt more gravity toward the experience of it.

So it’s a very weird mix. We shotlisted that sequence for weeks, drawing it on a board, throwing away our shot list, starting over, trying different iterations of it. By the end of it, that shot list was substantially longer than the script, and that became kind of the mission. But it remains one of the most technically difficult experiences of my career was was mounting that scene, and it’s a scene I’m deeply proud of. I feel can stand alongside the other adaptations without necessarily drawing comparison into how we approached it. That was always my goal.

You expect that those tormenting Carrie will get their comeuppance and the students and teachers who were kind to her will be spared. That’s… not what happens in your version. I think that’s why we looked at it as a tragedy. I think tragedy doesn’t discriminate. It doesn’t select who it affects. And once that fuse is lit and it combusts… .

I’ve seen the people who are like, “Well, I would have been fine at the prom because I was nice to Carrie.” And it’s like by that point, that doesn’t matter. It’s an explosion, and like any natural disaster, it doesn’t kind of take into account who you are, how you behaved prior to that moment. Everyone’s in the same gymnasium, and I think the exceptions only come only later. She’s eventually horrified by what she’s done, and that was something I wanted to protect in this adaptation. Because there’s there’s a very dark wish fulfillment that Carrie can tip into if you’re not careful. This sense of yes, those children deserved to die — which is an impossible sentence to get behind in any context, and certainly not the story we wanted to tell. I’ve seen some of that in the aftermath of the show: “Well, Carrie deserved to kill those kids!” And the first person to disagree with that would be Carrie White.

I came across an interview where someone asked you if horror was something that you had aimed yourself towards in terms of a professional career, and you said, “No, I was the last to know that I was going to become a horror filmmaker.” Which, given you’ve mostly worked in horror, was a bit of a shock. My initial experiences with it were… I found it deeply unpleasant. I was scared of the genre in a profound way as a kid. I avoided it. I would watch scary things through my fingers. I would pretend to be sick if I was at a sleepover, and my friends were watching something scary, so I could go home. And it made me feel ashamed of myself. I felt cowardly. I was ashamed by my reaction to it. So I tried to combat that by embracing horror literature, and figuring that if I could read a scary story, it would be less scary somehow. Which it is not! Which is the exact opposite. And I began to realize over the years, starting with Stephen King books and then burning my way through genre filmmaking, that horror was making me braver in little increments, and that the bravery didn’t dissipate when the movie ended or when the book was over. I could carry it into real life. I could become a braver person by that exposure therapy. And the other thing it did was — and I think it does this to many fans — horror makes you incredibly empathetic. It forces you to kind of put yourself into these positions of incredible vulnerability and fear. Even in its kind of more intense and brutal expressions, the genre breeds empathy.

I started to think horror wasn’t just scary. I believed it was vital and crucial, and one of the reasons I think it is such an enduring and worthy genre is that it connects us on a level that that is universal. Our first emotion we all feel is fear. We spend our whole lives trying to defeat it in one way or another, or live with it, and I think the genre gives us those tools. That’s why people flock to it. And now I love it so much; I find it to be so beautiful. I have given my life to it, but I also feel like it gave me my life back in a lot of ways, and it’s made me a better person. It’s a wonderful and often misunderstood and horribly underestimated and overlooked genre.

And now you’re about to become the caretaker of another major horror-film franchise with your Exorcist movie, and unlike Carrie, I’m sure people will be totally chill about that and have no strong opinions whatsoever. [Laughs] It is nauseating and exciting. It’s a special kind of anxiety along with an incredibly surreal level of wish fulfillment at the same time. I felt it for the first time when I did Doctor Sleep, and then I said, “I’ll never put myself in that position again.” I felt it when we did Carrie, and I feel it with The Exorcist acutely. I keep doing it, so I don’t know what’s wrong with me.

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