Featured image credit: Summer H. Howell in ‘Carrie.’ Robert Falconer/Prime via The Hollywood Reporter
I haven’t spent enough time on this website going long about how much I love Mike Flanagan’s Midnight Mass. But I love it. I think it’s perfect. You should go watch it right now. It’s on Netflix. If you don’t have Netflix… make a friend who does and watch it together.
I have not seen any other TV Mike Flanagan has done because I’m a scaredy-cat, and I do think The Haunting of Hill House, the Haunting of Bly Manor, and The Fall of the House of Usher will prevent me from ever sleeping again. (I know The Midnight Club isn’t scary, but it’s SAD, okay?) Why do I find these prohibitively scary but am able to watch the also-objectively-scary Midnight Mass multiple times a year? Well, for one thing, Midnight Mass is about ████████ and I love ████████. [Redacting for spoiler purposes… telling you that Midnight Mass involves ████████ is, in my opinion, the worst spoiler that could ever happen to you. Well, besides how, in Psycho, ██████████████████ is █████████████████████████████████████. And ████████████████████████.
Anyway, now Mike Flanagan is taking on Carrie. He is adapting Stephen King’s 1974 novel Carrie into an eight-episode mini-series, which will be available to stream on Amazon Prime. Note: the series will be set in the present-day, not the 1970s.
Flanagan knows his Stephen King. He adapted The Life of Chuck into a feature film, last year, and in 2019, adapted King’s 2013 sequel to his 1977 novel The Shining into a film. And not just any film… a film that King, who famously does not like many adaptations of his work, adored. He said that Flanagan’s film “redeems” Stanley Kubrick’s 1978 adaptation of The Shining. Which is extraordinary, because he really, really hates that one.
So, Flanagan knows what to do with Stephen King. And he wrote and directed the best TV limited series of all time, Midnight Mass, which, again, is about ███████████. So, if he’s taking on Carrie… I think there’s a really good chance that it’ll be great.
For a while, there was only one Carrie: Brian de Palma’s 1976 film starring Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie. Two decades later, in 1999, a sequel, called The Rage: Carrie 2 appeared. That’s about Carrie’s also-telekinetic younger sister, played by Emily Bergl, who similarly overcome by a vengeful rage while attending high school.
In 2002, there was another adaptation of the novel—this one written by Bryan Fuller and directed by David Carson. And in 2013 Kimberly Peirce adapted the novel into a movie with Chloë Grace Moretz and Julianne Moore.
This eight-part miniseries stars Summer H. Howell as Carrie and the most terrifying redhead working today, Samantha Sloyan, as her weirdly religious mother. (I’m freaking out at how good Sloyan’s casting is.) It also features Matthew Lillard, which is always fun.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, the series will “[expand] on King’s original story about a high school girl with telekinetic powers by ‘deepening its characters and tensions’ and chronicling a ‘deeply human story about kindness versus cruelty, and whether we’re witnessing the making of a hero, a monster, or something far more complicated.’” It will be released on October 2026.
Well, it doesn’t have ███████████, but I’m still into it!
