Carrie is a narrative very a lot related to the Nineteen Seventies. Stephen King’s debut novel was revealed in 1974, and Brian De Palma’s 1976 film is among the decade’s defining horror classics. But that hasn’t stopped a number of filmmakers from tackling the story within the years since—and Mike Flanagan, whose series adaptation hits Prime Video this fall, could be very conscious of Carrie‘s legacy and potential for redundancy.
Suffice to say, he’s respectful of the previous and feels assured that he’s prevented the latter. At the present’s San Diego Comic-Con panel—that includes a number of castmembers, a first teaser, and quite a lot of first-look clips shared with the viewers—Flanagan defined how his eight-episode adaptation takes the story in a recent (however nonetheless deeply disturbing, after all) route.
“I think bullying has changed a lot in the 50 years since this novel was written … I think our understanding of the cycles that create that kind of behavior has also evolved quite a bit. I do think though that bullying can take many, many forms. And we were very careful,” Flanagan mentioned. “We brought several high school students into the writer’s room to ask if they could share their experiences and the things that they dealt with, either in these shocking one-off situations or just the constant kind of treatment and the microaggressions and the things that don’t necessarily immediately present themselves as the kind of targeted harassment that they really are.”
The web, after all, has been an enormous a part of how bullying has advanced, and that can be foregrounded within the new Carrie. As Flanagan defined, the web has “encouraged that kind of cruelty, rewards it, celebrates it, amplifies it, and lets it hide behind the anonymity. This is awful for adults to deal with, much less teenagers.”
In holding with that, the sequence’ model of Carrie, performed by Summer H. Howell, can be totally different than the model horror followers are accustomed to. “Carrie White as a character in every other incarnation of this story, you meet her, and she is trembling with trauma from the very first time you ever lay eyes on her,” Flanagan defined. “Our Carrie has lived her whole life sequestered in her house with her mother and her father, and has never stepped foot outside of that into our world. And so she comes into that, earnest and eager and curious and wide open, and through her eyes we get to look at kind of the things we have normalized in our high schools. We get to see what the modern experience is.”
That consists of having to cross via a metallic detector and take part in energetic shooter drills. But it additionally means having her private struggles amplified by social media. “I made mistakes in high school, plenty of them, as I tried to figure out who I was. But those mistakes were private. They were kind of confined within the walls of my school,” Flanagan mentioned. “My son is a high school freshman right now, and he lives in a world where that kind of torment and those kinds of mistakes are public and can be memorialized online forever. That’s an incredible, incredible change. That’s the world that we get to scrutinize through this innocent character’s eyes, and that turned out to be one of the big parts of the show.”
Another large a part of the present is, clearly, the promenade. But Flanagan insists that even should you suppose what occurs with that second, “you don’t.” He known as the sequence “the most complex scene I have ever, ever filmed” in addition to “a showstopper and one of my favorite sequences I’ve ever gotten to be a part of in my career in any capacity.”
The “you don’t know about the prom” vibe interprets to the present as an entire, to listen to Flanagan inform it. He defined that whereas he’s executed trustworthy variations in his profession, he’s additionally had loads of expertise doing extra artistic takes on present works, just like the Netflix sequence The Haunting of Hill House. Carrie, he mentioned, is decidedly in that second class.
“It’s a thrilling way to adapt something, to take it apart into its essential pieces and use that to build something new. That is how we were approaching Carrie,” Flanagan teased. “That’s what got Stephen King very excited about this adaptation. I think a lot of people think they know what the show is. And the biggest thing I’m excited about today is just knowing what a big surprise our Carrie is going to be.”
We’ll get to return to highschool with Carrie White when Mike Flanagan’s Carrie hits Prime Video on October 7.
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