We recently learned that Mike Flanagan is developing another Stephen King project with an eight-episode series adaptation of Carrie for Amazon’s Prime Video.
Carrie tells the story of a shy and awkward high school girl, Carrie White, who is relentlessly bullied by her classmates and tormented by her fanatically religious mother, Margaret.
As she is going through this and is feeling isolated and misunderstood, Carrie discovers that she has telekinetic powers.
When a cruel prank is played on her at the school’s prom, Carrie snaps, unleashing her pent-up rage and using her powers to exact a devastating and deadly revenge on her tormentors and the town.
The story’s climactic prom scene is easily one of the most iconic in horror literature and movies.
This story has been adapted a few times already and when asked in an interview with CinemaBlend why he wanted to retell this story again, Flanagan said:
“One of the only questions I had when it was first put on the table was ‘Why?’, and if I couldn’t answer ‘Why do this again?’ for myself, then there was no point in pursuing the project. It’s the same muscle.
“I will say that it’s the same feeling I had when we approached The Turn of the Screw, which had been adapted dozens of times. And it’s like, ‘Okay, how do we do this completely differently?’”
When asked about what Stephen King thought of the story being retold again Flanagan said: “His first question was also mine. … Steve’s first reaction was, ‘Why do that again?’”
Well, the filmmaker has a direction that he wants to take the story that isn’t going to retread anything that’s come before. When teasing the project, he said:
“I can’t spoil our approach to Carrie only to reassure people we are not retreading the same story. It is definitely a new approach to the material, and one that Stephen King is excited about which is also important to me.”
When talking about how he earned that enthusiasm from King, he said if he didn’t get King excited about it, he wouldn’t have done it.
“It’s been done and it’s been done beautifully, arguably perfectly by De Palma and then done again for ‘reasons.’, Why do it again now?
“And so when he went through the proposal that I put together for it, his reaction was, oh, this is actually very exciting to him. And then I said, ‘Okay, if he’s excited, then we should do this.’ But otherwise I wouldn’t have done it. … It will be a very pleasant surprise for fans.”
I assume that this will be a contemporary take on the story and when teasing his initial idea for the project, Flanagan told MovieWeb:
“Carrie White walking through a metal detector is interesting to me. Carrie White with social media. The iconic scene in the locker room is very different when people have phones in their hands.
“So that was the first germ of an idea, like, there is room for this to actually have a lot to say that’s very relevant. And I can’t spoil the changes that we made in order to kind of find a story that felt like it needed to be told. But we made some pretty substantial changes.”
Flanagan is a hell of a great storyteller and he’s a filmmaker that has an understanding of King’s work that a lot of filmmakers don’t have, and I’m excited to see what his vision for this story will be as he brings it to life as a series.
