With October now just a few short months away, the marketing cycles of some of the biggest horror releases of the year are really starting to ramp up, chief among them being Mike Flanagan’s reimagining of the iconic Carrie.
Set to be the horror auteur’s first collaboration with Amazon, the series is set for release on Amazon Prime this coming October and will be yet another Stephen King adaptation from the filmmaker. However, in a recent piece published by Entertainment Weekly, containing first looks at the upcoming supernatural horror series, it was revealed that multiple big changes have been made to the source material, including a reworking of the setting so that Carrie White’s story now takes place in the modern day.
This is notable for several reasons, chief among them being the ways in which it completely redefines the entire dynamic of the story. Carrie was published back in 1974 and was actually Stephen King’s debut novel. The now-infamously prolific author got his start with this seventies-set high-school tale of terror, about a young misunderstood girl who unlocks psychic abilities within herself and uses them to exact revenge upon all of her bullies on one fateful prom night. The book has been adapted several times over in the years since, most notably by Brian De Palma into one of the defining horror films of the ‘70s, simply titled Carrie, featuring Sissy Spacek in the titular role.
In the decades since then, many attempts have been made to revive Carrie as a franchise of sorts, in one way or another. That’s already an antithetical instinct, given that the character of Carrie White famously dies at the end of the book, but the dynamic duo of King’s book and De Palma’s film ultimately proved too successful to let sleeping dogs lie for too long. There was a sequel made with 1999’s The Rage: Carrie 2, a made-for-TV remake in 2002, as well as a proper theatrically released remake again in 2013. That makes Flanagan the latest in a long line of filmmakers to tackle the property, and he seems to be keen to do it in a very different way.
Flanagan’s Carrie is an eight-episode streaming series that is aiming to flesh out characters and storylines only briefly featured or hinted at in the book. Stephen King is certainly no stranger to big, sprawling epics, but Carrie is definitively not one of them. The book is among the author’s shortest novels and hones in fairly exclusively on Carrie as a character. So how exactly is Flanagan planning on fleshing this story out in such ways? Well, one approach he has employed has been updating the setting for the modern day.
It isn’t exactly a stretch to see how updating Carrie’s tale of horrific bullying could take on a new context and heft if updated for modern times. Technology will undoubtedly play a role in this miniseries, just as it does in the lives of actual teenagers today. While some might cry foul, associating both King’s book and De Palma’s film so explicitly with the ‘70s culture that they both grew out of and subsequently influenced so profoundly, updating the setting could give Flanagan and Co. the opportunity to not only approach the oft-tread material in a different way but also find resonance with new audiences.
There are entire generations of horror fans out there (as evidenced by the recent success of Obsession and Backrooms) who likely have little-to-no familiarity with Carrie. The 2013 film was more than a decade ago, and it isn’t exactly like that film captured the zeitgeist. Rather, by modernizing it, perhaps Flanagan will be able to get new audiences invested in Carrie White’s tragic tale in wholly new ways, allowing King’s original tale of horror to live on for decades more to come.
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