Mike Flanagan is back in Stephen King territory, and the first trailer for his Carrie has arrived. Prime Video will run it as eight episodes this autumn, which is already a statement: the story has never had that much room before.
The premise, updated
The spine is unchanged. Carrie White is a shy teenager who discovers she is telekinetic while enduring relentless bullying. Summer H. Howell plays her, with Samantha Sloyan as her fiercely protective mother Margaret.
The update is the setting. Carrie has been kept at home her whole life, and it takes the abrupt loss of her father to put her in a public school at all. Flanagan's argument is that the cruelty King wrote about half a century ago has been amplified by the phones every teenager now carries.
Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, he said the themes King was working with, kindness against cruelty, empathy against bullying, violence at school, have become more relevant than the author could have anticipated because of our relationship with technology.
Why it is not a remake
Flanagan has been direct about this. The only way to approach it, he told the same outlet, was to build something new out of the ingredients of Carrie, because there is no purpose in retreading ground that has already been walked so beautifully.
That extends to the sequence everyone is waiting for. The prom is still in it, but he says the route there is completely different and so is what happens once everyone arrives. He described that as an irresistible opportunity for someone who enjoys adapting things.
The casting
Howell is Canadian and was chosen after more than a thousand actresses auditioned, which suggests how hard the part is to cast: Carrie has to be invisible for six episodes and then not.
When
Autumn, on Prime Video. No date has been given yet.