The prom scene in Brian De Palma‘s adaptation of Stephen King‘s Carrie is one of the most iconic scenes in all of cinema, in any genre. Throughout his career, King has detailed dozens of iconic sequences, many of which have been brought to life in movies and TV. Still, the scene in which Carrie White is doused with a bucket of pig’s blood remains a touchstone in film history.
Mike Flanagan has developed a new take on Carrie, which premieres on Prime Video this week. Having previously adapted King stories like Doctor Sleep and Gerald’s Game, the filmmaker has already tackled a variety of seminal King sequences, though the prom sequence proved to be the most challenging of his career.
“I knew I was directing the first two episodes of the show, and, for a minute, it looked like that was all I would do. I couldn’t give up the prom. I had to [direct it]. If you’re going to do Carrie, you’ve got to do the prom,” Flanagan shared with Bloody Disgusting. “It’s the most complicated sequence of my career, logistically, by a lot. It’s one of the most difficult sequences in my career to execute, but it was one of the most exciting and rewarding.”
He continued, “And to be able to go into something that is so iconic and say, ‘I want to do a different version of it. I want to see it from angles we’ve never seen. I don’t want to repeat what De Palma did. I don’t want to repeat what they did in the Angela Bettis version, or the Chloë Grace Moretz [version]. I want to try to do our prom,’ that was such a great challenge. And it’s one of those sequences that I’ll be proud of my whole career. I had so much fun doing that.”
Similarly, Samantha Sloyan is taking on the role of Margaret White, who has been brought to life previously by acclaimed actors. Sloyan broke down how this new adaptation was able to highlight unseen elements of the character’s relationship with daughter Carrie.
“So much of it was baked into the script. It was such a fundamental reason of why Mike, his new take on this, was that if we start with Carrie and Margaret as a loving mother-daughter, it really — even though we’re going on the same journey, it gets us there in an entirely different way,” the actor expressed. “And so I just really wanted to focus on making sure that I maintained those wonderful, iconic performances of her still being terrifying and her still being a threat, but doing that through the lens of a loving relationship.”
Given King’s prolific career, there are still elements about his original Carrie novel that stand apart from subsequent stories. From Flanagan’s perspective, “Carrie‘s his first published novel. It’s from a [much] younger Stephen King, although you can see the seeds of everything he’s going to become all in those pages. There’s a remarkable simplicity to it. It’s almost like Greek myth. It is a tragedy where the trajectory of it is so clear.”
He added, “You look at the bookshelf of Stephen King books, these huge tomes, and then you see Carrie. This is this narrow, efficient, straight-like-an-arrow book, but his central theme about how the choice between kindness and cruelty can accumulate into tragedy is a universally true theme that will always be true. While the details change, and while you can approach that story from so many different angles — and we tried very hard to approach it from a very different angle than had ever been done before — I think this is a story that is likely going to remain ripe for reinterpretation and examination probably for another couple decades, if not hundreds of years. It’s that timeless.”
Arguably one of the elements of Carrie is often overlooked is how vulnerable Carrie White is as a character, and so much focus is on the telekinetic powerhouse she becomes by the narrative’s ending. In this Prime Video adaptation, Summer H. Howell embodies the teen.
“I related a lot to her from the start. As soon as I read those scripts and the scenes Mike put her in, and the kind of person she is is the kind of person I want to be,” Howell recalled of what connected her most to Carrie. “It took me time. After high school, I really started figuring out who I want to be, how I want to show up in the world, the people I want to surround myself with. Carrie goes into it all very excited and optimistic, which I admire a lot, and grateful and curious, and so that’s what I really was excited to bring to her.”
She pointed out, “The hardest part … she’s full of emotion and rage, and so am I, but [performing] that for people can be a little intimidating, but I like to use that for my work. It almost feels therapeutic when I can, and channeling that on the day is the hard part.”
Carrie premieres on Prime Video on October 7.
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