Mike Flanagan didn’t approach Carrie as a horror story.
His Prime Video adaptation of Stephen King’s debut novel follows Carrie White (Summer H. Howell) as a bullying scandal tears through her school on the way to the infamous prom. Series creator Flanagan, who also writes, executive produces and directs four episodes, spoke exclusively with BLKCinema.com about the real story that shaped the series, the everyday horrors he found scarier than the bloodshed and whether there’s more story to tell.
The real-life story behind Mike Flanagan’s ‘Carrie’
Asked about the riot at the school, one of the series’ most chaotic moments, Flanagan said it came from a real event.
“We did not look at this as a horror story. It was a tragedy,” Flanagan said. “One of our major inspirations for this was a real-life account in Albany, California, where a very peaceful small-town high school was completely destroyed by an anonymous bullying Instagram account. By the end of it, they actually had a riot at the school during a mediation. We kind of used that story as the backbone for our structure.”
Mike Flanagan on the horrors that lead up to prom
Flanagan said being a parent shaped where he found the real fear in the story.
“That’s the stuff that scares me. As a parent of a student going into high school when I started developing this, the horror for me wasn’t the prom,” he said. “The prom was the tragic, inevitable conclusion of all the horror that led up to it, and those horrors were smaller, but way more chilling to me.”
“It’s the horrors of having normalized shooter drills in school, the horrors of dropping your kids off, watching them go through a metal detector, and then having the kids imagine what it must be like to have a shooter burst into their classroom. That’s an extraordinary horror,” Flanagan continued. “And just the way they treat each other, the normalization of cruelty, I find horrific. But it’s one of the things that gives me such respect for this younger generation. They have a fortitude I didn’t have to have in the ’90s. It wasn’t required of me. It’s kind of amazing what they have to go through.”
Could ‘Carrie’ return for Season 2?
Carrie was initially positioned as a limited series, but its ending leaves plenty unresolved. Flanagan said more is possible.
“It’s certainly open to that. Our priority was to try to conclude this season as though we’d never see another frame of it after we cut to black,” Flanagan said. “It does leave a lot of questions, and a lot of possibilities for her heading out into the world. So yeah, it’s certainly a possibility and something we’re wide open to, but our whole priority was get to the end of this season and see if people like it, see if we can tell this story right. But yeah, it’s certainly on my mind for sure.”
He said the series format gave the team room the story never had on film.
“When you have a story like this that fits so beautifully into a feature film format, and we have eight episodes, it gives us so much room to expand on things and to surprise ourselves and surprise these characters,” Flanagan said. “I’ve gotten to do that kind of expansion only a very few times in my career, and I’ve always enjoyed it so much.”
Where can I watch ‘Carrie’?
All eight episodes of Carrie are now streaming on Prime Video.
Featured image photo credit: Photo: Prime Video
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