Mike Flanagan on Carrie: Why Stephen King’s Outcast Hits Harder in the Viral Age
Every generation gets the Carrie White it deserves. In 1976, she was a girl drowning in pig’s blood and her mother’s scripture. In 2026, she’s a girl whose humiliation goes viral before she even gets home.
That’s the territory Mike Flanagan stakes out with Carrie, his eight-episode reimagining of Stephen King’s debut novel, now streaming on Prime Video. The man behind The Haunting of Hill House, Midnight Mass and The Fall of the House of Usher didn’t come to remake Brian De Palma’s classic. He came to ask what happens to a sheltered, grieving teenager when she’s thrown into a public high school where cruelty is recorded, shared and never deleted, and her body starts answering back.
Summer H. Howell carries the title role opposite Flanagan regular Samantha Sloyan as Margaret White, a pairing critics have singled out as the series’ beating heart.
I sat down with Flanagan to talk about why Carrie still terrifies us fifty years later, what the social-media age did to an old story about shame, and why the scariest thing in this house was never the telekinesis.
