Stephen King’s Carrie has been adapted repeatedly since the novel first appeared in 1974, but Mike Flanagan is taking the horror classic somewhere it has never gone before.

The filmmaker behind The Haunting of Hill House, Midnight Mass and The Fall of the House of Usher has expanded King’s breakthrough novel into an eight-episode Prime Video series, giving Carrie White’s tragedy far more room to unfold than previous screen versions.

Summer H. Howell leads the cast as Carrie, while Samantha Sloyan plays her deeply religious mother Margaret White — and it is their relationship that could provide one of the biggest surprises for viewers familiar with the story.

Rather than simply recreating the famously disturbing dynamic seen in the 1976 Sissy Spacek film, Flanagan has made mother and daughter more complicated, more recognizably human and, potentially, even more heartbreaking.

Carrie White enters the modern world

The fundamental pieces of King’s story remain.

Carrie is a painfully sheltered teenage outsider who faces vicious bullying at school while gradually discovering that she possesses telekinetic abilities.

There is also Margaret, her controlling mother, and the looming prospect of a prom night that anyone familiar with Carrie knows will not end quietly.

But Flanagan’s series brings Carrie into a dramatically different world.

Following the sudden death of her father, circumstances eventually bring officials to the White family home, where they discover that Carrie has spent her entire life being home-schooled and isolated.

Margaret is then forced to send her daughter into a co-ed public school.

For Carrie, virtually everything is unfamiliar.

She knows nothing about lockdown drills, metal detectors or phone apps. Her understanding of her own reproductive system is similarly limited.

Suddenly, a girl who has been deliberately shielded from modern society is dropped directly into it.

Margaret White is not simply the monster of the story

One of the most significant changes concerns Margaret.

Piper Laurie’s Oscar-nominated performance in the 1976 film turned Carrie’s mother into one of horror cinema’s most memorable religious fanatics.

Sloyan’s Margaret is different.

The actress previously played the fanatically religious Bev Keane in Flanagan’s Midnight Mass, so she initially wondered whether she had been approached because Margaret seemed like familiar territory.

Instead, she discovered that Flanagan had written a substantially different woman.

“I was relieved and excited,” Sloyan said, explaining that she had no desire simply to repeat what she had already created with Bev.

Central to this interpretation is something easy to lose beneath the horror: Margaret genuinely loves Carrie.

“I think it was very much in the script that Mike had written, and in the way that Summer wanted to play it, too, which is that this mother and daughter loved each other,” Sloyan explained.

That does not make Margaret’s behavior harmless.

Instead, the series explores how her fear of the outside world drives her need for control.

Sloyan believes Margaret attempts to control Carrie because the wider world terrifies her. Hiding her daughter away becomes her extreme response to something she feels powerless to manage.

Carrie’s isolation has an unexpected consequence

That upbringing has also shaped this version of Carrie differently.

Howell’s teenager is sheltered, but she is not portrayed simply as frightened and defeated.

She remains intelligent, curious and surprisingly hopeful.

In an unsettling irony, being cut off from the outside world has protected part of her innocence.

“That sheltering has helped preserve Carrie’s spirit in a way,” Sloyan said. “She’s still so optimistic and so curious and so open to what the world might be.”

That optimism makes what awaits her at school particularly painful.

Carrie encounters classmates including Chris Hargesen, played by Alison Thornton, and Sue Snell, played by Siena Agudong.

As she becomes the target of bullying, the contrast between the world Carrie imagined and the one she actually encounters begins to close in around her.

And somewhere beneath all of it, her telekinetic abilities are emerging.

Flanagan surrounds Carrie with familiar faces

The series also reunites Flanagan with several actors from his previous projects.

Sloyan is joined by Kate Siegel, who has appeared alongside her in The Haunting of Hill House, Midnight Mass and The Fall of the House of Usher.

Rahul Kohli, Michael Trucco and Ruth Codd also return to Flanagan’s orbit.

But Carrie brings a substantial group of newcomers into his regular ensemble as well.

Matthew Lillard plays Carrie’s school principal, while Amber Midthunder takes on the role of sympathetic gym teacher Miss Desjardins.

Heather Graham, Katee Sackhoff, Josie Totah and Delainey Hayles are also among the cast.

For Sloyan, however, Howell’s performance at the centre of the series stands out.

“Summer Howell, to me, has done something with this Carrie that is unbelievable,” she said.

A rare rehearsal period changed the experience

Flanagan also had something on Carrie that his productions do not always allow: time to rehearse.

Sloyan said the cast spent a couple of weeks together before filming, giving the actors an opportunity to meet and begin developing their characters.

That was particularly useful with so many younger performers joining the production.

It also allowed Howell and Sloyan to begin building the relationship that anchors this interpretation of the story before cameras rolled.

Flanagan’s preparation went beyond rehearsals.

According to Sloyan, he immersed himself deeply in King’s writing, studying not just Carrie but the interconnected nature of the author’s wider fictional universe — including characters and ideas that can resurface across different books.

His familiarity with the material then gave him the confidence to expand it.

Eight episodes allow the story to become something bigger

Turning Carrie into a television series inevitably creates opportunities that a two-hour film cannot.

Flanagan has introduced new layers and subplots, some of which Sloyan acknowledged represent significant creative swings.

But she insists those additions still belong naturally within the story.

“They don’t feel outside of the script,” she said.

That may prove crucial.

Carrie has become such a familiar part of horror culture that simply recreating its most famous moments would offer little reason for another adaptation.

Flanagan’s approach appears to be different: preserve the emotional tragedy and supernatural terror that made King’s novel endure, while asking what Carrie White would look like if she were a teenage girl encountering the world for the first time today.

At the centre is still a lonely girl, a frightened and controlling mother, cruel classmates and a terrifying power waiting to erupt.

But this time, viewers will have eight episodes to understand how everyone reaches that infamous night.

Carrie premieres Wednesday, October 7 on Prime Video.