•When Mike Flanagan set out to adapt Stephen King‘s classic 1970 novella into an eight-episode series set in 2026, the first thing he did was go to King himself. “There’s no world where I’m doing anything like that without talking to Steve about it first,” Flanagan tells Polygon. “He got to see all of that before I agreed to do the show, and was very intimately involved in deciding how we wanted to expand that universe.”
The result is Carrie, which is streaming now on Prime Video and generating debate among Stephen King fans over the many ways it alters the source material. When Polygon interviewed Flanagan about his new show, one of the first questions was what King himself thought about all those changes — and some of the biggest ones were actually his idea.
“Some people seem animated by trying to protect Stephen King in this, and what I want to say to them is, ‘Guys, this is Steve’s idea,'” Flanagan says. “Steve believed very much that the story had already been told as he had written it. What excited him and animated him about this was the chance to expand that universe and to open it up into a much broader world.”
Carrie’s most radical update
The biggest change to Carrie is how it connects to the broader Stephen King universe, which frequently features the same characters and settings across various stories along with a shared set of rules defining his supernatural reality. Because Carrie was King’s first book, there was nothing to connect it to at the time — but given the chance to make some changes, both King and Flanagan jumped at the opportunity.
Specifically, Carrie (2026) establishes that Carrie White (Summer Howell) is just one of many women with similar psychic powers. One of those other women even refers to their shared power as “the Shine.” For Flanagan and King, it felt like a natural update to the story.
“If Steve had written this book just a little later in his career, I think he would’ve been calling it the Shine,” Flanagan says. “Even in the book as it is, he points to the larger universe and says, ‘Carrie’s not alone. She just doesn’t live long enough to realize that.’ It’s one of the things he was the most excited about in this.”
Carrie and Emaline
Another huge change is that, unlike in the original story, Carrie survives — a decision Flanagan says relates less to staying true to the spirit of King’s work and more to setting up a bigger story. Still, he confirms it was a change King was very much on board with.
“We all, including Steve, agreed that this version of Carrie deserved to survive the story, and we were always servicing that,” Flanagan says. He adds that he understands why this may bother some fans: “As a King purist, I’m deeply sympathetic to those reactions, but I’m also really more grateful for the larger volume of conversation I’m seeing of people who really enjoyed that and are intrigued to see where it could go.”
Yet another big departure is the new character Emaline (Thalia Dudek). At first, she appears to be a loner at school with Carrie who becomes her only friend while encouraging her to develop her powers. Later, viewers are led to believe Emaline doesn’t exist and was only a figment of Carrie’s imagination — but in a final twist, they learn Emaline is real and was using some sort of astral projection to guide Carrie from a distance before ultimately showing up in person in the final moments of season 1.
This addition has sparked debate. Again, King was directly involved in creating it.
“I see so much discourse about Emaline, which was the character King had the most input into and the one he was the most excited to shape,” Flanagan says. “So it’s very interesting to me to watch people defend Steve from Steve. But these were the things we always knew were going to be the controversial elements.”
If you’re mad, just watch the original Carrie movie
For anyone who doesn’t want to watch this radical update of King’s book, Flanagan has a solution: don’t.
“If people truly aren’t interested in exploring those directions, they’ve got three other versions that they can fall back on that will give them what they’re comfortable with,” he says. “But that was just never our goal. Our Carrie was always so different from the one in the book, and that was something Steve was also excited about.”
“Steve loves De Palma’s movie,” Flanagan adds. “And I agree. It’s perfect. But his whole excitement here was that this is a great opportunity to expand the world.”
Carrie is streaming now on Prime Video.
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