Stephen King’s Carrie has remained an incredibly popular and prevalent work within the horror genre for over 50 years now.
Since the book’s initial release back in 1974, audiences have been entranced, horrified, and ultimately compelled by King’s story of Carrietta White, the young girl with repressed telekinetic abilities that are unleashed in full after she is tragically bullied on prom night, resulting in a mass casualty across the entire town. In the years since the release of the novel, there have been several movie, TV, and even Broadway-based adaptations of the book, and through it all, probably the single most pervasive detail for general audiences has remained: Carrie uses her powers to kill a bunch of people at the end.
So when Mike Flanagan’s new Prime Video series reached its finale and opted to make some substantial alterations to this infamous finale, it was met with a decidedly mixed response from fans and critics alike. Despite how great so much of the show and so many of the performances were and had been across the course of the eight-episode series as a whole, the altered conclusion seemed a baffling note to end on.
In a new interview with The Direct, Carrie star Summer H. Howell has revealed that not only is she aware of this reaction, but there are answers and justifications already baked into the story for the series’ upcoming second season.
"We were always making something different with our version of Carrie, and we get to explore the TK gene a bit and all these other special women. I think it set up the future more, and a lot of questions will be answered about Emaline, and I know she’s got a lot of hate online, but I think it’s unnecessary… I think if you’re here for something new and fresh, I think just wait… you’ll see why Mike Flanagan decided to do it this way.”
There’s a lot to unpack there, but first and foremost, a massive kudos to Howell for standing up for the character of Emaline, as played by Thalia Dudek. That character has gotten some bad-faith and unfair criticism from a certain subsection of the internet. But secondly, what Howell seems to be getting at here is the idea that Flanagan and the team were well aware that the changes in the finale were bound to ruffle some feathers and that it was actually by design.
Making such large-scale changes (such as Emaline stepping in to “take the wheel” of Carrie’s abilities at prom and then having Carrie survive the events of the night) to the most ubiquitous part of the story wasn’t something that happened unwittingly; it was clearly a pre-meditated choice.
If the first season of Carrie, this could have wound up being a disastrous choice that tainted the series. However, Flanagan was hoping that introducing all of these new elements in the finale and leaving them as cliffhangers would help drive interest in a second season, both creatively and commercially, and that wound up being the case. The series has now been officially greenlit for a second season, so Flanagan and co. will get the chance to follow up on these new storylines.
Season 2 will obviously dig into these new developments, and seeing as the entirety of King’s novel was adapted in season one, it is freed up to chart entirely its own course. While it remains to be seen exactly how well all of this will work out, one thing is for certain: getting to see more of Howell’s remarkable performance as Carrie White is never going to be a bad thing.
Stay tuned for more news about Carrie season 2 on Prime Video!
Add us as a preferred source on Google