Stephen King’s Carrie has been a critical part of the landscape of the horror genre for over fifty years now. When the book was released in 1974, it was something of a phenomenon and served to launch the career of the then nascent author, King, a man who has since gone on to become an institution of horror unto himself. Merely two years after the release of the book, the first-ever Stephen King film adaptation was released, in the form of Brian De Palma’s Carrie, starring Sissy Spacek from 1976.
Today, both of these takes on this singular story are viewed as iconic and rightfully so. Through the joint power of King’s novel and De Palma’s film, the story of Carrietta White has been etched into the very fabric of horror history. There have been numerous other adaptations in the years since, but none resonated quite as strongly or pertinently as King’s original novel or De Palma’s 1976 film. All of this puts Mike Flanagan’s new Amazon Prime TV series, Carrie, in an interesting position. And now Flanagan has revealed something a bewildering detail which makes the position of this new show even more interesting: he’s hoping to have it run for three full seasons on the streamer.
“In my dream scenario, I think it’s three seasons. In my dream scenario, I think Carrie has a wonderful three-step arc. It’s a trilogy, really," Flanagan told Collider.
If you’re unfamiliar with Carrie, that might not sound like especially striking news to you. After all, ‘successful showrunner has plans for new series to run for several seasons’ isn’t usually something to write home about. But when it comes to Carrie, it very much is.
Stephen King as an author is now associated with exceedingly lengthy books, thanks to works like It or The Stand, which each run for upwards of one thousand pages. So one might reasonably think that maybe Carrie is a novel that could potentially support this kind of long-form storytelling. But one would be very wrong. Carrie is one of the shortest novels King has written in the entirety of his obscenely prolific career, clocking in at less than two-hundred pages. De Palma’s original 1976 film, while by no means a word-for-word adaptation of the book, covers most of the important ground of the story and only runs for ninety minutes.
All of this to say, there was already a great deal of warranted skepticism with regard to how Flanagan was going to stretch out the content of King’s Carrie to fill eight hours' worth of material in a single season, which many (myself included) have assumed would simply be a limited series (something that Flanagan is no stranger to; his Midnight Mass is among the best limited series of the past decade).
Not to spoil the end of King’s novel, but it doesn’t exactly leave the door open for further adventures for the titular character. So this either means that Flanagan is planning on stretching out the contents of the book across three seasons (which seems incredibly unlikely if not outright impossible) or that Flanagan’s version of the story is going to end in a very different way and then proceed onward from there. Whatever the case may be, it’s a befuddling thing to reveal to audiences ahead of the release of Carrie's first season.
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