Four major Carrie book changes are confirmed for Mike Flanagan’s new adaptation.
After several movie versions over the years, Stephen King’s novel Carrie is receiving its first-ever television show adaptation. Helmed by Flanagan, it will be an eight-episode limited series released on Prime Video. The filmmaker and various members of the cast have previously teased the story being updated for the present day, including what it is like to be a teenager and bullied in the age of social media, but specific details about other changes have been kept under wraps.
Draft 1 · Bangor, Maine How Well Do You Know Stephen King? “They all float down here.”
🎈ITYou’ll float too
🪓ShiningAll work and no play
🔨MiseryI’m your number one fan
🏰Dark TowerThe gunslinger followed
⛓ShawshankGet busy living
01
King was a high school English teacher in Hampden, Maine, living in a trailer with no phone, when Doubleday paid him a $2,500 advance for his first hardcover novel in 1973. He’d thrown the opening pages in the trash; his wife Tabitha fished them out and told him to keep going. What was the book?
✓ Correct! Carrie. Doubleday paid a $2,500 hardcover advance in 1973, and the paperback rights sold to Signet for $400,000 — King’s half ($200,000) let him quit teaching. He always credits Tabitha with saving the manuscript from the trash. Brian De Palma’s 1976 film adaptation with Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie earned two Oscar nominations and cemented King as a screen-adaptation goldmine from day one.
✗ Wrong page. The answer is Carrie, published April 5, 1974. ‘Salem’s Lot came next in 1975, The Shining in 1977, The Stand in 1978. Tabitha King rescued the Carrie opening from the trash, insisted he finish it, and the $400,000 Signet paperback deal that followed — split 50/50 with Doubleday — is what finally let him leave teaching.
02
In the late 1970s, publishers believed no author could release more than one book a year without saturating the market. So King invented a pseudonym and published five novels under it — including The Long Walk, The Running Man, and Thinner — before a Washington bookstore clerk outed him in 1985. What was the pen name?
✓ Correct! Richard Bachman. King took the first name from Richard Stark (Donald Westlake’s pseudonym) and the last from Bachman-Turner Overdrive playing on the car stereo. Steve Brown, a Washington D.C. bookstore clerk, cross-checked copyright filings at the Library of Congress and phoned King. Rather than deny it, King wrote a mock obituary declaring Bachman had died of “cancer of the pseudonym.”
✗ Wrong byline. The answer is Richard Bachman — a pseudonym King used for Rage, The Long Walk, Roadwork, The Running Man and Thinner between 1977 and 1985. Peter Straub is a real author and King’s co-writer on The Talisman and Black House. John Swithen was a one-off alias for a 1972 short story. Gordon Lachance is the narrator character in The Body (filmed as Stand By Me).
03
King wrote The Shining (1977) after a one-night stay at the then-closing Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado, in the fall of 1974. He and Tabitha were the only guests, and a dream about his son being chased down a corridor gave him the entire novel. The fictional haunted hotel is called…
✓ Correct! The Overlook Hotel. The Kings checked into room 217 on the last night of the Stanley’s 1974 season; Tabitha fell asleep and Stephen dreamed about his three-year-old son Joe being pursued by a fire hose. He woke up with most of the novel in his head. The Stanley has been milking the connection ever since — and in 1997 King adapted his own novel for a TV miniseries filmed there, as a partial corrective to Kubrick’s film.
✗ Wrong floor. The answer is The Overlook. The real-world Stanley Hotel in Estes Park inspired it — King stayed in room 217 on the last night of the 1974 season and had the fire-hose nightmare that became the book. The Dolphin is a later King hotel (1408). The Bates Motel is Psycho. The Stanley itself is the real place, not the fictional one, though it’s leaned into the association ever since.
04
In IT (1986), the shape-shifting entity the Losers’ Club calls Pennywise the Dancing Clown emerges from the sewers every 27 years to feed on children. The novel — and Andy Muschietti’s 2017/2019 films — are set in a fictional Maine town that also shows up in Insomnia, Dreamcatcher, and 11/22/63. Name it.
✓ Correct! Derry. Loosely modeled on Bangor, Maine, where King lives. Derry recurs across IT, Insomnia, Dreamcatcher, 11/22/63 and parts of the Dark Tower series. Castle Rock is King’s other signature Maine town (The Dead Zone, Cujo, Needful Things). Jerusalem’s Lot is from ‘Salem’s Lot. Chester’s Mill is the setting of Under the Dome.
✗ Wrong sewer. The answer is Derry — King’s Bangor-coded fictional town, the setting of IT (1986), Insomnia (1994), Dreamcatcher (2001) and 11/22/63 (2011). Castle Rock is a different King town (Cujo, The Dead Zone, Needful Things) and Jerusalem’s Lot is where the vampires show up. But Pennywise’s home is always Derry.
05
The 1990 film of Misery, adapted by William Goldman and directed by Rob Reiner, won its lead actress the Best Actress Oscar for playing obsessed “number one fan” Annie Wilkes — still the only acting Oscar ever won for a Stephen King adaptation. Who was it?
✓ Correct! Kathy Bates — winning Best Actress at the March 1991 Oscars for Misery. Bates later came back for King adaptations Dolores Claiborne (1995) and The Stand (1994 miniseries). It remains the only Academy Award for acting in any screen adaptation of a Stephen King book; Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie both got nominations for Carrie, but neither won.
✗ Wrong fan. The answer is Kathy Bates, who won Best Actress at the 1991 Academy Awards for Misery. Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie were both nominated for Carrie in 1977 but lost. Jessica Lange has been nominated and won for other films, but not for any King adaptation. Bates’s hobbling scene with the sledgehammer is still routinely voted one of the most terrifying moments in horror cinema.
06
The Shawshank Redemption (1994) — regularly voted the greatest film of all time on IMDb — is adapted from a King novella called “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption.” The same 1982 collection also contains the novellas that became Stand By Me and Apt Pupil. What is the collection called?
✓ Correct! Different Seasons (1982) — four novellas, three of them adapted into major films: Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption became The Shawshank Redemption (1994), The Body became Stand By Me (1986), and Apt Pupil became the 1998 Bryan Singer film. The fourth, The Breathing Method, is the only one never filmed. Different Seasons is the most-adapted single King book in Hollywood history.
✗ Wrong shelf. The answer is Different Seasons (1982). Night Shift (1978) is an earlier horror-story collection. Skeleton Crew (1985) contains The Mist and The Jaunt. Four Past Midnight (1990) has The Langoliers and Secret Window. But three of the four novellas in Different Seasons — Shawshank, Stand By Me, Apt Pupil — all became celebrated films, making it arguably the single most cinematically influential King book.
07
King started writing his sprawling magnum opus in 1970 as a college student and finally published the eighth and final volume in 2012. The first line — “The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed” — introduces a hero inspired by Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name. What’s the gunslinger’s name?
✓ Correct! Roland Deschain of Gilead, last of his line. The Dark Tower series — eight novels plus The Wind Through the Keyhole — is King’s spine work, connecting dozens of his other books (The Stand, Salem’s Lot, Insomnia, Hearts in Atlantis, IT) into one multiverse. Randall Flagg is the series’ recurring villain, Jake Chambers is the boy Roland meets, and Ted Brautigan is a Low Men minor character.
✗ Wrong ka-tet. The answer is Roland Deschain. Randall Flagg is the recurring King villain who crosses from The Stand into the Dark Tower (he’s the “man in black” fleeing across the desert in the famous opening). Jake Chambers is the young boy Roland picks up in The Gunslinger. Ted Brautigan is a minor Breaker in Hearts in Atlantis. Roland alone is the king of Gilead’s son.
08
King has three children. His daughter Naomi is a Unitarian minister. His younger son Owen is a novelist. His older son is a bestselling horror writer in his own right — author of Heart-Shaped Box, Horns, NOS4A2, and The Fireman — and spent his early career using a pseudonym to hide the family connection. What name does he publish under?
✓ Correct! Joe Hill — a shortening of his real name, Joseph Hillström King. He used the pseudonym for a decade so his work would be judged on its own merits and not marketed as “son-of.” His 2004 short-story collection 20th Century Ghosts and 2007 debut novel Heart-Shaped Box made his reputation before the family connection became public. He and his father have also co-written a handful of novellas including In the Tall Grass.
✗ Wrong branch. The answer is Joe Hill — pen name of Joseph Hillström King. Paul Tremblay (A Head Full of Ghosts, The Cabin at the End of the World) is a separate contemporary horror novelist. Josh Malerman wrote Bird Box. Grady Hendrix wrote Horrorstor and My Best Friend’s Exorcism. Joe Hill hid the King connection for about a decade so his career would stand on its own.
Final Draft · Put Down the Pen Your Constant Reader Status
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Constant Reader — or still stuck in Derry?
In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, where first-look images were also revealed, Flanagan confirmed four significant changes from the source material. The first of these in the Prime Video show is the sudden death of Carrie White’s father, Ralph, which makes the state aware of the family’s existence for the first time and forces the titular teenage character to begin attending public school. In the book, Ralph dies in a construction accident before Carrie’s birth, and she has been going to public school since she was a young child.
Carrie’s mother, Margaret White, is an abusive parent in the novel and brutally squashes any curiosity or questions that her daughter has. As Flanagan explains, the show’s version of the character will be more nuanced, as she instead tries to protect her daughter by creating a “private utopia” in which curiosity is encouraged. Check out Flanagan’s comments below:
Our Margaret White is a woman who fiercely loves her daughter and wants to protect her from this world and the dangers that Margaret’s aware of that Carrie is not. [She] doesn’t know how to do that and thinks the way to protect her is to close her off; not punitively, but to create this private utopia and to let her daughter exist earnestly and curiously and wide open by protecting her from the world. It’s a completely different dynamic.
Beyond Carrie’s parents, another important change will be the iconic prom scene in which she is doused in pig’s blood. Flanagan teases that “We’re getting there a completely different way and the events of that prom are going to be completely different. That’s a wonderfully delicious and irresistible opportunity for someone who loves adapting things.”
The fourth and final massive change he reveals in this interview is expanding the story’s global scope, as after episode 2, every episode begins with “a different, unique story of a different woman, somewhere else in the world and in time, coming to terms with their own abilities. Carrie’s specific place among that group of women is part of the real joy that we get to discover over the course of the season.”
There are chapters in the novel about courtroom testimonies, scientific investigations, police reports, and 911 calls that touch on others who have telekinetic abilities. This will be greatly expanded on by exploring specific cases of TK at the beginning of seven of the show’s eight episodes. Such an approach is an even bigger change from Brian De Palma’s 1976 movie Carrie, which did not address how others throughout the world also have these powers.
Stephen King also talks about the “TK gene” [for telekinesis] and the science behind Carrie’s abilities. Something that the De Palma adaptation ignored was Carrie’s place in the larger universe, that she’s part of a sorority of very gifted women and just doesn’t know it. The book absolutely points at that, but that was something we could pick up and run with.
As a “King fanatic” who previously adapted the author’s Gerald’s Game, Doctor Sleep, and The Life of Chuck into largely faithful and well-received feature films, Flanagan understands the hesitancy that comes with making such big changes, but it is also one of the reasons why he wanted to tackle the project: “One of the things I’m the most sensitive to is when people change things. This would require an enormous amount of change and invention and re-contextualization, but that’s kind of why I wanted to do it.”
The cast of Carrie features Summer H. Howell as the eponymous character, Samantha Sloyan as Margaret, Alison Thornton as Chris Hargensen, Siena Agudong as Sue Snell, Joel Oulette as Tommy Ross, Arthur Conti as Billy, Amber Midthunder as Miss Desjardin, and Matthew Lillard as Principal Grayle. Flanagan served as the showrunner, writer, and executive producer, along with directing four of the eight episodes. King is an executive producer as well. The series is releasing this fall in more than 240 countries and territories via Prime Video, although an exact release date has not been announced yet.
