'Carrie' Showrunner Confirms the Biggest Changes to the Book Were Stephen King's Idea

'Steve believed very much that the story had already been told as he had written it,' Mike Flanagan tells Polygon

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 quite a lot of debate among Stephen King fans over the many ways it alters the source material. So when Polygon had the chance to interview Flanagan about his new show, one of the first things we asked was what King himself thought about all those changes. Turns out, not only was the legendary author directly involved, but some of the biggest changes 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."

Spoilers ahead for the ending of Carrie (2026).

Carrie's most radical update

The biggest change to Carrie is how it connects to the broader Stephen King universe. This is pretty common in much of King's writing, which frequently features the same characters and settings across various stories, along with a shared set of rules that define 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, King and Flanagan both jumped at the opportunity.

Specifically, Carrie (2026) establishes that Carrie White (Summer Howell) is just one of many women with similar psychic powers. Not only that, but one of those other women even refers to their shared power as "the Shine." This might come as a shock to some, but 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, in this version Carrie survives. This decision has less to do with staying true to the spirit of King's work and more with setting up a bigger story. Still, Flanagan confirms it's 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.

The showrunner 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. That's where I'm coming from."

Yet another big departure is the new character Emaline (Thalia Dudek). At first, Emaline appears to be a loner who goes to school with Carrie and becomes her only friend, while encouraging her to develop her powers. Later, we're led to believe that Emaline doesn't exist, and was only a figment of Carrie's imagination. But in a final twist, we 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 a lot of debate. Again, it turns out King was directly involved in creating Emaline for the show.

"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.