Carrie: First look images reveal Mike Flanagan's expanded take on Stephen King's classic

The first look images of Mike Flanagan's Carrie have been released, and they give us a look at a modern adaptation of the Stephen King novel. The story of the heavily bullied girl that discovers she has telekinetic powers has been told innumerable times through films.

This time, however, we're going to get a more detailed look at the story since it is a series that will span eight episodes and show us how the themes of King's 1974 novel are relevant even today.

Mike Flanagan's Carrie TV series sticks to its roots while telling the story in a new way

Amazon MGM Studios has released a few first-look images and a GIF of Carrie, which will be released on Prime Video in the fall of 2026. Entertainment Weekly has also released a few exclusive first looks at the show, allowing us to understand the modern retelling better.

The pictures give us a first look at Summer H. Howell as Carrie White, who has been living an extremely sheltered life but now has to go to public high school for the first time after the death of her father.

Samantha Sloyan plays her mother, Margaret White, who is an extremely overprotective mother and wants to protect Carrie from things even she's not aware of. However, she's not going to be as abusive as the character's earlier adaptations.

In the upcoming adaptation of King's novel, Carrie goes into high school as an excited and optimistic teenager who honestly doesn't expect anything bad to happen. However, as both the first look images and Amazon MGM Studios' press release suggest, she will be

"...forced to navigate a viral bullying scandal that tears through her community, the relentless pressure and casual cruelty of the social-media age, and the awakening of mysterious telekinetic powers that rise alongside her adolescence."

We also see many other familiar characters in the first-look images. As the images and the press release reveal, Chris Hargensen (played by Alison Thornton), the main bully of Carrie, is going to be part of the new adaptation. Sue Snell (played by Siena Agudong), Tommy Ross (played by Joel Oulette), Sue's boyfriend, and Billy Nolan (played by Arthur Conti) are also familiar characters who are going to appear in the show.

We will also see Miss Desjardin (played by Amber Midthunder) in the show, Carrie's teacher who defends her from her bullies. Matthew Lillard is going to play Principal Grayle in the show. Josie Totah and Thalia Dudek are going to play new characters, Tina and Emaline, respectively.

Mike Flanagan, the creator, showrunner, executive producer, and director of the show, has shed a light on how the upcoming series would be different from earlier adaptations. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Flanagan pointed out that it doesn't make sense to make a new adaptation if the story cannot be told in a slightly different way.

Moreover, this is the first time Carrie's story is being told in the form of a series across eight episode and thus, many aspects of the story had to be extended. However, as Flanagan also pointed out, it wasn't too hard to do a modern retelling of the story because

“The themes that Steve was talking about half a century ago of kindness versus cruelty, of empathy and bullying, and violence at school have become even more relevant today than he could have contemplated because of our relationship to technology and the degree to which violence encroaches on our high schoolers, especially in the United States,”

Flanagan continued,

“So that meant we had an opportunity to tell a story about a modern teenage experience that could use the seeds of these characters King created 50 years ago, but express them completely differently.”

One thing that Mike Flanagan has done differently in the upcoming series is that he has incorporated the stories of other women gifted with unique powers in different parts of the world. In Stephen King's novel, he had made it clear that the titular character wasn't the only one with telekinetic powers. There were many other women like her; she just didn't know that.

As Mike Flanagan told Entertainment Weekly, each episode of the upcoming show will give us a short glimpse at other women who also have powers, and Carrie is just unaware that she's not the only one. This will thus help us understand the science behind her powers, something other adaptations did not address.

Carrie will be released on Prime Video in the fall of 2026. A specific date of release is yet to be revealed.

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