New 'Carrie' series brings different motives to horror classic

Now, however, it’s front and center in “Carrie,” the limited series streaming on Prime Video.

“My generation is basically programmed to be addicted to it,” says Summer H. Howell, who plays Carrie. “It’s up to us to put it down. The fact that anybody can reach you at any time is terrible. We need young people to find themselves before they make personas of themselves online.”

If not? Carrie White is there to even the playing field. In the series, she’s still harassed by classmates, but the longer adaptation of Stephen King’s novel lets producer Mike Flanagan dig into contemporary pressures.

“You find yourself being mean to people just to protect yourself or to fit in,” Howell says. “You haven’t had the time with yourself to really figure yourself out.”

To complicate matters, Carrie’s mother, Margaret, is quite controlling.

“One of the first things Mike told me about his take on it was, ‘What if Margaret and Carrie love each other?’” says Samantha Sloyan, who plays the overprotective mother. “It just shifts those characters so fundamentally and untethered me from the story we had before. I wanted to make sure that Margaret was still dangerous and a terrifying character. But to come at those aspects through the lens of also loving her was really exciting to all of us. In some ways, that can make you scarier.”

To find her way into the story, Sloyan focused on Margaret’s inability to let her daughter grow up and how hard it can be to let her fend for herself. When telekinetic powers become part of Carrie’s coping skills, anything is possible.

By prom — a key moment in the story — “it’s like I’ve trained for this,” Howell says. “I’m like, ‘Destroy those phones.’ I’m getting to use my own sensitivity and emotions to carry it out.”

To play the moment when (spoiler alert) Carrie is covered in blood, producers took time to calculate the effect.

“They would lower a tennis ball to my head and shoot a laser at the top of it to make sure because we only had three times to dump it on me,” Howell says.

“We had two days of ‘clean’ prom and the end of one of those days, they dropped it on me. The next day we did two drops, and I had to get back into the look. Every morning, I’d get into the blood tent, the ‘Dexter’ tent as they liked to call it, and they’d apply the blood to me just perfectly. I’d stand there for 40 minutes every morning and then get to work.”

To support her, other cast members showed up to watch the messier scenes. “So that was really cool.”

Because she hadn’t seen the film, Howell didn’t know what Spacek had done.

“When I saw what Mike was doing in the writing, I got really excited to make my own version of her,” Howell says.

Sloyan had seen the film and its remakes. When Flanagan shared his take on the characters, “it allowed me to pay homage to the women who came before me” while still expanding the template. With eight episodes, “we really get to walk around them and see what makes them tick,” she says.

The new take also had King’s blessing.

“They work in tandem,” Sloyan says of King and Flanagan. “I trusted that Mike was going to treat the piece with care. From what Mike said, he wasn’t going to do ‘Carrie’ if Stephen wasn’t on board.”