Writing
Compared to most projects based on King's novels where stories have to be compressed, Flanagan acknowledged that, because the original Carrie novel is one of King's shortest books plus the fact that they would adapt it into an eight-episode miniseries, they had to expand the novel to tell Carrie White's story in a longform way. Despite the project's announcement as an adaptation, Flanagan never saw it as a straight one given how he deemed Brian De Palma as having adapted the story "faithfully and beautifully" in Carrie (1976), which was followed by a sequel The Rage: Carrie 2 (1999) and two more adaptations, which were Carrie (2002) and Carrie (2013), both "officially and unofficially", in addition to being imitated "scores of times", so for Flanagan, the only way he could approach a new version was to build something new out of the story's ingredients, as otherwise, there was really no purpose in trying to retread ground of something previously done.
For Flanagan, the themes King talked about in the original novel published in the 1970s of kindness versus cruelty, empathy and bullying or school violence have since become even more relevant by the 2020s more than the author could have contemplated because of society's relationship with technology and the degree to which violence encroaches high schoolers, especially in the United States of America, giving them the opportunity to tell a story about a modern teenage experience that could use the seeds of King's characters but express them in a completely different way. Unlike previous versions, Flanagan's version of Carrie White has spent her life hidden away at home with her mother Margaret, with the state not even knowing of their existence until the sudden death of Carrie's father and Margaret's husband Ralph, forcing a spotlight onto their household that prompts Carrie to enter public school for the first time in her life. Whereas De Palma's Carrie was a "clenched first who's absolutely shaking out there in the world", Flanagan's Carrie is "wide open", "eager", "curious" and "earnest", walking into teen age without without any sense of danger but with the innate trust in people and goodness. Likewise, in contrast to the tyrannical parental abuser she was in King's novel and De Palma's film, Margaret is a woman who fiercely loves her daughter and wants to protect her from the world's dangers which she is aware unlike her daughter, so she thinks because of her lack of knowledge on how to do so that the best way to protect her is to close her off not punitively but by creating a private utopia where Carrie exists curiously, earnestly, and wide open as she protects her from the world, giving them a completely different dynamic. Although the serialized miniseries includes differences to the original novel, Flanagan confirmed that core events from the original story like familiar characters will still be mantained, like Chris Hargensen, Sue Snell, Tommy Ross, Billy Nolan, Rita Desjardin, Principal Grayle and Tina Blake among others, though new characters also appear such as one named Emaline.
In regards to other of the book's stables, the period scene at the bathroom that sets off the wave of bullying at Carrie and the Black Prom will be mantained as well, but Flanagan prefaced that the story will get there in completely different ways, with the prom's events completely different in that regard, which he remarked a wonderfully delicious and irresistible opportunity for someone when adapting material from its source. He did feel intimidated upon bringing up his concept to King, as he knows that changing things in adaptation requires an enormous amount of change, invention and re-contextualization, but concluded that was why he wanted to tackle on the project. As for his expansion plans, Flanagan further built out from the book's mythology, using its often underused moments as launching pads, like how previous adaptations such as De Palma's ignored various chapters including panicked 911 calls, police reports, courtroom testimonies and scientific investigations that attempted to explain Carrie's phenomenon, which implied Carrie was part of a sorority of very gifted women who had telekinetic powers. Flanagan opted to pick up and run with that plot point starting from the second episode, depicting a different, unique story of a different woman somewhere in the world coming to terms with her abilities while Carrie finds her specific place among them over the season.
