Like you, I received the news that horror supremo Mike Flanagan was working on a TV series based on Stephen King’s Carrie with confusion and an eye roll. I love Flanagan’s work—Netflix series Midnight Mass, The Fall of the House of Usher and The Haunting of Hill House are all utterly extraordinary—and his passion and understanding of why Stephen King’s books are special shone through in Gerald’s Game, The Life of Chuck, and even the peculiarly Kubrick-besotted Doctor Sleep. I also can’t wait to see what he does with The Dark Tower, especially after Nikolakj Arcel’s absymal 2017 attempt starring Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey. But if Flanagan is going to adapt more of King’s work for television, why not books that have never been tried like Insomnia or Rose Madder, or those that were done atrociously like Needful Things and Dreamcatcher?

But why Carrie ? The 1974 novel is a stunning debut from King, and only two years later it received its definitive on-screen interpretation via Brian De Palma’s extraordinary movie of the same name. Every subsequent adaptation of the book has been an embarrassment, a pale imitation of De Palma’s masterpiece. 1999’s execrable The Rage: Carrie 2 went so far as to actually include short clips from the 1976 movie, cruelly teasing audiences with reminders of the film we weren’t watching. In 2002 NBC had the usually excellent Bryan Fuller ( Wonder Falls , Hannibal ) write a TV movie which was cheekily turned into a backdoor pilot, and that bombed.

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