'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."

The biggest change to Carrie is how it connects to the broader Stephen King universe.

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