Mike Flanagan just did the thing everyone said was pointless: he remade Carrie, and it worked. It is sitting at the top of Prime Video, Stephen King calls it brilliant, and in five months he puts Scarlett Johansson in front of a demon in The Exorcist: Martyrs. Here is a fan's look at where he is, where he is going, and the three things he has made that I would defend in any argument.
I have been a Mike Flanagan fan since The Haunting of Hill House in 2018, and I have been the person telling everyone that a show about a priest on a tiny island is the best thing Netflix ever put out for almost as long.
So this has been a big week. Carrie is out, it is a hit, and the first trailer for his Exorcist film arrived the same week. It feels like a good moment to take stock.
Carrie: the remake nobody asked for, done right
All eight episodes of Carrie landed on Prime Video on October 7, after a world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 18. Flanagan created it, and directed four of the eight episodes himself. The other four went to Kate Siegel, Axelle Carolyn, Kyra Sedgwick and Hiromi Kamata. Episodes run between 48 and 59 minutes, it was shot in Vancouver between June and October 2025, and King is an executive producer.
The cast is led by Summer H. Howell as Carrie White, with Siena Agudong as Sue Snell, Alison Thornton as Chris Hargensen, Joel Oulette as Tommy Ross and Matthew Lillard as Principal Henry Grayle. And Margaret White is played by Samantha Sloyan, which, if you know Flanagan's work, is the most reassuring piece of casting news imaginable. More on her below.
What it changes, and why I think it was right to
Remaking Carrie has always looked like a losing bet, because Brian De Palma's 1976 film is close to untouchable and the 2013 remake proved how easy it is to make a pale copy. Flanagan's answer is not to copy anything. The story is moved into the present, Carrie has spent her life in seclusion with her mother and only enters public high school after her father dies, and the bullying follows her online as well as down the hallway. A social media scandal drives the plot.
The biggest swing is Margaret. In the novel and in De Palma's film she is a tyrant. Here she is fiercely loving and protective, which sounds like it should defang the story and, by most accounts, does the opposite: a mother who is wrong because she loves her daughter too much is a far more Flanagan idea than a cartoon of a zealot. He also builds out the novel's idea of other telekinetic women into a storyline of its own, and adds new characters, including Thalia Dudek as Emaline West.
That last change is the one splitting people. TechRadar called the changes ones that "will certainly divide fans", Tom's Guide gave it four stars while worrying about the expanded mythology, and Collider called it a risky expansion that does not always land. I can see the argument. But Rotten Tomatoes has it at 85% from around 110 reviews, Metacritic at 72, and Time's Judy Berman went as far as calling it the first worthwhile adaptation of the book in fifty years, which is a sentence that would have started a fight at my house a month ago.
Mike Flanagan's version of CARRIE is brilliant. What it has to say about social media is shocking and true.
Stephen King, on Threads
Prime Video does not publish viewing numbers, so I am not going to invent one. What is public is that it shot to the top of the service's charts within days of release. For a story every viewer already knows the ending of, that is the clearest sign the reinvention is working.
Next: The Exorcist: Martyrs (March 12, 2027)
If Carrie is Flanagan proving he can rebuild a classic, The Exorcist: Martyrs is the harder test. Universal has it dated for March 12, 2027. He wrote it, directed it, produced it through his company Red Room Pictures with Blumhouse-Atomic Monster and Morgan Creek, and edited it himself. It was shot in New York between March 13 and June 9 this year, and the first trailer was unveiled at New York Comic Con with Chiwetel Ejiofor on stage beside him.
Scarlett Johansson plays Julie Miller, an NYPD homicide detective who ended the run of a serial killer called Father Sunday, played by John Leguizamo, thirteen years ago. Now a new killer has written her name in an altar boy's blood on the wall of a church crypt. Ejiofor and Laurence Fishburne play priests, Diane Lane plays Julie's mother, Sasha Calle is a fellow detective and Jacobi Jupe plays Julie's son. The film ties a line of real-world killers, from H. H. Holmes to the Zodiac, to something that is not human at all.
It has been a long road. This project replaced Deceiver, the planned sequel to 2023's The Exorcist: Believer, which was scrapped in May 2024 after Believer's rough reception. Martyrs was dated for April 2025, then March 2026, and Flanagan pushed it again so he could finish Carrie first. He was blunt about it at the time: there was "no way" it was coming out that March.
What has me excited is how clearly he has said what this is not. It does not connect to Believer, every earlier film stays canon, and he has dropped the Tubular Bells theme because he felt leaning on it would mean leaning on William Friedkin's film. He told Gizmodo audiences are "not seeing any attempt to reboot or remake or to step into the Friedkin film", described the story as being about humans under the influence of evil itself, and in some cases under its direct control, and promised there is still a possession, because "it does have that one job from the title."
A serial-killer procedural that turns into an exorcist film is not what anyone expected from this franchise. After Believer, I think not what anyone expected is exactly what it needs.
And after that
Clayface, the DC horror film, opens later this month. Flanagan wrote the original script and shares the screenplay credit with Hossein Amini, though he did not direct it.
The Mist. He is writing a new adaptation of King's novella and says "the differences start page 1", because there is "zero point" in redoing Frank Darabont's 2007 film. No start date yet.
The Dark Tower. Still alive at Amazon, still without a green light. The rights to King's characters sit with different studios, and he says untangling them has taken more than a year.
How he got here
The short version of a long career: Absentia in 2011, made on almost nothing, then Oculus, which turned a haunted mirror into a genuinely upsetting film about memory. Then 2016 brought Hush, the home invasion film with a deaf heroine that he co-wrote with Kate Siegel, who stars in it, and Ouija: Origin of Evil, a prequel to a film nobody liked that turned out to be properly good.
Then came the King run. Gerald's Game in 2017 took a novel set mostly inside one woman's head and made it work on screen, which nobody thought possible. Doctor Sleep in 2019 tried to make peace between King's book and Kubrick's The Shining at the same time, and mostly did, though at about $72 million worldwide on a $45 million budget (TMDB's figures) it did not get the audience it deserved. The Life of Chuck, a King story with no horror in it at all, followed in 2025.
In between, he built the Netflix run that made his name: Hill House, Bly Manor, Midnight Mass, The Midnight Club and The Fall of the House of Usher, five series in six years. Then in late 2022 he took an overall deal at Amazon, which is how we got Carrie.
One thing that makes it all feel like one body of work is his company of actors. Samantha Sloyan was the terrifying Bev Keane in Midnight Mass, Tamerlane Usher in House of Usher, and now Margaret White. Kate Siegel, Henry Thomas, Carla Gugino and Rahul Kohli keep coming back too, and several of them, Sloyan, Siegel, Gugino and Kohli included, are in the Martyrs cast. Spotting them is half the fun.
My three best Mike Flanagan creations
This is a fan's ranking, so argue with it. The rule I used: things he created and ran himself, judged on how they hold up on a rewatch. That rule is why Doctor Sleep, which I love, is an honourable mention rather than a pick, and why Carrie is not here yet. Ask me again after a second viewing.
3The Fall of the House of Usher
Poe, a pharmaceutical dynasty, and the best villain monologues on TV.
His last Netflix series, and the most fun he has ever let himself have. Eight episodes, each built on Edgar Allan Poe, about the obscenely rich Usher family and the children of Roderick Usher dying one by one. Bruce Greenwood and Mary McDonnell play Roderick and his twin Madeline like two people who have long since stopped pretending to have consciences.
And Carla Gugino as Verna, who turns up at every death, is the performance of the whole Flanagan catalogue. It is angrier and funnier than anything else on this list, and it is the one I put on when I want to show someone that horror can be a blast.
Ten episodes about the five Crain siblings and the summer their parents moved them into Hill House, told across two timelines. Victoria Pedretti's Nell is the heart of it, and her episode, The Bent-Neck Lady, is the best single hour of horror television I have seen. Then the next episode, Two Storms, stages almost the whole hour in a handful of very long takes.
It is a show about grief that happens to be terrifying, which is the Flanagan formula in its purest form. I made the longer case for it in our five best horror TV shows, where it sits at number one.
A young man, Riley Flynn (Zach Gilford), comes home to a dying fishing island after prison, and a charismatic new priest, Father Paul (Hamish Linklater), arrives at the same time. Then miracles start happening. I am not saying another word about the plot, because going in blind is the best way to see it.
Flanagan wrote it as a novel long before anyone would make it, and fans will know the book even turned up as a prop in his earlier work, a story told in our horror TV ranking. That list put it third, behind Hill House, because it was judged as pure horror. Judged as a Mike Flanagan creation, it comes first. It is a show about faith, addiction and forgiveness that takes all three seriously, it has the long monologues people tease him about and every one of them earns its length, and Samantha Sloyan's Bev Keane is the most hateable character I have ever watched. It is also complete in seven episodes, so there is nothing to wait for. If you only ever watch one thing he made, make it this.
One evening: Gerald's Game or Hush. Both are short, contained and show exactly what he does with a single location.
A weekend: Midnight Mass. Seven episodes with a real ending.
Right now: Carrie, while everyone is talking about it.
Before March: Doctor Sleep, then The Shining, to get your head into King and Kubrick before Martyrs takes on Friedkin.
#mike flanagan#carrie#stephen king#the exorcist#the exorcist martyrs#midnight mass#the haunting of hill house#the fall of the house of usher#prime video#horror tv
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