Mike Flanagan clarifies if Carrie or Emaline are responsible for his TV show’s messy ending

Mike Flanagan’s new TV adaption of Carrie on Prime Video has a very different ending to the original Stephen King book. In the actual novel, Carrie alone goes on a rampage that kills 458 people (although, readers can debate at length whose fault the whole thing is). However, in Mike Flanagan’s version of Carrie, a new character called Emaline West pops up at the prom in the ending. That final episode gets very messy (literally) and a bit hard to follow. Thankfully, Mike Flanagan has clarified precisely which deaths are on Carrie, and which parts of the ending are Emaline’s responsibility.

In the TV show, Carrie is responsible for three people’s endings

Mike Flanagan told Polygon: “It’s important to me that there were certain things Carrie White needed to be 100 per cent solely responsible for. No one but Carrie White can be blamed for killing Tommy Ross. No one but Carrie White can be blamed for killing Billy Nolan and Chris Hargensen.

“We were very careful to make sure Emaline was way off to the side while Carrie looked Chris in the eye and made the decision to crush her alive.”

However, the rest are on Emaline

In Stephen King‘s book, Carrie directly kills some people at the high school, and indirectly kills even more by electrocuting them with power lines, then causing a gas station to explode and set the town on fire.

However, Mike Flanagan considers his character Emaline responsible for most of these killings, not Carrie. Emaline uses her astral projection powers to take over Carrie’s body. Carrie isn’t aware of what’s going on.

Mike Flanagan told Polygon: “None of us believed the Carrie White we created would consciously choose to kill Principal Grayle, would choose to kill Ms. D, and would choose to ignite innocent people around her.”

Flanagan believes “tragedies have many authors”, and he wanted his interpretation of Carrie to show “the unintended consequences of cruelty”.

He explained: “We wanted her to be someone pushed to the brink who explodes in a way that isn’t necessarily controllable, but who isn’t callous to the lives of the people around her, because that isn’t the character Summer [H Howell] created. It isn’t the character that she’s been for all seven episodes leading up to that moment. That just isn’t who she is.

“And so the complexity of that culpability, and the kind of prismatic look at the tragedy of it, became an opportunity for us to present a prom scene that wasn’t what we’ve seen before.”

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Featured image credit: Prime Video