Spoiler alert: Spoilers for Prime Video’s Carrie follow. If you thought you knew the story of Carrie, director Mike Flanagan has a few major surprises for you. The Prime Video adaptation, which dropped on Oct. 7, puts a fresh spin on Stephen King’s iconic 1974 horror novel, as well as the subsequent movie adaptations. In the show, we follow Carrie White, a sheltered teenager whose first experiences with high school quickly turn horrifying. But rather than meeting her tragic death in the end like she does in the original and the adaptations, Carrie escapes in a getaway car with Emaline — her astral projector friend — and leaves her small town for good.
Flanagan’s Carrie still has plenty of the elements fans recognize from King’s novel — including Carrie’s telekinetic abilities, and that infamous prom night — but the eight-episode series gives the characters considerably more room to breathe. The series format expands Carrie’s world and explores how cruelty can spread in the age of viral posts and smartphones. So no, not even Carrie is safe from cancel culture.
Naturally, that leaves fans with one very important question now that all eight episodes are streaming: Will there be a Season 2 of Carrie? The notable cliffhanger opens up a lot of doors for where Carrie could go next, particularly after expanding the mythology surrounding her supernatural abilities. Here’s everything we know about a potential Season 2 and what that finale could signal for the future of the series.
Carrie actress Summer H. Howell herself actually expressed her wishes for what a potential Season 2 could look like. “I hope a long adventure with, maybe, a true friend,” she tells Her Campus in an exclusive interview. “Just time to find her light again. To come back to that confidence that she had going into school and the excitement for life and the world. And I think we see that a little bit in my eyes at the end, but she’s full of guilt and sadness and trauma and rage. So I hope she gets to deal with that.”
Flanagan himself might not have a clear picture of how the rest of Carrie’s story will unfold yet, but he doesn’t see the Season 1 finale as the end. “The beauty of not really being beholden to the book or any of the previous adaptations is that the potential of the characters and of the greater world that she belongs to does allow [us] to look at it not as a finite story,” Flanagan told Entertainment Weekly. “I don’t speculate as to what it could be or what Amazon may want to do with it down the line.”
It’s also true that Flanagan has long been working toward adapting Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series, and he’s confirmed that Carrie definitely connects to that larger Stephen King universe. So while there may not be a specific Carrie Season 2, it’s definitely still possible that we’ll see “Carrie’s place in that bigger world,” as Flanagan told ScreenRant, in some way down the line.
For now, a second season of Carrie remains up in the air, but between the finale’s open ending, Howell’s hopes for Carrie’s future, and Flanagan’s comments, it seems like the door isn’t closed just yet. If Prime Video decides to take another trip to Chamberlain, we’ll be waiting.