Carrie Season 2 Sets Up The Perfect Crossover With 6-Year-Old Stephen King Series

Published Oct 27, 2026, 11:30 AM EDT

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Just as he did with The Haunting of Bly Manor, The Midnight Club, and The Fall of the House of Usher, the now-famous horror creator Mike Flanagan has put his signature spin on his adaptation of Stephen King's Carrie.

Throughout his tenure creating horror series for Netflix, Flanagan displayed a deep well of knowledge of the classic authors he adapted, weaving many more of their stories into his series than their titular works. He did the same with Carrie, leading King to dub Flanagan the best adaptor of his work.

With social media, parent-faculty politics, and video surveillance playing a major role in the story, Prime Video's Carrie felt like a modernized, but otherwise faithful, iteration of King's 1974 novel for most of its hit first season. However, the season was also bookended with unfamiliar characters that signaled an on-screen world bigger than that of the book.

While Carrie season 1 covered the titular book in its entirety, the season finale was far from a conclusive ending to Carrie's story. Instead, the season's final moments pivoted to the mysterious "others" who were present at the fateful prom disaster.

As promised in the pilot episode, Mike Flanagan's Carrie revealed that other people played a role in the deaths that occurred that night. A cult of other young people endowed with supernatural abilities like Carrie, led by Kate Siegel's Adelaide, arrived to rescue Carrie from Margaret and the other mother who set out to kill her.

In season 1's final moments, Carrie was whisked off into the sunset by the very real Emaline, creating a cliffhanger that leaves Carrie season 2 open to almost anything. Knowing Mike Flanagan, though, Carrie's world will surely still be full of nods to Stephen King's body of work, and one King character in particular would be a perfect fit.

Cynthia Erivo's Holly And Summer H. Howell's Carrie Would Be A Great Duo

In 2020, HBO adapted Stephen King's The Outsider and introduced Cynthia Erivo as the eccentric, endearing private investigator Holly Gibney. A common theme throughout King's work is the concept of belief and the idea that, in order to defeat a scary supernatural entity, one first has to have the open-mindedness to believe that it exists.

No character represents that better than Holly, a character who has appeared in several Stephen King stories, beginning with the 2014 novel Mr. Mercedes. Much like Carrie, Holly faces the world with honesty, innocence, and intelligence, traits that she uses to help and protect people. Holly would be a great influence on Carrie, especially in the wake of Margaret's death at the end of Carrie season 1.

So far, Carrie has painted the cult-like group that Emaline is presumably escorting Carrie towards as ominous and secretive. Though they protected Carrie from the women trying to kill her, Adelaide also killed Margaret and covered it up, while Emaline refused to tell Carrie where they were going.

At this point, the group's objectives are still unclear, but their intentions can only be so pure, especially considering the hindsight knowledge that Emaline's violent urgings were coming from a real person and not Carrie's own subconscious. Holly would be a great person to accurately size up that situation and take Carrie under her wing, keeping the wholesome girl from being misled.

Mike Flanagan's Carrie Has Already Nodded To A Wider Stephen King Universe

By making significant deviations from the book, Mike Flanagan's Carrie has already indicated that it intends to build a story that goes beyond its source material. There are also some indicators that the show will, in true Flanagan fashion, incorporate other elements, characters, and devices from Stephen King's work rather than going completely rogue.

Carrie season 1 ended with the reveal that Margaret, too, possessed some of Carrie's telekinetic abilities, to which Adelaide replied that a "lot of people have a little bit of shine." The use of the word "shine" is a reference to not only to The Shining, but also to several Stephen King stories in which the author uses that phrase to describe the use or possession of supernatural abilities.

The word "shine" implies that Carrie takes place in the larger Stephen King universe, a place where Holly Gibney appears frequently.

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  Summer H. Howell

  Carrie White

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  Samantha Sloyan

  Margaret White