To Carrie on an icon Manitoba’s own takes on biggest role yet as Stephen King’s telekinetic teen By: Randall King Posted: 3:49 PM CDT Friday, Oct. 2, 2026

From the tender age of eight, actress Summer Howell has made her presence known in a series of horror films shot in her home province of Manitoba.

Her first film was Curse of Chucky (2013), director Don Mancini’s continuation of the venerable killer doll series he started (as a screenwriter) in 1988 with Child’s Play.

“Even then, it was obvious she was very talented, intelligent and delightful,” Mancini said of Howell.

Though she has worked in other genres, Howell gravitated to horror repeatedly, with credits in Shawn Linden’s harrowing Hunter Hunter (2020) and the 2023 possession thriller All Fun and Games. Earlier this year, she shot the horror film Sundown in Winnipeg with director Rebekah McKendry, which premièred last week at Beyond Fest in Los Angeles and is headed for a streaming berth on Shudder.

At 22, Howell is now preparing for the imminent release of her most important, high-profile role yet, playing Stephen King’s troubled telekinetic teen Carrie White in horror director Mike Flanagan’s eight-episode series Carrie, premièring on Prime on Wednesday.

Flanagan (The Haunting of Hill House), interviewed in a Zoom call from Toronto, where the first two episodes of the series premièred at the Toronto International Film Festival, says Howell won the part over some 1,400 contenders.

“The most difficult casting of my career was finding Carrie White,” Flanagan says.

“Summer had put herself on tape. She self-taped and just kept kind of moving up the rounds and floated to the top the way the system is supposed to work. She immediately brought something I’d never seen in any of the other 1,400 candidates, which is just something that Summer Howell has in her bones, which is an earnestness and empathy and a kindness that doesn’t feel naive, and that defined the character for me.”

Flanagan adds that he had unknowingly seen some of Howell’s work, having watched Hunter Hunter and Chucky.

“But I didn’t put that together until after I cast her.”

Also interviewed via Zoom from Toronto, Howell says the fact she still lives with her family in St. Andrews helped her slide into the role of Carrie, who, at the series’ beginning, has a loving relationship with her mother Margaret (Samantha Sloyan, a frequent Flanagan collaborator), in contrast to past iterations of the relationship, in which Margaret is portrayed as more of a malignant religious fanatic.

“It definitely helps in ways, still being at home with my parents and having that family dynamic, especially because I love them so much,” Howell says.

“My Carrie is different from the past Carries because her family is built from love. So a lot of the division that comes with the story and the issues between her and her mom are after she’s been out of the house and in school and seeing how other people are treated and how her upbringing has been different.

“But it all comes from love. Margaret is fearful for her daughter and the world and just wants to protect her so bad that it pushes her to places she probably shouldn’t go.”

Howell worked on a season of the horror series Channel Zero, but the sheer amount of her work on Carrie was unprecedented.

“I’ve maybe made small appearances in other TV things, but this was substantial, definitely the biggest role I’ve done,” Howell says. “I feel like I’ve been working towards it my whole life and just slowly pulling it towards me.”

After the series wrapped its shoot in October of last year in Vancouver, Flanagan hosted a special screening of Brian De Palma’s 1976 original version of Carrie at the Rio Theatre, which allowed her to check out Sissy Spacek’s interpretation of the role.

“It was an incredible night,” Howell says. “I didn’t really know what to expect. I’d been told certain things, but it was wild having filmed my whole version of Carrie in a television format and then seeing the roots of her, where she came from, and why it’s an iconic thing.

“People loved Sissy and they love the film,” she says. “And I understand now. She’s incredible.”

randall.king.arts@gmail.com

 

Carrie, made contemporary

After director Mike Flanagan had already adapted three Stephen King stories on film — The Life of Chuck, Gerald’s Game and Doctor Sleep — he felt comfortable enough to overhaul one of the horror master’s most popular stories, his debut Carrie, which was published back in 1974.

His eight-episode adaptation of Carrie contemporizes the horror of the original. One pivotal scene sees Carrie (Summer Howell) forced to endure an active-shooter drill in the high school she has just entered, without understanding that it is only a drill.

Later, when she suffers the shower room humiliation Carrie experienced in both the novel and the first film, the humiliation is exponentially exacerbated by social media.

Those new elements were a reaction to Flanagan’s personal experience with the horrors of the American school system.

When he was contemplating taking on Carrie as a miniseries, he recalls, his oldest son was getting ready to start high school.

“And when I was bringing my kids to school in the U.S., I was frequently dropping them off in a place with barbed wire, watching them go through metal detectors and being notified that they would be doing active shooter drills, which for them and their generation in the U.S. is very normal,” Flanagan says. “And I know for the rest of the world, it’s very strange.

“One of the big reliefs I had when my family was working in Vancouver and my kids were going to school there was to drop them off in an environment where I felt safe leaving them, knowing that they weren’t going to be going through that.”

For that reason, Flanagan moved to Canada and got his permanent resident card last year.

“It took me years to get it. So shooting in Vancouver for me is now shooting at home, which I’m so excited about.”

Flanagan is following in the footsteps of another American horror film director Eli Craig (Clown in a Cornfield), who likewise moved to Vancouver in 2018.

“My fifth-grader — at the time — was in a couple of lockdowns in Los Angeles where there was a gun-toting maniac on campus,” Craig told the Free Press last year.

“And I just thought: We’re done with this. Let’s move.”

“It’s the definition of horror, I think, to imagine that kind of violence occurring in what is supposed to be a safe place where kids are learning,” Flanagan says.

“You can talk about monsters and ghosts and vampires all you want. Real horror is that.”

— Randall King