Mike Flanagan settles a major debate about Carrie's season 1 finale

Who's actually responsible for the prom massacre? Carrie or... that other character?

Mike Flanagan's new Carrie show ends with prom. Because of course it does. Ending Carrie in any other way would be sacrilegious. However, the Prime Video series makes plenty of changes to the source material, and these lead to one particularly ambiguous moment right at the height of the iconic prom scene. In a Zoom interview, Polygon asked Flanagan to clarify exactly what's happening in that sequence, and his answer reveals a fascinating idea at the heart of the entire show.

Who kills everyone at prom? Carrie or Emaline?

Early on in Carrie, we're introduced to Emaline (Thalia Dudek), a high school loner who befriends Carrie (Summer Howell) and helps her hone her psychic abilities. It later becomes clear that nobody but Carrie can see Emaline, and we eventually learn that's because Emaline is using her own powers to astral project from far away. But despite not physically being at prom, Emaline still plays a major role.

After Carrie is crowned prom queen and then doused in pig's blood as the crowd of students laugh and film it on their smartphones, she unleashes her terrifying powers on them. First, she explodes their phones with a psychic blast in response to the sea of cameras pointed at her. Then, she accidentally kills her prom date, Tommy Ross (Joel Oulette), while trying to attack the people responsible for the prank as they flee from the catwalk above.

At this point, Carrie seems to hesitate. Has she already done enough, or should she go even further? Emaline then appears behind Carrie onstage and offers to take over. She seemingly gains control of Carrie's body and unleashes bloody mayhem on the entire school — students and faculty alike. Later, Carrie chases down her tormentor Chris Hargensen (Alison Thornton) and Chris' boyfriend, Billy Nolan (Arthur Conti) and murders them; in that moment, Emaline is nowhere to be seen.

So the question is: Who really killed all those people? Was it Carrie, Emaline, or both of them together?

"It's important to me that there were certain things Carrie White needed to be 100% solely responsible for," Flanagan tells Polygon. "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."

So those deaths are on Carrie, but the rest may be Emaline's doing.

"None of us believed the Carrie White we created would consciously choose to kill Principal Grayle [Matthew Lillard], would choose to kill Ms. D [Amber Midthunder], and would choose to ignite innocent people around her," Flanagan says.

"Tragedies have many authors"

For Flanagan and the rest of the writers, it was important that Carrie explored the thorny question of who is really responsible for a terrible incident like this one.

"Tragedies have many authors," Flanagan says. "We were trying to tell the story of the kaleidoscopic collection of people whose small decisions led to this moment."

He also notes that while you might think the show is a metaphor for school shootings (a topic that comes up early in the show), that was never the goal of Carrie.

"The thing about this being a tragedy in our approach, way more than a horror story, was that these are the unintended consequences of cruelty," Flanagan says. "We didn't want Carrie to be a school shooter. 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 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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Carrie is streaming now on Prime Video.