Mike Flanagan’s Carrie Introduces Dark Tower Easter Egg Only Big Stephen King Fans Noticed

Mike Flanagan is heading to Prime Video with “Carrie,” a new take on Stephen King’s classic horror novel about a young girl with telekinetic abilities who discovers that high school is a living hell. The series has proven to be quite polarizing, with reviews like /Film’s saying that this adaptation changes enough that it often doesn’t feel like “Carrie.” Indeed, Flanagan’s take includes significant characterization changes for many of the players in the classic tale, particularly Carrie’s bullies and her mother, while taking elements from the novel and using them to expand Carrie’s powers and take them in an entirely new direction.

The result is a story that is still recognizably “Carrie” (even bringing the book’s oft-forgotten epistolary elements to the screen), while giving the story a uniquely Flanagan twist. What’s most curious is how Flanagan develops the story in a way that clearly sets up a second season. Flanagan, after all, hopes to realize his dream project in “The Dark Tower,” a book series that notably connects many of Stephen King’s works.

That is to say, we shouldn’t be surprised that “Carrie” presents an Easter egg to “The Dark Tower,” one that only big Stephen King fans can clock. This happens at the start of the very first episode of the season, as we follow Carrie’s father to his workplace at a construction site where he later dies. In the background of one shot, we see a sign indicating that the construction site is a LaMerk Industries project. King fans may recognize this name from “The Dark Tower”, where LaMerk is a metal company allied with the Crimson King in his quest to destroy the tower. In the books, LaMerk usually works creating robots, although in “Carrie” they seem more interested in real estate.

Here’s the deal. Mike Flanagan has been working on “The Dark Tower” for a while, and the main reason the project has been so slow is the complex and ridiculously complex licensing deals for the various Stephen King properties. Until this issue is resolved, Flanagan can’t really move forward in production.

That being said, it’s entirely possible that Flanagan is wasting no time and is already building a Stephen King TV universe with what’s available to him currently — starting with “Carrie.” We see this with the end of the first season of the series, which opens up into a larger universe focused on mediums – of which there are many works in Stephen King’s library. It would be poetic if “Carrie,” King’s first book to be published, was the series from which an entire King TV universe was born. And it’s not like it would contradict or impact the eventual “The Dark Tower” series in any way. Flanagan can simply find other King novels to adapt this piece to the ideas he introduced in “Carrie,” slowly weaving them together in the same way that “Welcome to Derry” connects “It” to “The Shining” without contradicting any of the sources – while still building the “Dark Tower.”

And it’s not the only Easter egg in King’s 8-part series, either. In a later episode, we see Billy Nolan feeding his pet and we see a tattoo on his arm that bears an uncanny resemblance to the Eye of the Crimson King symbol.