Carrie: Is Ewen High School Based on a Real School?

Prime Video’s ‘Carrie,’ created by Mike Flanagan, and adapted from Stephen King’s eponymous novel, follows Carietta “Carrie” White, who has just entered Ewen High School following the death of her father. Coming from an abusive household and having been homeschooled her whole life, Ewen becomes her window to a normal life. But she is wholly unprepared for the bullying environment and the sweeping changes she will have to adapt to. Triggered by harsh treatment from her classmates, Carrie unlocks her supernatural powers, and the school soon becomes a space for her defiance and transformation, one that becomes increasingly terrifying.

Ewen High School is the Fictional Setting of Stephen King’s Classic Novel

Ewen High School is a modern-day reimagining of the eponymous school depicted in Stephen King’s horror novel ‘Carrie.’ In many ways, the story begins and ends at Ewen, which ties its narrative significance to the very foundations of the novel. Its roots can be traced back to King’s own experience of Maine high schools, given that he attended Lisbon Falls High School while growing up in the nearby town of Durham, Maine. Later on, the writer worked as a high school teacher and janitor, and it was around this time that the premise of ‘Carrie’ began to take shape in his mind. Reportedly, while working, he encountered a girls’ locker room whose shower arrangement gave him the idea for the novel’s opening stretch, which ends up bringing in social commentary about menstrual awareness.

Over the years, Ewen High School has been adapted and altered across the many adaptations of ‘Carrie’ in film and other formats. In the 197c film adaptation, for instance, the school is renamed Bates High School, as a nod to Norman Bates from Alfred Hitchcock‘s ‘Psycho.’ Despite these major and minor alterations, however, the school retains its narrative function and sense of realism. In the Prime Video TV series, the real-life Eric Hamber Secondary School, located at 960 West 33rd Avenue in Vancouver, British Columbia, is transformed into the fictional Ewen High School, with real backdrops enhancing immersion and expanding the thematic scope into contemporary times.

Mike Flanagan’s Spin on the School Weaves in Modern-Day Social Commentary

While Stephen King’s time as a janitor is one of the many inspirations that led him to pen ‘Carrie,’ it is most significant when it comes to informing the setting, that is, Ewen High School. That said, King has never drawn any direct connections between the school in his book and any real-life school, and this trend continues in the TV adaptation developed by Mike Flanagan. Given that the show specifically takes place in contemporary times, it also weaves in substantial amounts of additional social commentary, be it critiquing bullying or highlighting the negative aftereffects of blindly chasing after social media trends and phenomena.

The reason for such a drastic shift in the narrative is largely personal, as Flanagan noted in an interview with The Times. When his son entered high school, it made him revisit the novel and analyze how much the teenage experience had changed and morphed over the decades. This is why Flanagan’s take on the school brings a string of more realistic anxieties to life through its depiction of cyberbullying and active shooter drills, among other details. In doing so, Ewen serves as a representative of the many negative aspects of an abusive high school experience, dramatized through the use of a creative construct. The school itself, however, remains fictional in nature, which is essential to maintaining the universal quality of its social commentary.

Read More: Where is Prime Video’s Carrie Filmed? All Shooting Locations