Carrie White is a character that looms large in horror. Since her introduction in Stephen King’s eponymous 1974 novel and her immortalization by Sissy Spacek in Brian De Palma’s adaptation, Carrie has been a sort of fairy ghoulmother for women in the genre, and a somewhat untouchable one at that. Horror is constantly being reapplied to the current moment, resulting in a plethora of remakes and reboots. Carrie, however, has been revisited with somewhat sparing restraint. In the 50 years since her inception, she had only been reincarnated three times before celebrated horror auteur and frequent King adapter Mike Flanagan took a stab at her, so to speak, in the Prime Video series which premiered earlier this month.

The eight-episode series, (which has now been renewed for a second season) is set in the present day and throws a whole host of issues at Summer H. Howell’s Gen Z version Carrie in addition to the menstrual products hurled by her classmates in the iconic locker room scene. This Carrie has to contend with cyberbullying and the online radicalization of her own parent, the chilling Margaret White (Samantha Sloyan). In contrast to the original story’s timid, frightened Carrie, this version never lets it affect her open and curious nature—until she does.

Makeup department lead Krista Young and hair department lead Julie McHaffie used this modern characterization of Carrie to guide their approach to her appearance, wanting to create a new character separate from her previous iterations. “I needed to show a difference between the insular Carrie and Margaret and the greater world outside which they’d been so sheltered from. That was the most important thing that I was trying to express,” Young tells The Set Set.

Young did this by hewing closely to the actors’ own style. “It was all based on who they cast,” explains McHaffie. “The hair that we got was the hair that we used, with the exception of Alison (Thornton) who played Chris. She’s a brunette, and Mike really wanted her to be blonde, so we had a complete color change. But really we worked with each individual and created from there.”

Where Young and McHaffie were really able to play was with some of the supporting characters and, in this case, a completely new character created for the series. Emaline West (Thalia Dudek) is a fellow outcast student who befriends Carrie and begins to indulge some of her darker impulses. This was reflected first in Emaline’s costumes, which are grayscale to reflect the moral ambiguity of the character. “We thought of her makeup as a uniform as opposed to an adornment,” says Young. “It was a hard black rim around her eyes, no lip color. We didn’t even need to use foundation on her. It was really just staying in those grey areas.”

Dudek came in with grown-out bleach, a look McHaffie wanted to keep, so it was a process of returning to the salon every couple of weeks to maintain the exact length of grown-out-ness. They refined Dudek’s cut with a razor to create a punkier style. Also sporting a punk aesthetic is Margaret’s manager at the big box store where she’s forced to work after the death of her husband. This affronts every fiber of Margaret’s being, so Flanagan urged McHaffie and Young to go extreme, creating tattoos, piercings, and hair extensions for the character. At one point, the camera pans up and down her body, following Margaret’s gaze of disapproval and disgust, picking up all these details.

For the prom scene, McHaffie ceded most of the control to Young’s makeup team as they were tasked with the application of the infamous pig’s blood on Howell’s face, hair, and body at the end of each shoot. They filmed the prom for two weeks, did the climactic blood drop four times, and Young estimates they applied blood to Howell in various scenarios outside of the prom, such as at Carrie’s house and in the streets, 12 times.

“Every time you see Carrie in blood, it was hand-applied by myself and my key makeup artist, Brooke Fenton,” Young says. “I would start out with a slightly thinned amount of the blood which I would pour over Summer. She wore swimming goggles to protect her eyes. Each application took Brooke and I about 45 minutes with squeeze bottles of blood and reference photos which we would painstakingly match.”

Both Young, a frequent Flanagan collaborator, and McHaffie—for whom “Carrie” was her first time working within the “Flanaverse”—had local Canadian hair stylists and makeup artists contacting them, wanting to work on the show. Luckily, a 200-person prom was the perfect occasion. Young brought on about 10 makeup artists and McHaffie 20 for these consequential scenes. It remains to be seen whether such large teams will be required to apply equal amounts of glam and gore when “Carrie” returns for season two, extending Carrie White’s story and opening up a potential Stephen King universe kicked off by Carrie’s telekinetic event at the prom.