Summer H. Howell, the actress who grew up in horror and now plays Carrie

Summer H. Howell

Photo: Gabriel Hutchinson / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	May 22, 2004 Manitoba, Canada
Occupation	Actress
Known for	Clouds, Normal, Curse of Chucky

For half a century, playing Carrie White has meant playing fear: the hunched shoulders, the flinch, the girl already braced for the next humiliation. Summer H. Howell was hired to do the opposite. In Mike Flanagan’s eight-episode Carrie for Prime Video, her Carrie walks into high school curious and unguarded, a teenager who has never learned to expect cruelty because she has never been allowed out of the house. It is a strange assignment for an actress who has spent almost her entire working life inside horror films, and it is the reason a name known mostly to genre audiences is now attached to one of the most famous roles Stephen King ever wrote.

Howell, a Canadian from Manitoba, did not set out to act. Her older brother, Chase Howell, was the one going to auditions; she tagged along, and a casting director noticed her. Her first job, at nine, was a Crest toothpaste commercial. Her first feature was a horror film.

Don Mancini, the creator of Chucky, cast her as Alice Pierce in Curse of Chucky (2013), the little girl in the house where the doll is delivered, after she won him over at the audition. She came back to the part four years later in Cult of Chucky. In between she worked for the Japanese director Mamoru Oshii in the science-fantasy film Garm Wars: The Last Druid, played the young Anna in the occult horror The Midnight Man, and appeared as eleven-year-old Margot in three episodes of the Syfy anthology Channel Zero. Before she was a teenager, most of her screen time had been spent in the dark.

The year 2020 brought her the two roles that showed more range. In Shawn Linden’s wilderness thriller Hunter Hunter, she was Renee, the daughter left in a remote cabin with her mother while her father, a fur trapper, hunts a rogue wolf, in a cast led by Camille Sullivan, Devon Sawa and Nick Stahl. The same year she played Grace Sobiech, the younger sister of the dying songwriter Zach Sobiech, in Justin Baldoni’s Disney+ drama Clouds, opposite Fin Argus, Sabrina Carpenter and Neve Campbell. Sullivan has since become a recurring screen partner: the two appeared together again in Harland Manor and, this year, in Sundown.

The years that followed were the working actor’s circuit of Canadian production. Linden directed her again in Abducted by My Teacher: The Elizabeth Thomas Story, a Lifetime film executive-produced by Elizabeth Smart, in which Howell played the Tennessee teenager kidnapped by her teacher in 2017. She took smaller parts in bigger titles, among them the Netflix time-travel slasher Time Cut, the supernatural horror All Fun and Games with Asa Butterfield and Natalia Dyer, and Ben Wheatley’s crime thriller Normal with Bob Odenkirk. In Brandon Christensen’s small-town slasher Night of the Reaper she played Emily Golding.

Then came the casting call that turned the circuit into a career. Flanagan, who had already adapted King three times, auditioned more than 1,400 actresses for Carrie. “It’s still to this day the most intense casting experience of my career,” he said. Howell had never read the novel and had not seen Brian De Palma‘s film, and Flanagan decided she should keep it that way rather than study Sissy Spacek. Her first conversation with him fell on April Fools’ Day, and she assumed the offer was a prank. Variety reported her in talks in April 2025; Deadline confirmed the casting in June, with Samantha Sloyan as her mother, Margaret, and the series shot in Vancouver from June to October that year.

What Flanagan wanted, in his words, was “curiosity and openness and earnestness and kindness instead of the paralyzed terror that we’ve always seen from Carrie White.” Howell put it more simply: “A big part of my Carrie is that she’s open and curious about the world and wants to experience things.”

The framing around her deserves some scepticism. The press narrative of a discovery plucked from 1,400 hopefuls skips the thirteen years she had already spent on sets; this is a veteran’s break, earned in exactly the low-budget genre work that rarely gets reviewed. The comparison she was told to avoid is also the one she cannot escape. The production admitted that she looks strikingly like Spacek did in 1976 and chose to live with it, which means every review measures her against an Oscar-nominated performance she deliberately never watched. And the series surrounding her divides critics. Collider called her take “even quieter” than earlier Carries but argued that Flanagan’s expansion, with telekinetic women scattered through history and around the world, strips away some of the story’s mystique. A performance built on openness can end up judged by the show’s bigger structural gambles, and Flanagan’s own talk of a three-season “dream scenario” remains a wish, not an order.

For now the reception has been on her side. Carrie premiered in the Primetime section of the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2026 before all eight episodes arrived on Prime Video in October, and reviewers singled out Howell and Sloyan; the series held an 86 percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes ahead of its release. Weeks earlier, Rebekah McKendry’s Sundown, a vampire film about three generations of women who take revenge for a death in the family and then find their captive’s relatives waiting for nightfall, premiered at the Locarno Film Festival, with Howell alongside Olwen Fouéré and Sullivan and Slash among its executive producers. It is headed to Shudder.

Next is Runaway, an independent action thriller from director James C. Clayton, now in post-production. Howell plays the teenage runaway of the title, carrying evidence of a small town’s crimes, protected by a detective played by Josh Duhamel and hunted by a corrupt sheriff played by James Franco. It is another girl in danger. The difference now is that the audience arriving to watch her already knows she can play a girl who is not afraid.

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Tags: actors, actresses, Stephen King, Mike Flanagan, Carrie, Curse of Chucky, Samantha Sloyan, Summer H. Howell

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