Mike Flanagan's Timely Carrie Is the First Worthwhile Adaptation in 50 Years

Everyone knows what happens in Carrie. Fifty-two years after its publication, the novel that ignited Stephen King’s career has so thoroughly engulfed the culture, you’d have to be almost as sheltered as Carietta White herself not to have absorbed its most indelible images. The locker-room tampon gauntlet and “Plug it up!” chant. Carrie’s smothering holy-roller mom, locking her up in prayer-closet solitary confinement. The eerily unlikely prom date. The swinging bucket that has haunted every coronation of school-dance royalty in film and TV since Brian De Palma first adapted the book in 1976.

It’s a tale as old as time: Warped by her mother’s zealotry and scapegoated since childhood by her classmates, 16-year-old Carrie has a late, traumatic menarche that reactivates her latent telekinetic abilities. Then, after accepting a pity date to the prom, she’s crowned queen and immediately gets pig’s blood dumped on her head by a resentful bully. The humiliation causes her to lay waste to the school and then the town, using her powers to exact revenge.

King’s book and De Palma’s film became classics of the horror genre. No less venerable a critic than Pauline Kael wrote of Sissy Spacek’s Oscar-nominated portrayal: “I don’t see how this performance could be any better.” Yet in the 21st century, new interpreters keep trying to improve upon it. With platforms scrambling to capitalize on popular IP, it’s no mystery why this would sound like a good idea to Hollywood executives. But something else must be inspiring high-minded filmmakers like Boys Don’t Cry director Kimberly Peirce, who released a divisive remake in 2013, to keep resurrecting Carrie.

The fourth screen adaptation of the novel (unless you count the pitiful 1999 sequel, The Rage: Carrie 2) is an eight-episode Prime Video series created by Mike Flanagan, who is known both for riffing on horror touchstones in Netflix hits like The Haunting of Hill Houseand The Fall of the House of Usherand for his features based on King novels like Gerald’s Game and Doctor Sleep. Premiering Oct. 7, his ambitious Carrie is the first that manages to fully get out from under the shadow of De Palma’s. Yet it confirms a gradual shift in how the story is being told. What was once an account of an abusive mother and an evil bully unwittingly uniting to create a lethal monster has become, with each new incarnation, more like an indictment of society as a whole.

All three Carrie moviesare mostly faithful to the novel, dutifully reproducing every major plot point and set piece, as well as a lot of dialogue. King’s writing is remarkably cinematic, which is probably why he’s our most adapted living author. But every Carrie is also a product of its time. De Palma, whose masterfully crafted version turns 50 in November, seems to lust after and fear the female body in equal measure—a common response within what was then a male-dominated genre to the feminist upheavals of the ’70s. It’s hard to imagine a contemporary adaptation pairing its opening credits with a steamy, slow-motion parade of nude high school girls in their locker room. A 2002 made-for-TV movie written by cult creator Bryan Fuller (Hannibal) is a relic of an era when the only things teen girls loved more than low-rise denim were movies where female misfits get glow ups (She’s All That, 10 Things I Hate About You, Jawbreaker). Just over a decade later, Peirce incorporated smartphones and YouTube, as well as an emerging pop-feminist sensibility that traced the derangement of Carrie’s mom, Margaret (played here by Julianne Moore), to childbirth trauma and found a palpably empowered Carrie actively choosing who to kill and who to save.

You can find support for each of these readings in King’s own reflections. “The book is, in its more adult implications, an uneasy masculine shrinking from a future of female equality,” he wrote in his 1981 nonfiction book Danse Macabre. “For me, Carrie White is a sadly misused teenager, an example of the sort of person whose spirit is so often broken for good in that pit of man- and woman-eaters that is your normal suburban high school. But she's also Woman, feeling her powers for the first time and, like Samson, pulling down the temple on everyone in sight.” In her influential 1992 study Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, the scholar Carol J. Clover suggests that this tangle of intentions explains the broad and, in some ways, contradictory appeal of Carrie across genders. Its protagonist is, at once, a projection of female power and male fear and the universal horror of bullying.

Despite feeling mostly redundant, the two features released after Clover’s book shared a new emphasis. De Palma’s stylish ’70s chiller played up the ghoulishness of Margaret (a bellowing, vicious Piper Laurie) and of Carrie’s chief tormentor at school, the sadistic mean girl Chris Hargensen (Nancy Allen), as well as the otherworldly oddness of Spacek’s lead. But Fuller’s and especially Peirce’s films sand down those characters’ excesses, revealing motivations and vulnerabilities that make them harder to hate or fear. (The latter faced criticism for casting the conventionally beautiful, preternaturally confident Chloë Grace Moretz in the title role.) At the same time, we see the condescending assumptions behind the actions of ostensibly heroic figures like Sue Snell, the popular girl who tries to atone for hazing Carrie by sending her boyfriend to the prom with her. In these movies, Carrie’s reign of terror is the ultimate expression of the school’s brokenness. As the critic Matt Zoller Seitz wrote in a favorable review of the 2013 version: “The first Carrie was horror. This is tragedy.”

If the 21st century Carrie movies spoke to a post-Columbine era of school shootings, then Flanagan’s series is a product of the Trump decade, in which seemingly every aspect of American life has fractured along bipartisan political lines. The educational realm has become a crucible for debates around censorship, technology, parental rights, gun control, LGBTQ inclusion, critical race theory, the teaching of science vs. religion, social media. Which explains how Flanagan and his creative team, which includes many female writers and directors, found in this slight story eight episodes’ worth of material.

Without omitting any of the moments King fans will anticipate, they depart pretty boldly from the text. This Carrie opens with the death of Carrie’s conspiracy-theorist father (who, in previous versions, she never got to know) in a bizarre accident on his construction site. Somehow, no one knows he had a wife (Flanagan regular Samantha Sloyan, locating the wounded soul of a character who’s always been more of a caricature) and daughter (a movingly fragile Summer H. Howell) until they’re found cowering at home, in the closet where they pray. The previously homeschooled Carrie is forced to enroll at the local public high school while Margaret gets a job at a soulless big-box store, where her refusal to ring up a sex toy gets her demoted to cleaning toilets.

An almost saintly figure who believes in kindness most of all, Carrie develops complicated friendships with smart, benevolent Sue (Siena Agudong) and Chris (Alison Thornton)—who has been spiraling since her mom moved in with a classmate’s dad and her own father’s financial woes have jeopardized her college plans. What she doesn’t know is that Chris is behind an anonymous social media account that posted footage of her locker-room nightmare before expanding to target practically everyone at school, teachers included. A constant nuisance to the administration, Margaret harangues Principal Grayle (Matthew Lillard) to intervene. But he dithers, questioning whether the free speech of kids on a platform external to school is his jurisdiction.

The problem isn’t that Grayle doesn’t care; he’s a kindhearted guy who wants the best for his students. So do other adults, like the girls’ young gym teacher (Amber Midthunder), who’s horrified by the “Plug it up!” incident, and empathetic school counselor (Somebody Somewheresweetheart Tim Bagley). Even Margaret, an archetypal Karen with MAHA tendencies who becomes a vlogging parents’ rights crusader, is sincerely trying to help a daughter she cherishes. She’s not wrong to point out that a world where, for example, children are shot in their classrooms is an abomination. But meaning well is not enough. Fights, protests, and parental panics ensue. By prom night, whose carnage is now so unsurprising that Flanagan flashes forward to it in the opening scene, the place has already metaphorically exploded. Carrie only makes it literal.

For everything of value it adds to the story, Flanagan’s take can still feel a bit cluttered. There are too many interconnected framing devices, from on-camera interviews with survivors of Carrie’s massacre to history lessons on Joan of Arc. If you watched House of Usher, which filters the downfall of a Sackler-like family of opioid profiteers through the sieve of Poe’s Gothic tale, you’re probably aware that Flanagan’s social commentary can be blunt. His Carrie can get bogged down in meetings and assemblies where characters representing different facets of Trump-era vitriol and complacency monologue on what’s really wrong with the world today.

Yet at the core of this series is a perceptive diagnosis of that problem. More than individual bad actors who need to be brought down, there are people like Grayle and Margaret and Sue, whose pure intentions are undermined by complacency, indecision, disinformation, conformity, fear—all of it amplified to a potentially global scale by social media. Even Chris is lashing out as a direct result of her family’s dissolution and her father’s money troubles, which erode the class privileges to which she feels entitled. Amid extreme rhetoric, Flanagan implies, everyone who doesn’t work hard to avert atrocities is complicit in them. And there's precious little evidence that most of us are doing much to examine that complicity. Tragedy becomes, specifically, a tragedy of the commons as selfishness metastasizes into a scourge on the entire town. And Carrie becomes something between Frankenstein’s monster and Jesus Christ: an innocent persecuted for the sins of all mankind, but one whose all-too-human impulse to seek retribution incinerates any hope of forgiveness.