The Original Movie Is History’s Best Stephen King Adaptation. Now This Century’s Premier King Adapter Offers an Exciting New Vision.
Slate · L · trust 29/100
I’m quite certain I’m not the only American boy who first learned what menstruation was from the opening pages of Stephen King’s Carrie . I had just started sixth grade, at a new middle school with a library full of books that would have never been allowed on the shelves of my elementary school. Carrie was one of these; I picked it up knowing nothing about it, other than that Stephen King wrote books that my parents wouldn’t approve of me reading. I didn’t know that it was King’s first novel, the one that made his career, and I didn’t know a thing about Brian De Palma’s 1976 film adaptation that finally turned the veteran Movie Brat into an A-list Hollywood director. As an 11-year-old newcomer to King’s work, I found that there was a lot about the novel I didn’t entirely understand, even apart from the cruel chants of “ PER -iod” that besiege a mortified Carrie White in the book’s first scene. But I tore through it regardless, the start of a deep affection for King’s work that continues to this day .
Carrie is King’s most frequently adapted novel; apart from De Palma’s original, which in my estimation is still the greatest adaptation of King’s horror fiction ever put onscreen, there was a misbegotten 1999 sequel entitled The Rage: Carrie 2 , a 2002 made-for-TV movie that was watered down enough to air on NBC, and a poorly received 2013 theatrical remake by Boys Don’t Cry director Kimberly Peirce. (There was also a 1988 Broadway musical adaptation that is remembered as one of the more notorious flops of its era .) It’s not hard to tell why so many filmmakers have been drawn to Carrie , even while De Palma’s original remains pretty impossible to improve upon. Like all of King’s best work, the story is ruthlessly elemental: An isolated and secretly gifted social outcast is driven to a cataclysm of vengeful destruction by bullying classmates on the one hand and a domineering mother on the other. Anyone who wasn’t the most popular kid at their high school has probably fantasized at one point or another about being some version of Carrie White; this probably describes 99 percent of people who go on to make movies.
Mike Flanagan, the crack horror auteur who, through films like Gerald’s Game and The Life of Chuck , has also proved himself to be this century’s premier King adapter, now takes his own run at Carrie , in a new miniseries that begins streaming on Amazon Prime Video on Wednesday. Carrie is a relatively slim novel, particularly by King’s standards, so the thought of blowing it out into eight hour(ish)-long episodes might strike some as a misguided undertaking. How much more high school drama can you wring out of a book that is cover-to-cover high school drama?
Quite a bit, it turns out, and it’s both unsurprising and a bit of a relief that Flanagan’s Carrie is easily the second-best go at King’s novel in the past 50 years. Flanagan stays faithful to the most important parts of the novel while also updating and expanding King’s story considerably, with mostly successful results. Flanagan’s series moves King’s original story from the 1970s into the present day, meaning that Carrie White and her mother Margaret now live in an age of smartphones, wannabe influencers, and internet-driven conspiracy theories. This also changes the depiction of Carrie’s high school, where students now grudgingly comply with regular active-shooter drills, and where the most vicious bullying happens not in the hallways but in the virtual corridors of social media.
Flanagan’s expanded canvas provides the opportunity to elaborate many of the story’s main characters, starting with Carrie White herself, played by Summer H. Howell. Howell’s Carrie is far more influenced by Sissy Spacek’s turn in De Palma’s film than by King’s book, in which Carrie White is depicted as overweight, acne-ridden, and debilitatingly awkward. Howell plays Carrie as shy and deeply naïve, but also naturally sunny and eager for connection. She’s easy to like once you get to know her. Classmates Sue Snell (Siena Agudong) and Christine Hargensen (Alison Thornton) are given more depth and backstory, with the latter emerging as, if not exactly sympathetic, at least something more complex than the diabolically cruel bully of the source material. Flanagan’s is also the most explicitly feminist adaptation of Carrie to date, repeatedly linking Carrie to a long (and admittedly speculative) history of similarly gifted women being either demonized as witches or dismissed as frauds.
Fans of Flanagan’s past work, particularly his excellent Netflix shows like The Haunting of Hill House and Midnight Mass , won’t be surprised to see many of the director’s familiar faces here, including Rahul Kohli, Michael Trucco, and Kate Siegel. The best part of the show is another Flanagan mainstay, Samantha Sloyan, whose turn as Carrie’s mother Margaret is so good it almost makes you forget Piper Laurie’s iconic performance in De Palma’s original film, which earned her an Oscar nomination. Many of the characters in King’s novel, especially Carrie’s fellow high schoolers, can feel overly archetypal, but Margaret White is and always has been an incredible creation, a sexually repressed, paranoid religious zealot who is so smothering and overprotective that whatever love she once had for her daughter has long since curdled into a mix of fear and resentment. Sloyan’s Margaret retains some of these qualities but is a startlingly rich character, a woman trying to shield her daughter from the many evils of the modern world while also being, inextricably, drawn toward some of those vices herself. It’s a great performance and a starring showcase for an actress who deserves one.
Flanagan’s Carrie isn’t without its flaws. The middle episodes spin their wheels at times, suggesting that the show might have worked better over five or six episodes instead of eight. The excess length also makes the show’s depictions of high school melodrama start to feel a bit too much like…
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