Stephen King's Carrie returns to explore the horrors of social media
BBC News · C · trust 36/100
Adaptations, remakes and reboots are all the rage right now, and there’s often one question that crops up - why?
See also "what's the point?" and "do we need another one?" whenever a story is resurrected from the past.
Carrie, Prime Video's new TV series based on Stephen King's debut novel, has been no exception.
It's not the first time the tale of high school bullies and supernatural powers has been adapted for the screen.
Director Brian de Palma's 1976 movie version is a horror classic, with some of its most famous scenes and imagery widely considered iconic within the genre.
But the cast and creator of the latest version, which drags Carrie's story forward 50 years into a world of social media, have been telling BBC Newsbeat why they believe it's still relevant in 2026.
Fans of the novel have been quick to complain the new version of Carrie is not "book accurate", pointing out that she was originally an abrasive, even unlikeable character.
In the TV adaptation, Carrie has been raised behind closed doors by her paranoid father and deeply religious mother, and only enters school after a tragedy reveals her existence to authorities.
Audiences see a different version of the character in the show - one who's naive, but open and eager to learn new things.
"There's a lot of opinions, and I purposely avoided the original movie and and the book before filming because I hadn't seen it or read it," Summer H Howell, who plays Carrie, tells Newsbeat.
"And I wanted to create this new, light version of Carrie that was excited to get out of her house and just curious about the world and people."
However, the 22-year-old actress says the journey her character goes on is not so different, and argues it's still relevant today.
"It's the story of an outsider, and bullying has not gone away in 50 years," she says.
"If anything, it's just gotten worse with social media."
Social media plays a huge part in the adaptation by horror director Mike Flanagan, who's best known for series such as The Haunting of Hill House.
In his version of Carrie, some of the most famous scenes, including the dramatic prom moment, are adapted to a world where everything is filmed and shared online.
Alison Thornton, who plays chief bully Chris Hargensen, says social media "is kind of a villain in the show".
"You can post something, or someone will take a video of something, and the fact that it can be permanently online is actually quite terrifying," she says.
Thornton says the adaptation aims to show how online posts can have "repercussions in real life".
Showrunner Flanagan tells Newsbeat it would have been "impossible to ignore the impact social media has had in changing the way we see each other".
Fifty years ago, he says, bullying would have been relatively "private", and confined to "the classroom, in the halls, in the school".
"It's happening with the audience of the entire digital world and enshrined forever, permanently on these platforms.
"It's a whole different ball game that way," he says.
Carrie is the latest project from Prime Video targeted at Gen Z viewers based on a popular novel.
The Summer I Turned Pretty , Your Fault: London , and Off Campus have been huge hits for the streamer, and it's leaned into trends such as BookTok to generate interest in the shows.
Josie Totah, who plays Chris's sidekick Tina, agrees remakes and adaptations are popular, but says she would only get involved with one if the "intention" felt right.
"No one wants to just remake something for the sake of remaking it," she says.
"'Why now?' - unless that can be answered thoroughly, I don't think that I would want to do it."
There are worries from fans that revisiting existing works leaves less space for original stories.
Totah says projects such as this year's indie horror hit Obsession also deserve to be championed.
"Those are equally as important as the ones that we've already told in the past, if not maybe a little bit more," she says.
So far, Flanagan's version of Carrie has had a mostly positive response from critics, with an 85% positive rating on review website Rotten Tomatoes.
Most praised the performances and social commentary, although some reviewers felt it wasn't as scary as earlier versions and accused it of sanding down some of the original characters' harder edges.
The verdict from fans remains to be seen.
Flanagan hasn't just expanded on the original story, but has also made some fairly major changes, possibly laying the ground for further series to be made.
"I try to think about how fans will feel because I'm a Stephen King fan first," he says.
"So I have very strong opinions about changes that are made in adaptation."
Flanagan has brought other Stephen King novels to the screen before, but those have tended to be much more faithful to the source material.
Some of his best-known projects, reinventions of The Haunting of Hill House by author Shirley Jackson and The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe, have been based on works by long-deceased authors.
"I've just never done this with an author who's still alive or one with whom I already have a very intensely productive working relationship," he says.
"I hope people are going to look at these changes and say: 'Oh, this is actually why it makes good sense to tell this story again today'."
Listen to Newsbeat live at 12:45 and 17:45 weekdays - or listen back here .
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