Mike Flanagan’s Carrie Adaptation Premieres on Amazon Prime Video

By now, viewers are either entirely on board with Mike Flanagan or they checked out long ago. The prolific horror auteur has worked in the genre almost exclusively since 2011. While every project has a distinct flavor, from the gothic ghost story of The Haunting of Hill House to the religious horror of Midnight Mass, audiences can usually recognize a Flanagan production within minutes due to his verbose dialogue and his fondness for casting the same group of actors.

The same applies to Stephen King. He is prolific, a master of horror who rarely leaves the genre, and known for recognizable tropes and characters across various stories. Unlike Flanagan, who appeals to a specific subset of horror fans, nearly everyone holds some fondness for King and his work. Even his detractors tend to love at least one King story.

Flanagan is no stranger to adapting King, but he has mostly stayed on the periphery until now, turning lesser-known tales like Gerald’s Game and The Life of Chuck into well-reviewed movies. His most ambitious prior overlap was Doctor Sleep, based on King’s sequel to The Shining.

With his latest television show, Flanagan crosses a major threshold by adapting one of King’s most famous and beloved books. Carrie was King’s very first published novel. While it is rarely ranked among his best, it remains a classic, largely thanks to Brian De Palma’s dreamy film adaptation. Any new adaptation faces immense pressure, with many questioning the need for a series-length retelling of an already perfect movie. Against all odds, Flanagan delivers.

Carrie arrives as an eight-episode binge release next week on Prime Video. It manages to walk the fine line between a faithful adaptation and a unique reinvention. Flanagan updates the story for the 2020s to explore the modern high school experience, where online bullying and school shooting drills are the norm, all viewed through the naive perspective of Carrie. Although the show occasionally drags on its way to the climactic ending viewers know is coming, it remains a gripping story that Flanagan fans and even some detractors will eagerly devour.

Carrie starts at the end. After the deadly prom incident where Carrie unleashes her powers on a crowd, survivors are interviewed to understand what happened. This clever framing device quickly falls away as the narrative begins.

Weeks earlier, Carrie’s father heads to work at a construction site while listening to a political podcast reminiscent of Tucker Carlson. Moments later, he dies in a tragic workplace accident. Police visit his home to deliver the news and find a bizarre scene: a religious shut-in named Margaret White, played by Flanagan regular Samantha Sloyan, and her teenage daughter Carietta, played by Summer H. Howell. Carrie’s life changes instantly. Authorities explain that Margaret must get a job and send her daughter to the local high school or face losing custody.

This forces both mother and daughter into the real world, and the transition goes poorly. Carrie is immediately bullied by mean girl Chris Hargensen, played by Alison Thornton, while Margaret is stuck scrubbing toilets at a local supermarket. When Carrie gets her first period after gym class and classmates pelt her with tampons, Chris creates an anonymous Instagram account called Carrie Red. She begins terrorizing the school with fabricated rumors. The principal, played by Matthew Lillard, does nothing. Margaret seizes the opportunity to lead an online crusade against cyberbullying that threatens to escalate into violent vigilantism. Meanwhile, Carrie’s latent telekinetic powers express themselves violently as the pressure builds.

As Carrie hurtles toward its inevitable conclusion, Flanagan introduces obstacles that divert the story from its traditional trajectory. Carrie makes a goth friend who is not what she seems. Chris receives a more complicated backstory that almost makes her sympathetic. The school staff suffers just as much from Instagram bullying as the students. Everyone in Carrie has a miserable time, but the show remains compelling. The true horror stems from Carrie’s psychic outburst, but watching the town squirm under anonymous social media accusations proves even more agonizing.

Flanagan gives his entire cast engaging material, but Samantha Sloyan rises to the challenge of reinventing Margaret White. Viewers familiar with Piper Laurie’s vindictive, fanatically religious mother in the De Palma film will find Sloyan and Flanagan taking the character in a remarkably different direction. This version of Margaret is complex and compassionate. She is a loving mother with bad tendencies stemming from her own fear of the world. She launches a social media account to combat the harassment facing her daughter, only to get sucked into the allure of parasocial relationships and power. Sloyan’s Margaret is neither the hero nor the villain, but a deeply flawed woman trying to do what is right while failing by almost every metric.

While the adult cast—including Flanagan standbys like Rahul Kohli and newcomers like Amber Midthunder from Prey—makes a feast of the script, the young cast occasionally struggles to keep up. Much of the show focuses on high school characters discussing dating, parties, college, and social media. Chris’ entire villain arc centers on her inability to attend her college of choice, though the execution carries nuance. The result is consistently entertaining, a testament to the strength of the source material and the talent of the twenty-something actors playing teenagers.

Flanagan’s biggest risk involves the way he alters his source material. Without spoiling specifics, Carrie draws surprising connections to King’s broader connected universe in ways neither the book nor the De Palma film ever did. Because Carrie was King’s first novel, no prior connections existed at the time. Had he written it decades later, King likely would have set part of it in Castle Rock, Maine or teased a connection to private investigator Holly Gibney. Flanagan takes that bait, with mixed results.

Most of these lore changes are saved for the very end to set up future seasons. Flanagan has stated he has a three-season plan. The cliffhanger ending, occurring after the famous prom scene, sets up a larger story that depends on the performance of Amazon’s streaming algorithm. Regardless, the eight existing episodes provide a daring and complete retelling of Carrie White’s iconic story.

Carrie releases Oct. 7 on Prime Video.

 

Source: Polygon