Prime Video’s Carrie Secretly Revives A Missing Moment From Mike Flanagan’s Best Horror Series

Published Oct 22, 2026, 2:00 PM EDT

Cathal Gunning has been writing about movies, television, culture, and politics online and in print since 2017. He worked as a Senior Editor in Adbusters Media Foundation from 2018-2019 and wrote for WhatCulture in early 2020. He has been a Senior Features Writer for ScreenRant since 2020.

While Mike Flanagan’s The Haunting of Hill House might be arguably the best horror miniseries of all time, the show cut one sequence from the source novel that later appeared in Prime Video’s Stephen King adaptation Carrie. Although Mike Flanagan’s The Fall of the House of Usher was his wildest and goriest Netflix show, the colorful horror comedy wasn’t the greatest series that the writer/director made for Netflix.

That status instead goes to 2018’s The Haunting of Hill House, an extremely loose adaptation of author Shirley Jackson’s iconic novel of the same name. While Jackson’s book focuses on a troubled woman, Nell, who partakes in a strange sleep study at the eponymous supposedly haunted house, Flanagan’s Netflix series recasts the participants in this study as a dysfunctional family. Here, Nell is the lead character in a knotty multi-generational family drama about grief, ghosts, and confronting trauma.

While this take on The Haunting of Hill House is Flanagan’s masterpiece, the miniseries also necessarily cuts a lot of details from the source novel thanks to its many creative alterations. One missing moment eventually showed up in Flanagan’s 2026 Prime Video miniseries Carrie, an adaptation of Stephen King’s legendary debut novel. In both this show and King’s original novel, a hail of stones rains down on Carrie White’s house, seemingly of nowhere. It’s the earliest evidence of Carrie’s psychokinetic powers, but the scene was cut from earlier adaptations for good reason.

Prime Video’s Carrie Features The Haunting of Hill House’s Rain of Stones

While the hail of stones does appear in the novel Carrie, King acknowledges that the book’s story borrows from Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House in his 1981 non-fiction book on horror, Danse Macabre. Interestingly enough, the same scene serves very different purposes in the two stories. In Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, the childhood anecdote is used to establish Nell as a somewhat strange loner and outsider, someone who has always been alienated by her family by weird occurrences and patterns only she sees.

In Flanagan’s Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, in contrast, Nell is such a central part of the Crain family that her death sets the entire story of the series into motion. Thus, Flanagan’s show understandably cut the novel’s rain of stones, since it didn’t fit this new context. Flanagan’s take on Carrie, however, uses the same sequence toward a very different end.

In the show, Carrie, inadvertently and unbeknownst to herself, makes it rain rocks after her mother drags her away from a neighbor and insults the kind stranger in the process. All three earlier screen versions of Carrie cut this incident since it seemingly implies a certain Biblical bent to Carrie’s powers, as if God itself is on her side against her zealous parents.

How Carrie’s Rain of Stones Changes Stephen King’s Story

While Carrie is depicted moving things with her mind before the denouement of the story in every version of Carrie, this is nowhere near as dramatic and outright impossible as making it rain rocks. Thus, earlier versions of Carrie cut the sequence since it both gives away the extent of Carrie’s powers long before the prom massacre, and, as noted above, turns Carrie into more of a godlike entity rather than simply a super-powered teen.

Admittedly, Carrie’s powers are pretty extraordinary in any context. However, while Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House made Nell the witness to a bizarre hail of stones to establish a link between her childhood self with the supernatural world, King and Flanagan’s versions of Carrie depict the heroine’s hail of stones to hint at the awesome, terrible extent of her nascent powers. Thus, The Haunting of Hill House’s missing sequence is used to make Carrie’s title character a much more formidable force than her earlier screen incarnations.

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  Summer H. Howell

  Carrie White

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  Samantha Sloyan

  Margaret White