‘Carrie’ Review: Mike Flanagan Capably Expands Stephen King’s Horror Classic for Amazon, but Did It Really Need Expanding?

There is a very real possibility that were Stephen King to write Carrie today, it would read an awful lot like Mike Flanagan‘s Carrie, an eight-episode drama series produced for Amazon.

This is the best and worst thing about the new and distinctly non-canonical take, which continues a relationship between Flanagan and King that includes Gerald’s Game, Doctor Sleep and The Life of Chuck (as well as Midnight Mass, which wasn’t based on a Stephen King work, but felt like it ought to have been). The show also extends Flanagan’s record of taking slender texts — The Haunting of Hill House, The Turn of the Screw, The Fall of the House of Usher — and expanding them in unexpected and often impressive ways.

Carrie

The Bottom Line Not your father's 'Carrie,' for better or worse.

Airdate: Wednesday, October 7 (Amazon)
Cast: Summer H. Howell, Samantha Sloyan, Siena Agudong, Alison Thornton, Josie Totah, Arthur Conti, Thalia Dudek, Amber Midthunder, Matthew Lillard
Creator: Mike Flanagan, from the novel by Stephen King

The question is whether or not Carrie is a text that benefits from expansion.

The novel was written before King had the clout (or possibly the desire or drug intake) to unleash 1,000+-page novels into the world and, as a result, it’s marvelously and uncharacteristically small. It’s primarily the story of one young woman coming into astonishing powers that manifest themselves in one horrifying event, free from broader context or richer mythology. Carrie isn’t my favorite King book, but it may be the most immaculately contained example of the master at work.

Another thing about Carrie that cannot be said about most of King’s work is that it was adapted perfectly on the first try. Brian De Palma’s 1976 film has a career-topping performance from Sissy Spacek and multiple set pieces that could fight for a place on the genre’s Mt. Rushmore. Despite that perfection, Hollywood deigned to produce a sequel, a TV movie and a 2013 remake, all well-acted in their central roles and all largely forgotten.

Flanagan is appropriately respectful of De Palma’s film, with nods ranging from outright visual homage to the names of several supporting characters to a fleeting glimpse at a movie theater marquee that made me snort aloud. But unlike the subsequent directors who tackled the material, he has a very clear sense of what he wants to do with it, what he wants to say.

Amazon’s Carrie is probably the adaptation of Carrie that 2026 and the current TV landscape deserve, a collection of big authorial choices that are at best admirable and at worst defensible. But it probably wasn’t the adaptation of Carrie that I wanted. Kudos for its topicality and its performances, especially that of star Summer H. Howell, but this Carrie is finally less distinctive and far less scary than it should be.

Flanagan, director of four of the season’s episodes, starts off with an obligatory in medias res snapshot of news footage and 911 call logs from fires and devastation in the town of Chamberlain, before we go back a year to the death of a construction worker (Tahmoh Penikett’s Ralph White). When authorities go to the White home, they’re surprised to discover Ralph’s stern and religious wife (Samantha Sloyan‘s Margaret), as well as a teenage daughter (Howell’s Carrie) who has been home-schooled and, apparently, has never left the house.

In order to retain the house and custody, Margaret has to get a job at a big box store, while Carrie has to go to the local public school.

Carrie is socially maladjusted, but she’s got a good attitude and arrives at school eager to make friends and quote from Anne of Green Gables.

This is not exactly what happens.

Yes, the spineless but amiable principal (Matthew Lillard), cool young gym teacher Rita (Amber Midthunder) and gay guidance counselor Peter (Tim Bagley) want to ease her transition, and class president Sue Snell (Siena Agudong) reaches out agreeably. But high school is hard enough if you’re “normal” and Carrie White isn’t normal, in or out of quotation marks.

Carrie’s soon being picked on by Sue’s best friend, Christine (Alison Thornton), a spoiled rich girl with family issues and insecurities that she’s happy to redirect at the peculiar new kid who doesn’t even understand how to behave during live shooter drills.

Did I mention that when Carrie gets sad or angry, things tend to shake and, occasionally, rocks fall from the sky onto the White house?

And did I mention that Carrie hasn’t had her first period and that her mother, a big proponent of the “prayer closet” when it comes to domestic discipline, didn’t prepare her in any way for the magic of menstruation?

Oh and one more thing I maybe should mention: Somebody is interviewing the survivors of whatever bad thing happens in the opening scene. Is it the police? A documentary director? And why are the things people are saying about Carrie and the disaster mighty different from what fans of the property might be expecting?

Mum’s the word.

Flanagan understands Carrie, but there are points where he acts like nobody else has ever understood it before, like Carrie is some deeply coded riddle of a novel rather than an effectively blunt allegory about how nothing confounds and terrifies society like a teenage girl.

I fully endorse Flanagan’s attempts to connect Carrie White to a history of ill-fated extraordinary young women, from Joan of Arc on, but might it have been done in a way that didn’t feel cribbed from the “Claimants of telekinetic abilities” section on the Telekinesis Wikipedia page?

I ask this because the third episode begins with an unseen narrator documenting historical case studies with an ordered list that is pretty literally taken from the “Claimants of telekinetic abilities” section on the Telekinesis Wikipedia page.

Flanagan also understands the life of the modern American teen and he knows that if it was hard to grow up different in the 1970s, things have only become more difficult with the pervasive looming specter of school shootings, social media and general societal fragmentation.

So just imagine being a teen today, having your first period in the middle of a changing room, having a well-deserved meltdown, and having every single one of your malevolent classmates capable of filming the moment and distributing it for the world.

It sucks to be a teen, it sucks to be Carrie White, and Mike Flanagan is out there enumerating all of the ways. In fact, given that the added running time lets us spend more time with the teenage characters and their well-meaning (mostly) but thoroughly ineffectual teachers and administrators, what Amazon’s Carrie resembles far more than Carrie is Netflix’s 13 Reasons Why — the good first season not the two subsequent awful seasons. That isn’t the worst thing in the world, but there are stretches when Carrie ceases to be a show about an adolescent girl with budding telekinesis and instead becomes a show about a different adolescent girl with a mean Instagram feed that causes fights.

Freed from the need to tightly focus, Flanagan loosens up, with some benefits.

Margaret White, a one-dimensional and unexplained fundamentalist nightmare on the page and in previous adaptations, becomes a fully explained fundamentalist nightmare here. Sloyan, like co-stars including Rahul Kohli, Michael Trucco and Kate Siegel, is a regular member of the Flanagan troupe and takes advantage of the opportunity to make the character terrifying in a way that will be recognizable to anybody who has watched a televised school board meeting from many parts of the country in recent years. Margaret is prone to verbal abuse and cruelty, but it comes from a place of love — conspiracy theory-fueled, religiously confusing love.

Margaret looks and behaves like people we may currently know, rather than just being a monstrous shut-in raving about her daughter’s “dirty pillows.” That means she’ll probably offend some people, which means Flanagan and Sloyan did something right.

Bagley is hugely sympathetic, Lillard flawed-but-sympathetic and Midthunder extremely likable as a teacher capable of admitting that only a few years earlier, she might have been one of the mean girls bullying Carrie. You already know none of the adults will be able to stop what’s coming, but getting to see how they’re trying and failing is worthwhile.

The standout, unsurprisingly, is Howell. Like most of the high-school side of the cast, she’s in her 20s, but unlike a lot of the cast — Joel Oulette as Sue’s practically perfect boyfriend Tommy is 24 and looks closer to 35 — she’s able to look and seem much younger. There has never been a Carrie White in any of the screen incarnations who resembled King’s less-than-generous description of the character — overweight, beset by acne — but Howell embodies an awkwardness that can’t be cured with a makeover montage. Still, she’s more than capable of shifting back and forth between Carrie’s withdrawn moments and the increasing confidence that might come from realizing you can lift objects with your mind.

Flanagan’s mind-meld with King is sufficient that even when he sets out to embellish the text with original material, it’s very Stephen King-y original material. Carrie has been expanded here with shadings that resemble Firestarter and Needful Things and several other King works of which even mentioning the name would represent too much of a spoiler. Flanagan is extending and over-extending the text in ways that are fairly conventional, but with a story as familiar and previously simple as Carrie those changes could be interpreted as surprising, if not necessarily creative.

In the process, some of the engine that steers the property toward its explosive conclusion is lost. Even if you don’t know the story in any version, you know something bad is coming at the prom, but when it comes around, it isn’t as disturbing or terrifying as it ought to be. I’ve always found Flanagan far better at building a mood of horror than delivering actual frights, and here even the reliable jump scares don’t have much effect.

I respect much of what Flanagan has done with Carrie and I’m quick to acknowledge the validity of many (most, even) of his choices. But the new things that Amazon’s Carrie does well don’t make up for the old things that Carrie has always done well and that, unfortunately, aren’t present here.