Mike Flanagan Officially Does The Impossible With One Stephen King Villain

Published Oct 13, 2026, 8:15 AM EDT

Ben Sherlock is a Tomatometer-approved film and TV critic who runs the massively underrated YouTube channel I Got Touched at the Cinema. Before working at Screen Rant, Ben wrote for Game Rant, Taste of Cinema, Comic Book Resources, and BabbleTop. He's also an indie filmmaker, a standup comedian, and an alumnus of the School of Rock.

Over the past decade, Mike Flanagan has become renowned as the best adapter of Stephen King’s works. It started in 2017 when he turned Gerald’s Game into a claustrophobic chiller, and it’s continued through Doctor Sleep, The Life of Chuck, and his upcoming reimagining of The Mist. Flanagan’s latest King adaptation, Carrie, has proven to be yet another home run for the king of King.

We’ve seen a bunch of different versions of Carrie, including Brian De Palma’s definitive 1976 rendition, but we’ve never seen one like this. Flanagan has fleshed out the characters, expanded the world, and turned Carrie into a Big Little Lies-style mystery drama. Some book readers were divided on the changes to the ending, because it deviates wildly from the source material in order to set up a second season (and, perhaps most egregiously, it took away Carrie’s agency in the deaths of Chris Hargensen and Billy Nolan by having her possessed by another troubled telekinetic teen).

But, controversial ending aside, Flanagan’s Carrie show is a riveting retelling of a familiar story. He updated the story for the 21st century, with cyberbullying and school shooter drills, and he did the impossible: he made Carrie’s overbearing mother, Margaret White — her lifelong tormentor; an even worse villain than any of her high school bullies — surprisingly sympathetic.

I Never Thought I'd Side With Margaret White

After reading the character of Margaret as she was written by King, and then seeing her brought to life on-screen by Piper Laurie and Julianne Moore, I never, ever thought I would take her side and root for her. She’s a religious zealot who’s been abusing Carrie through her entire childhood, and then throws her to the wolves completely unprepared for the horrors of high school.

In the original novel, and in the previous adaptations, Margaret was a straightforward villain, and one of the most despicable villains ever created at that. But Flanagan took a very different approach to his adaptation of the character. His Margaret is still a hardcore Christian fundamentalist, she’s still horribly abusive to her daughter and her neighbors, and she even still tries to kill Carrie. But she’s not a traditional villain; she’s more of a morally gray antihero, because she’s not always in the wrong (just most of the time).

Margaret’s insistence on protecting her daughter from the horrors of the outside world made her look deranged and unhinged when the original book was published more than 50 years ago. But her overprotectiveness seems a lot more reasonable in the age of social media and school shootings — Carrie is traumatized multiple times over in her first week of high school — and Margaret’s vengeful crusade against Chris is surprisingly cathartic. It’s easy to get behind: she’s a mother standing up to her daughter’s bully, and rallying the entire town behind her, because the school won’t do anything.

Samantha Sloyan Was Born To Play Margaret White

I can’t overstate how perfect the casting is in this show. Summer H. Howell may not look the part, just like all her predecessors (Hollywood is allergic to casting actors who aren’t conventionally attractive in lead roles), but she’s a perfect Carrie White: the awkwardness, the social ineptness, the sadness, the rage. Siena Agudong is an appropriately good-hearted Sue Snell, Amber Midthunder is an appropriately fierce Rita Desjardin, and Alison Thornton is a Homelander-level horror as Chris.

But the greatest piece of casting in the Carrie TV series is Samantha Sloyan as Margaret White. Sloyan is a regular collaborator of Flanagan’s, and she plays a more complex, sympathetic, less overtly villainous Margaret than Laurie or Moore did. It makes for an even richer, stronger, more interesting, and, most importantly, less blood-boiling character.

Carrie

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  Summer H. Howell

  Carrie White

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  Samantha Sloyan

  Margaret White