Mike Flanagan's Carrie made a big mistake with one of its most important characters

Carrie hasn’t aged brilliantly, even by Stephen King’s own admission. In the novel, he paints a picture of someone considered grotesque because she’s overweight and covered in pimples, her head in the clouds to the that point she’s repeatedly described as having a "bovine" look.

Adaptations have attempted to correct this mocking first impression, and in Mike Flanagan’s new Prime Video miniseries, Carrie White (Summer H Howell) has agency long before unleashing telekinetic chaos at her school prom. It’s a noble modernisation, but it creates a bigger problem: the fact that she stands up for herself sooner alters her relationship with domineering cultist mother Margaret (Samantha Sloyan) while losing the story’s most integral themes of religious repression and sexual shame.

Flashbacks in the novel present a young Margaret as affected by her parents' divorce to the point that she comes to view all sexuality or femininity as sinful, even within wedlock. It’s the key reason why she treats her own daughter like the devil, seeing her as punishment for her own "sin" of not just having sex, but enjoying it.

Her warped views shape how she raises Carrie, telling her other women are "sluts", even overfeeding her with sugary treats to give her pimples and internal body image issues so she won’t consider dressing immodestly. Margaret conjures up a further sense of self-loathing in her daughter by making her view her own body as sinful, withholding educating her about menstruation so she can attempt to frame it as another sign of sin. This is the only detail from the source given any weight here and it’s shrugged off once Carrie is brought up to speed with her sex education, watering down the novel’s richest theme.

Even if it is a product of a less enlightened era, King’s Carrie still resonates because he understood the cultural factors that lead many young women to feel ashamed of themselves, with Margaret the manifestation of every ugly social norm, wrapped up in a misguided sense of religious self-righteousness. In Flanagan’s take, she’s a run-of-the-mill conspiracy theorist, whose anger at the school’s handling of her daughter’s gym shower incident is because she rejects the idea children need to learn about sex education at all.

It’s an intriguing way to bring the character into 2026, when conspiratorially minded parents have infiltrated educational boards across the US, resulting in schools removing everything from LGBTQ stories to textbooks about slavery from their shelves. The problem is that the show doesn’t have the courage of its convictions to run with that social commentary, and confusingly attempts to make us sympathise with her as she is rebranded into an anti-bullying advocate in defence of her daughter.

Her arguments with the school headteacher (Matthew Lillard) and teary-eyed Instagram posts directly targeting her daughter’s bully Chris Hargensen (Alison Thornton) show she’s still a master manipulator in this iteration. But she’s afforded too much benefit of the doubt, depicted as acting in what she believes to be her daughter’s best interests, no matter how misguided her actions. In later episodes, as she discovers Carrie’s telekinetic powers, she’s disgusted at the notion that murder could be the only thing that could restrain her; the motherly love is sincere and unaffected by any dangerous belief system.

In earlier incarnations, Margaret White had no issue killing her daughter; if Margaret represented shame and self-loathing, that idea was pushed to its furthest limits via her murderous intentions. Here, she’s presented sympathetically, still clueless to her own daughter’s needs but never acting maliciously with her misguided fixes. You could argue the series succeeds in making its biggest villain more of a three-dimensional character than any prior take on the story, but adding complexities to Margaret White makes it near impossible for her to become the devil on her daughter’s shoulder, feeding her with more ammunition to self-loathe.

Those original themes from the novel are especially relevant in an era where every teen has access to social media, and the series tries to refocus Chris Hargensen as its primary villain, with an Instagram account akin to the Mean Girls burn book. Carrie is initially targeted, but writes it off as she’s far from the only victim; other pupils routinely get into fights over posts, and the school guidance counsellor reports several students coming to him with suicidal thoughts after being featured.

Flanagan has said he wanted to transform Margaret and Chris from "irredeemable monsters," with the former changed to a mother who wanted to "protect her daughter from the cruelty of the world without knowing the best way to do so," and the latter someone whose "cruelty came from a place of deep pain". Redefining their relationships to Carrie undermines the still resonant themes of sexual shame that have made the novel endure, making the heroine unrecognisable without this specific adversity to overcome, not to mention far less unique in a school where every outcast student is being targeted.

This recontextualisation makes her prom night outburst resemble a villain origin story rather than a desperate outburst against a society that belittles her at every turn, feeling unusually uncomfortable due to the way the series handles her core relationships. In trying to find new depth in Margaret White especially, this Carrie adaptation loses sight of the themes of adolescent shame that have made it so resonant for generations of young readers.

Carrie is available to stream on Prime Video now. You can sign up to Amazon Prime Video for a 30-day free trial.

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