SPOILER ALERT: This review contains major spoilers for all eight episodes of Prime Video’s Carrie. When Prime Video announced another adaptation of Stephen King’s Carrie, my first reaction was probably the same as a lot of people’s:
Why?
Brian De Palma’s 1976 film is still iconic. Sissy Spacek’s Carrie White and Piper Laurie’s Margaret remain burned into pop culture. We’ve also already had another major big-screen remake, Kimberly Peirce’s 2013 Carrie, with Chloë Grace Moretz as Carrie and Julianne Moore as Margaret, not to mention other attempts to revisit King’s story over the years. There did not seem to be some giant, Carrie-shaped hole in modern entertainment waiting to be filled.
And then Mike Flanagan went and justified the whole thing.
His eight-episode Carrie is one of those increasingly rare modern updates that doesn’t simply move an old story into the present, swap in phones, and hope familiarity does the rest. It asks what this story means now.
The answer turns out to be considerably more interesting than another bucket of pig’s blood.
Flanagan takes King’s basic story of an isolated teenage girl, a controlling mother, vicious classmates, and emerging telekinetic powers and recasts it as something approaching a coming-of-age drama about kindness in a culture that rewards cruelty. Prime Video itself describes the series as a story about “kindness versus cruelty,” and that is much closer to what Flanagan is doing than simply making another horror show.
It is still Carrie. The humiliation is there. The prom is there. The pig blood is definitely there.
But horror is almost secondary.
At times, this feels less like traditional Carrie than if someone dropped Carrie White into 13 Going on 30 and then remembered halfway through that everyone was eventually going to die.
That shouldn’t work.
Somehow, it does.
Carrie gets to be a teenager
The smartest decision Flanagan makes is changing who Carrie is when we first meet her. Previous versions tend to introduce Carrie as already damaged by the world. She is frightened, withdrawn, and expecting pain before anyone has even inflicted it.
Flanagan deliberately went the other direction. He described his Carrie as “curious, eager, kind, earnest,” someone who has been sheltered rather than completely broken and is genuinely excited to finally encounter other people.
Summer H. Howell makes that choice work beautifully.
Her Carrie enters public school after the sudden death of her father with an almost childlike excitement about everything she has been denied. Computers. Books. Friends. Boys. Clothes. The possibility that life might be larger than the walls of her house.
That optimism makes what follows hurt more.
The series understands that modern teenage cruelty doesn’t stop when school ends. The locker-room humiliation that has always defined Carrie’s story becomes a viral event, with social media turning one terrible moment into something permanent, searchable, and endlessly shareable. Flanagan has said that his own memories of being bullied proved inadequate once he spoke to younger people about what growing up under that kind of constant digital scrutiny actually feels like.
That is where this adaptation starts to feel necessary.
The original Carrie dealt with public humiliation. The new Carrie understands what happens when public humiliation becomes content. There is no going home from it anymore.
Kindness becomes the radical act
What surprised me most about the series is how much time it spends examining kindness. Not niceness. Not sentimentality.
Actual kindness.
Again and again, characters get opportunities to make another person’s life slightly easier or slightly worse, and Flanagan treats those small decisions as consequential.
Carrie wants desperately to believe people are good. Sue wants to undo something cruel she participated in. Rita Desjardin wants to protect a student without really knowing how. Guidance counselor Morton gives Carrie something as simple as access to books and suddenly expands her universe.
Even Principal Grayle (Matthew Lillard), who frequently fails, is not presented as indifferent. He is an adult trying to navigate a social environment moving faster than the institutions meant to protect children.
That doesn’t make everyone innocent.
It makes them human.
And that distinction is important, because the series keeps asking whether empathy can interrupt cruelty before cruelty reproduces itself.
Sometimes it can. Sometimes the bucket still falls.
Two mothers, two daughters
The most interesting expansion may be the way the series pairs Carrie and Margaret White with Chris Hargensen and her mother.
They live at radically different economic levels.
Carrie and Margaret exist on the margins. Their world is cramped, religious, fearful, and increasingly disconnected from modern life. Margaret is forced into a low-level service job after her husband dies, entering a social world she regards with suspicion and disgust.
Chris begins on the opposite end of the spectrum. She is privileged, popular, and expecting a future that has largely been laid out for her.
Then that security begins collapsing.
Her family’s money is disappearing. Her parents’ relationship is fractured. Her mother may not even be coming home. Her father is toxic. Suddenly, the future Chris assumed was guaranteed starts evaporating.
The series does something fascinating with those two households. Both daughters are living inside the emotional damage of their mothers.
Both mothers believe, in different ways, that they are protecting their children. Both daughters respond by trying to construct identities outside the worlds they inherited.
Money changes the environment.
It doesn’t necessarily change the wound.
Flanagan has substantially reimagined Margaret in particular. Rather than beginning with an almost purely monstrous religious fanatic, Samantha Sloyan (a frequent Flanagan casting choice) plays a woman whose behavior comes from what Flanagan calls a “ferocious love” for Carrie and a desperate desire to keep her safe.
That love is still damaging. Margaret remains dangerous. The series never lets us forget that Carrie has nowhere truly safe to go.
But the tragedy in the relationship is clearer now than in previous adaptations.
Margaret loves her daughter. She is also destroying her.
Both things can be true.
This isn’t especially scary
Which brings us to something viewers expecting another Haunting of Hill House may find surprising. Carrie really isn’t that scary.
There are horror sequences. There is gore. The final episodes eventually deliver the bloodbath everyone knows is coming.
But for most of its runtime, the show functions more as an emotional teenage drama with supernatural elements than as conventional horror. At times the limited series even harkens back to Heroes.
Several critics noticed the same thing, with early reviews pointing out that the series often works best in its quieter emotional moments and spends much of its runtime relatively light on gore and traditional scares.
That isn’t a weakness. In fact, I think it is one reason the adaptation works. Flanagan lets us spend time with these characters before destroying them.
So when prom finally arrives, we aren’t waiting impatiently for Carrie to snap. We’re hoping, irrationally, that maybe she won’t.
Then Flanagan blows up the story
And this is where the adaptation makes its biggest gamble. The final episode doesn’t simply reinterpret Carrie’s ending. It expands the mythology.
We learn that Carrie may not be unique at all. Her abilities are connected to the broader psychic phenomenon King readers know as the shine, while Emaline is revealed to possess her own abilities, apparently including astral projection.
The mysterious interviews scattered throughout the season also turn out to be part of something much bigger.
Kate Siegel’s (Flanagan’s wife) Adelaide is not simply documenting the Chamberlain disaster. She is connected to a larger network involving psychically gifted women. Margaret, herself, appears to have latent abilities. And most importantly, Carrie survives.
That is a huge departure.
Flanagan has confirmed the ending was planned from the start and says it was one of the ideas that excited Stephen King about the adaptation. He has also acknowledged that the ending intentionally leaves room for more story, though Prime Video has not announced a second season.
Suddenly this isn’t just Carrie anymore.
It could be the beginning of something considerably larger.
Is this quietly becoming The Dark Tower?
That possibility becomes particularly interesting when you consider what Flanagan has been trying to build elsewhere.
He has been developing an adaptation of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower for years and recently said he remains desperate to make it, with scripts already written even as complicated rights issues continue to slow the project.
And Flanagan has explicitly confirmed that his Carrie is connected conceptually to that larger King mythology through the shine.
That doesn’t mean Carrie White is suddenly going to walk into Mid-World and meet Roland Deschain.
But the door is now open.
King’s fiction has always functioned as an interconnected universe where psychic abilities, parallel realities, recurring characters, and cosmic forces bleed into one another. Flanagan clearly understands that connective tissue, arguably better than anyone currently adapting King.
So what initially seems like an unnecessary remake begins to look like something else entirely.
Maybe Carrie is a story.
Maybe it is also a doorway.
I genuinely did not think we needed another Carrie. I was wrong.
Flanagan has created one of the rare contemporary updates of a classic that feels less like recycling intellectual property and more like reconsidering why the story endured in the first place.
The cyberbullying works because it isn’t simply TikTok pasted onto a 1974 narrative. The expanded characters work because they complicate rather than merely lengthen the story. The mother-daughter relationships work because Flanagan understands that love and damage often occupy the same room.
And most of all, the emphasis on kindness works.
There is something unexpectedly moving about taking one of the most famous revenge stories in horror and reframing it around the idea that people might save one another simply by choosing not to be cruel.
That message could easily become saccharine.
Flanagan couches it inside telekinesis, religious fanaticism, adolescent rage, parental failure, social-media humiliation, and eventually mass destruction.
Smart guy.
The result isn’t the scariest version of Carrie. De Palma still owns that particular nightmare. But this may be the most emotionally expansive.
And by the time its final minutes reveal gifted women, secret histories, psychic classifications and a living Carrie White heading toward an unknown future, Flanagan has done something I absolutely did not expect.
He made me want more Carrie. If there is a Season 2, I’m there. And if all of this eventually leads toward The Dark Tower?
Long days and pleasant nights.
All eight episodes of Carrie are currently streaming on Prime.
BOTTOM LINE: Mike Flanagan’s Carrie proves an unlikely remake can be necessary, updating King’s classic through cyberbullying, complicated mothers, kindness and a surprising expansion of the author’s supernatural universe. It’s a REEL SEE.
The Geek is a working screenwriter, director and screenwriting instructor.
