The following article contains spoilers for the TV adaptation of Carrie.
The climax of Carrie, Stephen King’s debut horror novel, is so famous that even people who haven’t read it or seen any of the numerous adaptations know the basics. The eponymous Carrie White, driven to the edge of sanity after years of abuse from her classmates and hyper-religious mother, gets drenched in a bucket of pig’s blood at her prom. She then uses her latent telekinetic powers to destroy her high school and her hometown. It’s an extreme reaction to an extreme situation, the climax of a revenge story in which vengeance is just another tragic act of violence. The line between villain and victim blurs.
King published the book in 1974, in the shadow of the atomic bomb. It’s a lean, nasty snapshot of troubled young adulthood in a world seemingly drowning in paranoia. The showrunner Mike Flanagan’s new adaptation for Prime Video—the first time Carrie has been translated to a television series—transports the protagonist (played by Summer H. Howell) and her classmates to the present day, where social media traps the teenagers and their bewildered guardians in a cycle of surveillance and shame. Many of the modernizations make sense: Technology serves as a convenient conduit for the characters’ impulses. But the show is almost too empathetic to its main characters; it doesn’t allow them to revel in their spitefulness, as they do in the source material. It treats many of them as victims of larger forces beyond their control—and robs viewers of the catharsis of Carrie’s big moment.
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In order to inflate the compact novel into an eight-episode series, Flanagan has taken some liberties. His Carrie expands on secondary elements hinted at in the book, such as interviews with survivors of that terrible night and investigations by various groups into paranormal phenomena. The show includes, among other things, a superpowered cabal tracking Carrie from the shadows, and at least one other psychic teen working against it. Viewers quickly get the sense that the story isn’t just about one girl with the ability to move stuff with her mind.
Perhaps it makes sense, in an entertainment landscape littered with comic-book cinematic universes, to give Carrie an X-Men-lite subplot. At best, these new elements add some intrigue to a tale that is still ultimately about how far teens will push one another when given the chance. The series leans heavily on themes of social media and internet paranoia to excuse the actions of many of its characters—it’s not them; it’s the phones. Most of the horrors in this Carrie are mundane: The kids exploit social media like a reflex, bullying one another with an anonymous Instagram account where they upload videos of their classmates’ worst moments. But Flanagan gives Carrie’s cruelest foes their own subplots to show how personal problems such as dysfunctional parents, college-admissions anxiety, and status woes—enabled and exemplified by social-media platforms—are the true reason they lash out. The added material creates a sympathetic core and suggests that the characters’ ruthlessness is simply a function of their experiences, rather than something shocking and inexplicable.
The effect of these changes to Carrie is most apparent when the show finally gets to the prom. A few episodes earlier, Carrie befriended a girl named Emaline (Thalia Dudek), who soon revealed that she has psychic powers. She encourages Carrie to enjoy her newfound abilities and often scoffs at Carrie’s classmates and teachers in a bid to turn Carrie against them. After the pig blood falls onto Carrie, Emaline appears before her and offers to “take the reins,” entering Carrie’s body and tapping into her abilities. Although it looks like Carrie is going rogue—drenching, electrocuting, and blowing up her classmates in revenge for the horrors they inflicted on her at school—Emaline is the real culprit The reveal absolves Carrie of wrongdoing by taking away, literally and thematically, any power she had over her story at its climax.
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This alteration isn’t necessarily a surprise, given who is overseeing the show. Flanagan is an old hand at translating King’s works to the screen; he turned Gerald’s Game, Doctor Sleep, and The Life of Chuck into well-received films. He’s also no stranger to making stylish horror miniseries, such as Netflix’s gothic anthology The Haunting of Hill House, as well as the Catholic vampire fable Midnight Mass. A sensitivity runs through much of Flanagan’s work, which tempers the horror and violence and pain with compassion. His villains’ behavior is usually justified by their circumstances. Take Carrie’s mother (Samantha Sloyan): The disgust she feels for the excesses of the outside world is a form of learned helplessness she developed while being married to a domineering husband, and this revulsion is exacerbated by the outrage farm of the internet. Flanagan’s Carrie is emblematic of the showrunner’s need to save his characters from their tragic fates; the system is always at fault, rather than the people living in it.
Carrie, in her original form, is a complicated protagonist: a victim, but a vengeful one, who fantasizes about how nice it would be if terrible things happened to her bullies. This new take on Carrie renders her a pawn in a game whose board is much larger than her school or her town. Her traditionally soft persona and terrifying abilities are co-opted to serve a story that often forgets about her entirely. The result is a show that shields her and the rest of its characters from their own actions, and hands over that responsibility to vague structures of control that they couldn’t possibly overcome on their own. Defanging Carrie means flinching away from the unforgiving bleakness that makes the story so memorable.