Published in 1974, Stephen King’s first novel, “Carrie,” sold a million copies in its first year, and millions more after the appearance of Brian De Palma’s 1976 film adaptation, which, if we are to trust Wikipedia, made nearly $139 million on a budget of $1.8 million. (That’s not even counting what home video has teleported into corporate pockets in the years since, laying the foundation of the King Industrial Entertainment Complex.)
A springboard in the careers of De Palma, Sissy Spacek, John Travolta, Nancy Allen and Amy Irving, De Palma’s “Carrie” is an excellent film that, having seen it once, I never want to see again, the bullying and humiliation of a perfectly nice if slightly strange young woman being my idea of no fun, even if it does lead to a spectacular set piece.
And so the prospect of watching an eight-hour adaptation of the novel stretched out before me like a five-year semester in which every class was P.E. But here we are, with “Carrie” 2026, developed (and directed in part) by Mike Flanagan (“The Haunting of Hill House”), premiering Wednesday on Prime Video.
Carrie White (Summer H. Howell) lives with her mother Margaret (Samantha Sloyan) and father Ralph (Tahmoh Penikett), a conspiracy-minded construction worker, in a sort of cult of three, out of which Carrie has never been allowed to poke her head. (For some reason, we are in “Chamberlain, USA,” and not the canonical Maine; it was filmed in Vancouver, of course.) Though “a loner” and “a bit of a doomsday prepper,” Dad is seemingly not a bad guy — Carrie loves him, anyway — but he departs the series early in a manner that will raise the eyebrows of anyone familiar with the paranormal phenomena at the heart of the story, and so many stories to come. His death prompts a visit from social services, and Carrie is sent to high school, where she begins as a sophomore, though every student she’ll interact with is a senior, while mom is sentenced to work, in a low-level service job in a world she was never made for and that frankly disgusts her.
Carrie, whose natural, long-bottled curiosity has been fed by the books a kind neighbor, Stella (Naika Toussaint), has secretly slipped her over the years, is excited to go to school, where they have computers and a library and other people, but her newness, oddness and 19th century home-sewn clothes make her a target. Things go bad when she gets her first period in the girls’ locker room and having been told nothing by her mother about menstruation believes she is dying. The crowd’s reaction to this is to pelt her with tampons. Teenagers!
The ringleader in this is Chris Hargensen (Alison Thornton), chief mean girl, whose nicer best friend is Sue Snell (Siena Agudong); we’ll meet Sue near the top of the series telling an unseen interlocutor, “It’s so easy to forget … we were kids.” In accordance with Flanagan’s scheme to build dimension into King’s characters, Chris is not merely a mean girl — she is a sad mean girl, about to learn that she is no longer rich, flattening her dream of going to Duke with Sue, and that her mother (Heather Graham) may not be coming home, which, as we’ve met her very unpleasant father (Michael Trucco), seems the sane move. She’ll compensate by hooking up with Billy Nolan (Arthur Conti), a high school dropout — or someone who was kicked out (described as “the reason we have metal detectors” at Ewen High) — minor league drug dealer and pig farmer (she will find this last occupation handy, come the story’s signature prank).
There are the now-traditional scenes in which Carrie learns to consciously control her telekinetic superpowers, previously manifested by accidentally setting off car alarms, opening mailboxes and causing a rain of rocks on her parents’ roof. Arms out, fingers splayed, she takes a comic-book summoning pose familiar from decades of mutant movies. (The business of superpowers arriving with the onset of puberty will become a dog-eared trope of science fiction.) There’s a lot of Carrie in Eleven, from “Stranger Things,” and a little of “Stranger Things” in this “Carrie.”
“We’re allowed to read all of them?” asks Carrie, when shown the school library. (We will see her with a stack of books, including “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and Malinda Lo’s “Last Night at the Telegraph Club,” described by Kirkus Review as “the intersectional, lesbian, historical teen novel so many readers have been waiting for.”) In my version of “Carrie,” she just hangs out there the whole time and avoids the haters. Maybe joins a book club and meets some fellow bibliophiles. Most often, when she seems on the verge of acceptance, happiness is snatched back from her — a nasty game. She does seem to make a friend with the appearance of Emaline West (Thalia Dudek), a Flanagan invention, a kind of devilish, yet supportive Jiminy Cricket figure who recognizes Carrie’s special powers.
“Through most of history I’d get drowned in a river, tortured on the rack or burned at the stake,” says Carrie, who has been reading about her condition, to Emaline, echoing the “documentary” sections that introduce each episode, offering background on the history of women with special powers in a male-dominated world (Joan of Arc, et al.), not that the story at hand really goes down that road. But it’s a point.
Other not insignificant characters I haven’t found a place to mention include Sue’s boyfriend, Tommy Ross (Joel Oulette), a sensitive jock; Josie Totah as Tina Blake, a secondary mean girl; Matthew Lillard, who will always be Shaggy to me, as beleaguered principal Henry Grayle; Amber Midthunder as Rita Desjardin, a sympathetic teacher; and Tim Bagley as Peter Morton, a sympathetic guidance counselor, who trades favorite literary quotes with Carrie. “Oh, um, I don’t do scary,” she says when he offers a line from “Frankenstein, “Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change.”
The eight-hour length has its good and bad points. King provided just enough material for a speedy feature, and so the series has been packed with extras. There are some useless side plots and some frankly wacky major interpolations in the later episodes, some of which appear to be laying the groundwork for a very different second season; Flanagan has in fact bruited a three-season arc, reaching far past the novel. The 20th century text is updated with notes on cyberbullying, viral videos , school shootings, conspiracy thinking, conservative populism, book banning and even beer pong. (Carrie goes to a party.) It can come across as polemical and yet somehow unavoidable.
But the more productive expansion has to do with character, especially as regards Carrie and her mother, who is not the deranged, abusive religious fanatic of previous versions, but an essentially loving parent frightened of the modern world. (She gets a surprising original arc in the back half of the series.) Whatever plot, or sinkholes may open in the larger narrative — I had more than a few “yes, but” reactions to elements of the story — “Carrie” does extremely well with person-to-person scenes. For all the cinematic energy and finesse dedicated to its climactic apocalypse (not a spoiler, it’s previewed at the start, and you may know it anyway), the real strength of the series is in quiet, one-on-one conversation, expressing issues of adolescent angst, loneliness and identity and generational and cultural divides that could serve any ordinary, non-paranormal teenage drama. Howell and Sloyan are quite wonderful in these moments, and Howell is exceptional throughout.
For all its little hiccups, “Carrie” does make one feel sad maybe 80% of the time, and anxious the rest of it, which is to say it does its job. Were you to meet me on the street and ask, “That new ‘Carrie,’ how is it?” my quickfire response would certainly be, “It’s good.”
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