// THE VERGE — MOBILE & WEB
Amazon’s Carrie is a cyberbullying nightmare
Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
Mike Flanagan’s first Amazon series is a (mostly) excellent update of the classic Stephen King tale.
Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
Do we really need a new version of Carrie? That’s the question that plagues any attempt to reimagine the classic horror tale. Stephen King’s 1974 novel remains one of his most iconic, and the film version from Brian De Palma and Sissy Spacek two years later remains unsurpassed, despite a handful adaptations that followed in the ensuing decades. Any new iteration of the story bears the burden of proving why it needs to exist in the first place. Mike Flanagan’s new Carrie series on Prime Video manages to do exactly that: It not only captures the terror and drama that has made the story so enduring, but updates it in a way that feels perfectly suited for 2026.
Carrie is also notable for coming from Flanagan, who has extensive experience both with King adaptations and limited horror series. He directed King-based films like The Shining sequel Doctor Sleep and The Life of Chuck, and became especially well known for putting out a string of shows on Netflix between 2018 and 2023, including the likes of The Haunting of Bly Manor and Midnight Mass. For years he helped Netflix own the month of October, so it was something of a coup when Amazon poached Flanagan with an exclusive TV deal in 2022. Carrie is the first project to come out of that partnership.
This version of Carietta White (Summer H. Howell), better known as Carrie, is a sheltered teenager who was largely isolated from the world until the death of her father. That event forced her and her mother Margaret (Samantha Sloyan) to reenter society for legal reasons, which for Carrie means attending high school for the first time. Despite a few changes here and there, Carrie tells the same basic story as its source material: A lonely young girl is met with the harsh realities of the world and is bullied to the point of awakening telekinetic powers that, ultimately, are unleashed with destructive force on a small town. The key beats remain in place, including Carrie’s most iconic scenes; Carrie is still pelted with tampons in a gym class shower when she gets her first period, and she’s still doused with pig’s blood at prom by a jealous bully.
But the Amazon show, by nature of being an eight-episode series, also expands on the story. And, much like Apple TV’s recent update of Cape Fear, some of the biggest changes are down to technology. When Carrie is embarrassed in gym class, the whole thing gets filmed, which then leads to the creation of an anonymous Instagram account — handle: “carriered” — that is used to bully her and, eventually, the whole school. Unsubstantiated rumors are given life by the account, including everything from teachers dating students to popular kids getting pregnant. What starts out as a bunch of mean-spirited memes turns into real-world consequences. Margaret, who in this iteration of the story is not only a religious zealot but also a conspiracy theorist, goes on to become a “parents’ rights activist,” fighting against the account with tactics that are eerily similar to those of right-wing influencers.