// KOTAKU — GAMING
Amazon Prime’s Carrie Has Flaws, But Makes Wonderful Additions To Stephen King’s Original
Like you, I received the news that horror supremo Mike Flanagan was working on a TV series based on Stephen King’s Carrie with confusion and an eye roll. I love Flanagan’s work—Netflix series Midnight Mass, The Fall of the House of Usher and The Haunting of Hill House are all utterly extraordinary—and his passion and understanding of why Stephen King’s books are special shone through in Gerald’s Game, The Life of Chuck, and even the peculiarly Kubrick-besotted Doctor Sleep. I also can’t wait to see what he does with The Dark Tower, especially after Nikolakj Arcel’s absymal 2017 attempt starring Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey. But if Flanagan is going to adapt more of King’s work for television, why not books that have never been tried like Insomnia or Rose Madder, or those that were done atrociously like Needful Things and Dreamcatcher?
But why Carrie? The 1974 novel is a stunning debut from King, and only two years later it received its definitive on-screen interpretation via Brian De Palma’s extraordinary movie of the same name. Every subsequent adaptation of the book has been an embarrassment, a pale imitation of De Palma’s masterpiece. 1999’s execrable The Rage: Carrie 2 went so far as to actually include short clips from the 1976 movie, cruelly teasing audiences with reminders of the film we weren’t watching. In 2002 NBC had the usually excellent Bryan Fuller (Wonder Falls, Hannibal) write a TV movie which was cheekily turned into a backdoor pilot, and that bombed. Then in 2013 it was adapted yet again, this time by Kimberly Peirce (Boy’s Don’t Cry), and once again the results created cries of “Why did they bother?” Can’t we just accept it’s been done, and leave it at that?
Of course I still watched Flanagan’s version. I’ll watch any King adaptation, no matter how abysmal, often because I feel like not watching them would be letting them get away with it. (Hello, Under the Dome.) And given Flanagan is such a brilliant writer and a decent director, I wasn’t expecting it to be bad. But my god, I wasn’t expecting to be so delighted, either. Not only was Flanagan’s Carrie not bad, it was actively brilliant. Not perfect, and I have big issues with the final episode, but it was so much more than I was expecting. And more than anything else, it answered the question of “Why bother?” The answer was because it had something else to say.
From here on there will be spoilers for the Amazon Prime show, and I really do encourage people to watch its eight episodes without knowing how the show is different from the novel and previous adaptations. At the same time, this is a TV show that knows you already know how the book ends, and I’ve done my best to not actually give away any of the key changes.
The opening episode of 2026’s Carrie begins by letting its audience know it knows you know. The very first thing we see is a news report from the aftermath of the prom, where the school has burned down and great stretches of the town are on fire. Many are dead. In the next moment, we see Sue Snell being interviewed after the climactic events. Later we see glimpses of Carrie streaked in pig blood. This isn’t here to patronize you, to make you play along by pretending you never saw John Travolta rigging the bucket. Heck, just like with De Palma’s film, promotional material for the series showed Carrie’s face coated in blood. We all already know this is the story about the pubescent girl with the cruel, religious zealot mother, who gets bullied after starting her period, and that it ends with Carrie murdering almost everyone in her school using her developing telekinetic powers.
It’s by the end of that first episode that Flanagan lets you know he has something else in mind.
Each subsequent episode begins with narration from Kate Siegel, delivering sardonic essays about the misogyny that has led to women with telekinetic powers being branded as frauds or witches for the last few hundred years. We immediately get told that there’s somethi