When youthful pageantry and joie de vivre give way to callous cruelty, Carrie rises again, with a new prom to burn to the ground. Some things don’t change between generations. The crux of Carrie is the same whether Brian De Palma or Mike Flanagan is making it. Now Carrie is a show. That does bring some differences. For one, Carrie (1976) is a tight 96 minute movie and Carrie (2026) is a stretched out 408 minute show.
Given that the show is four times longer than the film, it would seem evident that it has much more to say and do. That’s not necessarily true, though, apart from modernizing the Stephen King text. How Flanagan modernizes the story is by exploring the evolution of bullying and hostile educational environments, as they have shifted with the rise of social media.
Students have cameras now. When bullying happens it’s no longer an isolated incident. It can be widely shared across the school. So it goes for Carrie White (Summer H. Howell, good in the role), who just wanted friends but got a metaphorical coming-of-age story instead. Carrie still has telekinesis, but she now shares the power with a sorority of other women, widening the menstruation metaphor. This is a useful and inclusive central conceit, helped by Flanagan leaning into King’s design of telekinesis as an inherited, generational trait. It removes the isolation that was key to the first film but welcomes a bigger audience, which is how television goes.
Another key change in Carrie’s lineage is her mother, Margaret White (Flanagan regular Samantha Sloyan), who is now MAHA-coded and more sympathetic. She isolates her daughter not out of purposeful neglect, but out of a want to protect her. She cares deeply about parents’ rights and red food dyes. The metaphors are this heavy-handed now, like getting sloshed by a bucket of pig’s blood at prom.
In his memoir On Writing (2000) Stephen King once gave the best advice to writers:
Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.
The Mike Flanagan project is about nurturing Stephen King’s own darlings. There seems to be too close a working relationship with the author, whose worst tendencies for overwriting are being directly adapted. His darlings are safe, nurtured, and loved, now, but that’s not very good for his darlings, when we used to have auteurs who would kill them, like Brian De Palma and Stanley Kubrick. This time, Carrie does not end with the death of the character, leaving a town to sort out the cost of its behavior, but with the promise of more. The series, in fact, does not climax so much as end, the denouement does not unknot the plot at all, but tangles up another web to be untied next time. What a shame.