Mike Flanagan’s Carrie Series Is Great — When It Sticks to Carrie, That Is

Over the past decade, Mike Flanagan has proven himself to be Stephen King’s biggest fan, directing three feature films — Gerald’s Game, Doctor Sleep, and The Life of Chuck — based on the world-famous horror author’s work. He’s also made a name for himself in the TV world, with buzzy adaptations and original series like The Haunting of Bly Manor and the very Stephen King-esque Midnight Mass. That makes him the ideal person to adapt a Stephen King novel for television, if such a thing must be done.

Historically, Stephen King TV adaptations have been more of a miniseries thing. Here, Flanagan, his writers, and his co-directors — including Kate Siegel and Kyra Sedgwick, who helm one episode each — stretch the story out over eight episodes, each just under an hour long. As we mentioned in our first-look review from Fantastic Fest, this necessitates certain changes to the story, for a handful of reasons. One of them is to explore the characters in more depth, which leads to more nuance. This is very successful. The other is to add new story elements, which is where Flanagan’s Carrie goes wrong.

First, what works: Carrie was first published in 1974, a time when high school was practically unrecognizable compared to now. Suggesting that bullies should “choose kindness” would have gotten you shoved into a locker in the ‘70s — or the ‘80s, or the ‘90s, for that matter. But in 2026, assemblies encouraging teenagers to do just that are commonplace. Then again, so are school shooter drills. Through the character of Carrie White (Summer H. Howell), the series is able to highlight the confusing, contradictory world today’s teenagers live in, particularly the ambient threat of gun violence in schools and the self-consciousness that comes from knowing that you could be recorded by anyone, anywhere, at any time.

This, of course, leads us to social media. In Flanagan’s Carrie, the title character’s bullies are everywhere and nowhere, as an anonymous classmate — anonymous to the kids, anyway; the audience knows that it’s troubled rich girl Chris Hargensen (Alison Thornton) — creates an Instagram account called “CarrieRed” devoted to uploading embarrassing photos anonymously submitted by Ewen High School students. The latter part is important, as Carrie is not the sole victim and Chris is not the sole perpetrator of the bullying in this series. This spreads both the suffering and the blame around, which fits the more sympathetic airing that all the characters, including Chris, get here. But it also dulls the horror, particularly when — without saying too much — it’s revealed that neither Chris nor Carrie are wholly responsible for the infamous pig-blood incident, nor the massacre that follows.

It’s not as much fun to watch Carrie crying as she sets the school gymnasium on fire with her mind, in other words. But that’s not as dramatic as the changes Carrie makes to the character of Margaret White (Samantha Sloyan), reframed here as an overprotective mother rather than as an abusive monster. She seems as though she might be on her way back to the latter at the end of Carrie Episode 2, but her character takes an unexpected turn in the second half of the series that’s self-righteous and a little delusional, but far from villainous. This Margaret’s biggest sin is pride, as she uses the “CarrieRed” incident to take out her frustrations on the secular world that she’s feared her entire adult life — not on her daughter, as she has in previous versions of the story.

After a setup invented for the series that adds backstory about Carrie and Margaret emerging from self-imposed isolation after the death of Carrie’s father, the extremist elements of Carrie fade into the background as the season goes on. This is unfortunate, as the connections Flanagan and company make between this aspect of the story and contemporary right-wing culture-war messaging are some of the series’ most insightful. Instead, Carrie gets carried away (sorry) with broad themes of scapegoating and witch hunts — both metaphorical and literal — accompanied by feminist monologues about women with “powers” being condemned as sorcerers and frauds. (These would be more compelling if they didn’t use images from the famously unreal Salem Witch Trials to illustrate their point.)

This is where Siegel’s character, briefly glimpsed at the end of Episode 1, starts to play a more important role in the story, although she physically appears too late to be properly developed as a character in her own right. In the meantime, as Chris and Sue Snell (Siena Agudong) embark on their own interpersonal dramas, Carrie makes friends with Emaline (Thalia Dudek), a fellow outcast who conveniently appears every time Carrie gets overwhelmed with emotion and does something spooky. Their relationship leads to the series’ low point, as Emaline and Carrie go to a junkyard to develop Carrie’s telekinetic powers in a scene that’s a little too much Eleven and not enough Carrie White.

A high point comes in Episode 3, where Carrie attends her first party, gets a little drunk, and finds out that her classmates aren’t so bad after all. Chris, meanwhile, gets into a fight with her new stepsister, and ends up leaving the party wasted and miserable. Siegel (who directed the episode) cuts between the girls’ faces, each of them hanging out of the passenger seat of a car. (Carrie is feeling the wind on her face; Chris feels like she’s going to throw up.) We know that something horrible is going to happen soon, but for now, Carrie’s life is on an upward trajectory, while Chris’ is sliding downwards. Add a sprinkle of the supernatural, and it’s the series’ entire arc captured in 30 seconds of visual storytelling.

It’s a great example of using character to deepen and modernize what Stephen King was doing in his original novel. Unfortunately, however, in subsequent episodes the series strays from this approach and into Stranger Things-inspired territory, whose cultural moment has long since passed. And that’s unfortunate, because in many other ways this Carrie quite unexpectedly rises to our own.

Carrie premieres on Prime Video on October 7th.