Mike Flanagan rebuilds Stephen King’s first novel around a girl who walks into high school expecting kindness, and across eight episodes that expectation becomes the most frightening thing in the story.
Fifty-Two Years of the Same Prom
Every adaptation of Carrie is haunted by an ending the audience already knows. The bucket, the blood, the gym doors slamming shut: the image has been parodied, sold as a Halloween costume and quoted so often that it no longer frightens anyone by itself. Any new version has to justify its existence before it earns a minute of attention, and for most of the versions since 1976 the honest answer was that it couldn’t.
Mike Flanagan’s eight-episode series for Prime Video answers the question by changing who walks toward that ending. His Carrie White is not braced for cruelty. She expects the world to be good to her, and that one decision reorganizes everything King wrote in 1974.
Prime Video kindly provided all eight episodes for this review.
My bias belongs on the table, because it shapes everything that follows. Flanagan is the horror storyteller I trust more than any other working today, and his name on a credit sequence is the closest thing television offers me to a guarantee. That trust is exactly why this review lands where it does. Carrie is extremely good, the best series on any screen right now, and it still sits a rung below the three shows that made his reputation.
What It’s About
Carrie (Summer H. Howell) has spent her entire life inside one house with her mother, Margaret (Samantha Sloyan). She has never been to school, and the state has no idea she exists. When her father, Ralph, dies suddenly, the White household is dragged into the light, and Carrie is enrolled at Thomas Ewen Consolidated High in Chamberlain as a teenager who has never sat in a classroom.
The school is a foreign country to her, and she takes it in with an openness that her classmates read as strangeness. Sue Snell (Siena Agudong) and her boyfriend, Tommy Ross (Joel Oulette), try to steady her. Chris Hargensen (Alison Thornton) offers a far more dangerous kind of friendship. Miss Desjardin (Amber Midthunder) and Principal Grayle (Matthew Lillard) watch the school come apart over a bullying scandal that spreads online faster than any adult can follow. Underneath all of it, things start to move when Carrie is frightened.
The familiar beats are all present, the locker room included, and yes, there is still pig’s blood. What changes is the road to them. Alongside Carrie’s story, almost every episode opens a window onto another woman, elsewhere in the world or elsewhere in history, whose abilities made her a target. That thread is the series’ boldest invention and, as I’ll come to, its most uneven.
A Long Shelf of Carries
King’s novel was his first, and it is a stranger book than its reputation suggests. Much of it is told after the fact, through invented testimony, inquiry transcripts and excerpts from a fictional study of the Chamberlain disaster: a collage of adults trying to explain a girl none of them bothered to see while she was alive.
Brian De Palma’s 1976 film threw almost all of that away and kept the nerve. Sissy Spacek’s Carrie is a creature of pure flinch, and Piper Laurie plays Margaret’s scripture like a horror score; both were nominated for Oscars, which almost never happens to a horror film. Then came the copies. The Rage: Carrie 2 attempted a sequel in 1999. A 2002 television film with Angela Bettis restored some of the novel’s investigative framing and was meant to launch a series that never arrived. Kimberly Peirce’s 2013 version, with Chloë Grace Moretz and Julianne Moore, gestured at phone cameras and online humiliation without ever believing in them. There was even a Broadway musical in 1988, whose collapse became theater legend.
Each of these reads the same girl differently. For De Palma, she is a victim whose revenge is the release the audience came for. For Peirce, she is a teenager discovering her power almost the way a superhero would. King wrote her as both, a frightened child and a weapon, and left the reader uncomfortable with the overlap.
Flanagan’s reading is the most generous of them all. This Carrie is curious and eager, unguarded because nobody ever taught her she would need a guard. Margaret, in turn, is the first screen version who is recognizably a mother before she is a zealot: a woman who fears the world so completely that she built her daughter a sealed paradise and called it protection. The tragedy is no longer a beaten girl finally hitting back. It is what a cruel, connected, permanently recording world does to someone who arrives believing in it.
Script and Structure
The novel is one of the shortest King has written, and eight hours is a lot of room. Where most adaptations of his work fight to compress, this one has to expand, and Flanagan expands sideways rather than padding the middle. The episodes carry school-subject titles, starting with “First Period,” which tells you something about the show’s humor: dry, a little cruel and aimed squarely at the scene everyone remembers.
The best expansion is Chris Hargensen. In King’s book she is a rich girl with a lawyer father and not much else. Here she gets a family, a history and a motive, and what makes her frightening is method. She does not sneer at Carrie from across the cafeteria. She befriends her. The betrayal that follows lands harder than in any previous version because the show made you want the friendship to be real. Flanagan explains Chris without excusing her, and he never asks you to forgive her.
The social-media layer is where the update earns its keep. A meme page devoted to humiliating Carrie runs through the school, and the writing understands that online cruelty has no off switch, no end to the school day and no adult who can see the whole of it. It is the clearest case for retelling this story now: the novel’s bullying stopped at the school gates, and this version’s never does.
I will be honest about where it slips. The meme-account subplot eventually tips the school into a riot, and it runs longer than it should, with stretches in the middle of the season that spend more energy on the mechanics of the scandal than on the people caught inside it.
The other weakness is the thread about gifted women. The vignettes are often superb as short films in their own right, and they take seriously a corner of King’s book that every earlier adaptation dropped: the suggestion, buried in those fictional reports, that Carrie might not be the only one. The trouble is that their payoff is held back until the final two episodes, which then have to carry the mythology, the prom and the setup for what comes next all at once. The ending changes the nature of the climax in a way I won’t spoil. It works as the close of a first chapter, which is plainly what it is, since Flanagan has spoken openly of Carrie as a three-season story. As the close of a self-contained tragedy, it asks more of your patience than King ever did.
Performances
Summer H. Howell carries the series, and she beat more than a thousand other actors to the part. She looks enough like the young Spacek that comparisons were inevitable, and she makes them irrelevant within an episode. Her Carrie leans toward people before she knows whether they are safe, and Howell lets every small humiliation register a beat late, as though the meaning arrives after the blow. When the powers come, they come out of that delay, and the effect is far more unsettling than any amount of trembling.
Samantha Sloyan gives the performance of the series. Flanagan wrote Margaret for her, and after Bev Keane in Midnight Mass it would have been easy to play another sanctimonious terror. She does the opposite. Her Margaret loves her daughter with a fierce, frightened tenderness, and the horror of the role is watching that love curdle into dread as Carrie’s gifts surface. There are scenes where you side with her. They are few, and they are the most disturbing in the show.
Alison Thornton makes Chris magnetic in a way that makes your skin crawl, and Josie Totah’s Tina is, at moments, worse. Siena Agudong gives Sue a conscience the script tests rather than flatters, which is the only way that character has ever worked. Matthew Lillard does a great deal with a principal’s limited screen time. Amber Midthunder is good as Miss Desjardin but underused, and Heather Graham, as Chris’s mother, has too little to play.
The Flanagan repertory fills the edges of the frame. Kate Siegel, Rahul Kohli, Michael Trucco, Katee Sackhoff and Crystal Balint all turn up, and spotting them is part of the pleasure for anyone who has followed his work since Hill House.
Direction and Craft
Flanagan directs four episodes, the first two and the last two, and hands the middle of the season to four women: Kate Siegel, Axelle Carolyn, Kyra Sedgwick and Hiromi Kamata. In a series about young women coming into their power, that reads as intent rather than scheduling, and the handoffs are clean enough that the season plays as a single long film.
Michael Fimognari, the cinematographer behind most of Flanagan’s television, keeps the camera close to Carrie and puts us inside her head. A crowded hallway becomes a wall of faces she cannot read, and the classroom, which every other character treats as furniture, looks to her like a stage. It is subjective filmmaking that never announces itself, and it does more to build sympathy than any line of dialogue.
The Newton Brothers, Flanagan’s longtime composers, score the series with restraint, saving their weight for the moments when something in the room starts to give. And for a horror show, Carrie is rarely scary in the jump-out-of-your-seat sense. Its dread is existential, closer to grief than to shock, which is the register where Flanagan has always been strongest.
Where Carrie Sits in Flanagan’s Work
This is his fourth King adaptation. Gerald’s Game (2017) took a novel widely considered unfilmable and made it almost unbearable. Doctor Sleep (2019) did something harder still, reconciling King’s The Shining with Kubrick’s, two visions their own author spent decades refusing to reconcile. The Life of Chuck went the other way entirely, a gentle, backward-told film about one whole life, and won the People’s Choice Award at Toronto in 2024. Carrie is the first time he has had a full season of television to adapt King, and you can feel how at ease he is with the room.
But the series that define him are the ones where the material bends most completely to his own preoccupations. The Haunting of Hill House (2018) took Shirley Jackson as a starting point and turned her into a family saga about grief, with an episode, “Two Storms,” built from a handful of extraordinary unbroken takes. The Haunting of Bly Manor (2020) used Henry James to tell a love story, and its final episode is as tender as horror has ever allowed itself to be. Midnight Mass (2021) is wholly his own, a story about faith, addiction and an island congregation, with the most fully realized monologues the genre has produced.
Those three are, for me, the best that a series can offer in any form of entertainment. Not the best horror series. The best series. They have a patience and a confessional quality, the long speeches, the dead who refuse to leave the room, that Carrie only partly shares. Here Flanagan is serving a story whose ending belongs to King and to fifty years of cinema, and even his boldest changes are a negotiation with that history. In Hill House, Bly Manor and Midnight Mass he answered to no one.
That still leaves Carrie in very good company. It sits comfortably above The Midnight Club (2022) and alongside The Fall of the House of Usher (2023), and it is the most complete thing he has made since Midnight Mass.
Why King Keeps Getting Rewritten
Stephen King matters to the writers now running writers’ rooms in a way very few living novelists do, and the reason goes beyond any single story. He handed them a grammar: the small town as a closed system, children as the only people who see clearly, the ordinary detail (a brand name, a song on the radio) as the floor the horror stands on. Writers who grew up with his paperbacks adapt him the way musicians cover the song they learned to play on, faithful in spirit and free in form.
That is why the past decade has been the richest stretch of King adaptations in his long career. The Duffer brothers built Stranger Things largely out of his vocabulary. Andy Muschietti turned It into a two-part box-office phenomenon in 2017 and 2019. And Flanagan has made himself the most faithful of the unfaithful adapters, the one who changes the most and still lands closest to what the books feel like to read.
Derry, Chamberlain and the Many Hands on King
It: Welcome to Derry made that argument better than anything else last year. The HBO prequel, which premiered on October 26, 2025, took the Muschiettis’ version of Derry back to 1962 and gave Bill Skarsgård’s Pennywise more room to frighten than either film had. Its eight episodes kept circling backward through the town’s bloody history, and its finale, with a frozen river, a line of hypnotized children and a revelation about how Pennywise experiences time, was the best hour of horror television of 2025. HBO has since renewed it for a second season set in 1935, during the Great Depression.
Put Welcome to Derry next to Carrie and you can see how differently King’s world now gets imagined. Muschietti is a showman: his horror is kinetic, maximal and often funny, a funhouse built on top of a real history of violence. Flanagan is a confessor: his monsters are almost always grief, shame or faith, and the supernatural is simply how they get to speak. Both are King.
Dick Hallorann is the neatest proof. King’s cook with the shine turns up in Welcome to Derry, played by Chris Chalk, and in Flanagan’s Doctor Sleep, and the two versions belong to entirely different imaginations while both feel true to the page. A writer whose work can hold temperaments that far apart has a legacy that grows every time it changes hands.
Both shows share one instinct, too: they treat King’s book as the first volume of a larger story. Muschietti has a three-season plan for Derry, and Flanagan has one for Carrie. Whether that is ambition or the economics of streaming television, the result is that King’s novels have become points of departure rather than destinations, and on this evidence his legacy is better for it.
The Viewing Experience
Prime Video released all eight episodes at once on October 7, in more than 240 countries and territories, after the first two premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival. That release model matters more than usual here. Taken over a weekend, the season’s middle sag barely registers, the dread compounds from one episode into the next, and the gifted-women vignettes read as a slow drumbeat rather than as interruptions. Spread across a week or two, the meme-account episodes would test anyone’s patience.
Give it a weekend with the lights low, then. Resist the urge to check your phone between episodes, which this show will make you feel faintly guilty about anyway.
What It Leaves Behind
What stays is not the prom. It is the expression Howell wears each time Carrie offers someone her trust, and the slow realization, a little earlier than she reaches it, of what that trust is going to cost her. Every previous version asked what happens when you push a girl too far. Flanagan asks what happens when the world receives a girl who never learned to expect anything bad from it, and his answer is the bleakest thing he has put on screen since Midnight Mass.
It is also, by its final minutes, plainly unfinished. I would rather a story overreach than play it safe, and the reach here is considerable.
Verdict
Carrie is the best series on any screen right now and the most persuasive argument yet that this story needed telling again. Howell and Sloyan give two of the performances of the year, Chris Hargensen finally becomes a person, and the move into a world of phones and meme pages feels like the book King might write if he were starting out today. It loses a little to a subplot that overstays its welcome and to a mythology that saves too much for the end. And it is not Hill House, Bly Manor or Midnight Mass, which remain, for me, the high-water mark of what television can do.
Watch it if you love Flanagan, or if you are convinced you have already seen every Carrie worth seeing. If you have never seen his work, start with The Haunting of Hill House and come back. Carrie will be waiting, and she will be glad to see you.
