Paulina EnckWhen a classic story gets a modern reimagining, some changes are necessary not just to adapt it to a new time and place, but also to justify its existence, especially when a masterful adaptation already exists. But how many alterations must exist before the adaptation becomes a fundamentally different piece of media than the original?
Horror auteur Mike Flanagan has taken on, as his latest miniseries adaptation, Stephen King’s iconic coming-of-age horror “Carrie,” which tells the story of a young woman facing years of brutal bullying at school and horrific abuse from her fundamentalist mother at home, who develops telekinetic powers her senior year, which culminates in a massacre at prom.
Flanagan is skilled at taking the core of classic horror stories and reshaping them in an engaging, wholly original collage. His Netflix series “The Haunting of Hill House,” loosely inspired by the Shirley Jackson novel of the same name, and “The Haunting of Bly Manor,” based on several Henry James ghost stories, primarily “The Turn of the Screw,” are perfect examples of this trait.
“Carrie” almost works, but many changes are more shallow than the source material and its similarly celebrated 1976 Brian De Palma-directed film.
While changes to such a ubiquitous story are at least somewhat necessary to keep it fresh and justify its existence, there comes a point where alterations are so excessive that it hardly resembles the source material, while still relying on the same but unearned emotional beats. Flanagan relies too heavily on viewers knowing the original story and bringing preconceptions about the characters, so he does not have to do the work of fleshing them out himself, which prevents the show from standing on its own.
The decision to alter Carrie’s abuse is one of the better shifts. Rather than a long-bullied social outcast, Flanagan’s Carrie starts school for the first time as a sophomore after an entirely secluded life, knowing no one but her domineering parents and having no access to the outside world.
Carrie is open and earnest, but she’s also deeply weird. She speaks largely in children’s book quotations, gets miffed when classmates don’t get the references, and struggles to understand concepts like study halls and school shooter drills. Summer H. Howell is a delight in the role.
This, however, considerably challenges the narrative around Carrie’s breaking point. In the novel, her massacre at the prom is due to years of resentment for horrific bullying and ostracism, where she had no allies for years, and then only received guilt-induced kindness from Sue, a former bully with a guilty conscience, and Sue’s boyfriend Tommy. In the miniseries, queen bee Chris is overwhelmingly the primary tormentor, but only for a matter of months at most. Carrie finds genuine friendships with Sue and Tommy, and certainly has the potential to make more friends as her social skills develop throughout the season. When, midway through the show, a mob of angry students is chanting “Death to [the bully]” and cheering for the beleaguered protagonist, the show does somewhat lose the plot.
The finale struggles to justify Carrie’s snapping and killing indiscriminately at the climactic prom, since most of the students hardly at all factored into Carrie’s hyper-specific misery, the school principal and entire faculty took her side, and the last we saw the masses celebrated her while inciting a mob that physically injured and nearly killed her bully.
In a post-Columbine world, the massacre at prom has a distinct school shooting flavor. The miniseries almost acknowledges the parallel, as Carrie’s defining character introduction is fundamentally misunderstanding an active-shooter drill at school and understandably being terrified. But Carrie’s pain has a very specific locus in three individuals: Chris, Chris’s enabler older boyfriend Billy, and Carrie’s mother. While her violence is still indefensible in previous versions, it’s at least comprehensible. Flanagan’s “Carrie” is neither.
Sue has been similarly flattened by adaptation. A bully who passively caused harm, went along with the crowd, then discovered the error of her ways and did everything in her power to make things right is a far richer figure than a nice, smart, hardworking girl who feels a little guilty about one moment of bystander-dom. Like many other aspects of the story, she has been rendered generic where she once was unique and complex.
Longtime Flanagan collaborator Samantha Sloyan is phenomenal as Margaret White, a very compelling take on an abusive parent. She can be terrifying in her viciousness, with a short temper and coldness, but she also shows moments of warmth and loving protectiveness. She punishes Carrie not for getting her first period, as in the novel, but for hiding pamphlets on sexual health given to her by the school after the period incident. It’s still horrific, but far more grounded and authentic. However, this initially compelling shift has unintended consequences as the miniseries progresses.
The shift from showing Margaret as a religious fundamentalist with a paralyzing fear of sexuality that she projects onto her adolescent daughter to a right-wing conspiracy theorist renders many of her objections either confusing or accidentally sympathetic. For a girl so previously restricted that she was hardly allowed outside the house, Carrie is now granted an astronomical amount of independence that many teens would find downright enviable. Her faith is brought up occasionally, but if a primary method of torturing her daughter is a room called the “prayer closet,” belief in God ought to play a larger role in her overall worldview rather than an afterthought.
While any adaptation of “Carrie” would be unlikely to treat religion nicely, due to the source material containing all of King’s redditor distaste for Christianity, maintaining the aesthetics of Margaret’s religious-tinged abuse without the substance of her faith is failing on both accounts. Similarly, Margaret’s concern about Carrie going to the prom with a popular boy in the show was concern about another bullying incident, rather than concern about potential sex. And after the semester Carrie had, that fear is not without merit.
Flanagan has a flair for eerie visuals. I tend to find his shows more atmospheric and unsettling than outright scary. The tampon-throwing scene that closed out the first episode is an ideal example, sad and evocative. The telekinesis is a little heavy handed. At its best, the sequences can be magical, physicalizing the highs and lows of the protagonist’s psyche, but several telekinetic moments in an episode render the metaphor labored, and the impact becomes banal.
It feels unintentionally fitting that one of the ringleaders of the locker room torture is a biological male. While I’m sure the relatively progressive Flanagan cast J.J. Totah as mean-girl sidekick Tina for woke points, watching a male actor disgusted by a girl’s period, then spending the rest of the season trying and failing to emulate the femininity and popularity of friends Chris and Sue, feels accidentally revealing.
The diversions about telekinesis and psychic powers beyond the protagonist are dull and unneeded, slowing the already bloated pacing of each episode. It also reduces the protagonist’s specialness in what is among the most blatant franchise bait this side of “The Mummy” (2017). Not everything needs to be a cinematic universe; sometimes a good miniseries should be left alone.
Although it’s currently framed as a miniseries, Flanagan has made it clear he could envision a three-season arc for the show. It is rare for miniseries extended past their initial run to offer much value to viewers, especially when the miniseries is based on a sequel-less book, as fans of “Big Little Lies” or “13 Reasons Why” can attest.
If the series continues, it will only stray further from the originality and unique story that made readers and viewers fall in love with “Carrie” in the first place, likely shifting into the repetitive, generic adolescent and supernatural tropes that plague much of Flanagan’s miniseries work.
As it stands, the Amazon Prime Video miniseries offers some fun for fans of either Mike Flanagan’s oeuvre or the King novel, but between the confused messages and shallow characterization, far better options exist.
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Paulina Enck is a media specialist in Washington, D.C.
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