CARRIE

Creator: Mike Flanagan
Starring: Summer H. Howell, Samantha Sloyan, Matthew Lillard, Alison Thornton, Joel Oulette, Amanda Midthunder, Siena Agudong, Arthur Conti, Rahul Kohli, Josie Toteh

Writer/director Mike Flanagan has become a strong adaptor at bringing Stephen King stories to the big screen with Gerald’s Game, Doctor Sleep, and The Life of Chuck. Now he’s turning King’s debut novel Carrie into a television series. Stephen King published Carrie in 1974, and Brian DePalma made his film version with Sissy Spacek in 1976. There have been a few adaptations since then.

Mike Flanagan takes the core characters and themes of King’s work and applies them to 2026 instead of keeping that 1970s setting. It’s a wise move, but one that means the audience needs to set aside their feelings for the book or previous movies and look at this one with a fresh lens. Flanagan introduces the audience to a young innocent girl named Carrie White (Howell) as she attends public school for the first time. She’s arriving after the winter break when the girls have their cliques and she’s the odd one out. Carrie was previously home school by her fiercely overprotective mother, Margaret. Frequent Mike Flanagan company member Samantha Sloyan plays Margaret with an icy chill. Carrie’s father is killed in a workplace accident, and the state orders Margaret back to work and for Carrie to attend school. She’s smart but stunted, as she falls prey to bullying and social media memes at the hands of the fellow girls at school. She begins to discover her gift for telekinesis at a time when she starts to realize what her mother and those girls at school are doing to her. Streaming on Prime Video on October 7

Here’s my review