Carrie premiered Wednesday, October 7 on Prime Video.
By Greg Wheeler
Spoilers follow for the entire season.
Mike Flanagan’s Carrie is a strangely unfocused adaptation of one of horror’s most focused stories. There is a great version of this show somewhere inside these eight episodes, built around a sheltered, deeply lonely teenage girl discovering that she possesses terrifying powers. Unfortunately, this version keeps wandering away from Carrie, often for long stretches at a time, until the season finale feels less like the culmination of her tragedy and more like the launch of an entirely different supernatural franchise.
The setup is familiar, even with the modern updates. After the death of her father, Carrie White is forced to leave her isolated home and attend public school for the first time. She knows almost nothing about the outside world, menstruation, friendship, or the social rules of high school. Her mother, Margaret, is an intensely religious and controlling presence, while her classmates quickly turn Carrie into a target. After a humiliating locker-room incident, an anonymous social media account called CarrieRed_ makes her torment public and permanent.
Summer H. Howell is excellent in the title role. She plays Carrie as curious and emotionally intelligent rather than simply strange or frightening, which makes her gradual transformation more tragic. Carrie is not naturally cruel. She is a girl who has been denied every opportunity to develop normally, then dropped into an environment where everyone around her seems to understand a language she has never been taught. Howell gives the character a wounded openness that makes the moments when her powers finally erupt genuinely compelling.
Samantha Sloyan is equally strong as Margaret, who is frightening precisely because she does not see herself as a villain. She believes her cruelty is protection, her control is love, and her religious extremism is the only thing keeping Carrie safe. The relationship between the two should be the emotional center of the show, and whenever Carrie focuses on that mother-daughter dynamic, it gets much closer to the material’s real power.
The problem is that the series keeps insisting on being about everything else too. There are elaborate storylines involving social media, school politics, parental rights, financial hardship, predatory teachers, online vigilantism, and a growing group of people with psychic abilities. Some of these ideas are interesting on their own. The CarrieRed_ storyline, in particular, is a reasonable way to update the original story for an age of cyberbullying, viral humiliation, and digital cruelty.
But the show rarely integrates these ideas smoothly. The political material is often delivered with the subtlety of a sledgehammer, while the supporting characters are given so much time that Carrie sometimes feels like a guest star in her own show. Sue Snell, Christine Hargensen, Tommy Ross, Miss Desjardin, Margaret, and several other characters all receive their own dramas, but most of those arcs never develop into anything especially satisfying.
Christine is probably the most frustrating example. Alison Thornton gives her plenty of pain and volatility, and the show tries to explain the insecurity beneath her cruelty. Still, Christine’s storyline gradually becomes an extended social media thriller, while the central rivalry between her and Carrie keeps getting pushed aside. The same is true of the subplot involving Brooklyn and a predatory teacher. It introduces a genuinely complicated moral question, but the show never gives the fallout enough attention to justify the space it occupies.
There are moments when the series briefly finds its focus. Carrie’s scenes at the scrapyard, where Emaline encourages her to experiment with her powers, are among the season’s best. They capture the intoxicating feeling of finally possessing some control over a life in which Carrie has always been powerless. The question of whether Emaline is an imaginary friend, a supernatural being, or something else entirely also creates some welcome mystery.
Sadly, the show’s structure repeatedly undercuts its own suspense. The opening interviews tell us almost immediately that the school will burn, more than 200 people will die, and several major characters will not make it out alive. That framing device might have created dread, but instead it drains much of the tension from the season. We spend several episodes waiting for an inevitable catastrophe while already knowing who will survive it.
The prom sequence itself is visually effective, with the expected blood, fire, collapsing structures, and chaos. Yet even here, Carrie makes a strange choice. By suggesting that Emaline takes control of Carrie during the massacre, the series softens Carrie’s agency at the exact moment when the story should be confronting it most directly. Carrie becomes less a tragic figure making an awful choice and more a powerful young woman being manipulated by someone else.
The finale then pivots into a wider mythology involving astral projection, a hidden community of powered people, the so-called TK gene, and an organization led by Adelaide that appears to monitor and control people with supernatural abilities. Margaret is revealed to have powers of her own, Emaline is confirmed to be real, and Carrie is whisked away toward an uncertain future.
That mythology may be appealing to Stephen King obsessives and viewers interested in a larger connected universe, but it does serious damage to Carrie as a standalone story. The season spends so much time expanding the world that it forgets why Carrie’s story has endured in the first place. The emotional impact of Christine’s death is minimal, Tommy’s death feels largely functional, and many of the supporting characters receive little meaningful closure.
There is talent all over this production, and the series is never completely without merit. Howell and Sloyan are terrific, the modernized bullying material occasionally lands, and Flanagan clearly understands the sadness underneath King’s horror. But Carrie is too scattered to be devastating and too restrained to be genuinely frightening. It feels like a coming-of-age teen drama with supernatural elements, rather than a horror story that happens to take place in high school.
A shorter, tighter season focused primarily on Carrie, Margaret, Sue, and Christine could have been something special. Instead, the show keeps reaching for a larger universe before it has fully earned the story in front of it.
I give Carrie Season 1 a C+.
