We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.
This week: a TV series based on a story that previously inspired multiple movies.
CARRIE SEASON ONE (2026)
We have seen a lot of different versions of Carrie over the years, and there’s an unavoidable problem with taking another swing at Stephen King's story: if you’re going to recreate the most famous parts of Carrie, you’re going to be compared to Brian De Palma’s 1976 movie. And pretty much anything that attempts to replicate what De Palma did is going to come up short.
That doesn’t necessarily mean the new Carrie (overseen by King regular Mike Flanagan) is a failure, though. In fact, this series is pretty good for most of its run, and sometimes it’s very good. It finds some interesting things to say about bullying and the way teenagers behave online, gives the Carrie character a different personality than we've seen before, and digs deeper into the troublesome Chris Hargensen than previous adaptations have. Unfortunately, it all falls apart in the final episode.
This version of Carrie White is played as a much friendlier and more upbeat person than we've seen in previous adaptations. She isn't the painfully shy, socially awkward girl waiting for someone to push her too far. Summer H. Howell, the actress playing her, is excellent, delivering a very different Carrie performance than in previous movies. This time, the White family are doomsday preppers who have been homeschooling Carrie, keeping her away from society and apparently doing everything possible to make sure she has no idea how normal people live. They haven't even bothered to get her a birth certificate. After her father dies, Child Protective Services decides Carrie needs to go to high school, and suddenly this sheltered girl is thrown into a world she has never been allowed to experience.
That setup works well. Carrie is a sweet kid who wants to connect with people. And that makes the bullying she experiences all the more upsetting. The best material in the series involves social media and cyberbullying, because that's an area where Carrie can actually be updated rather than recreated. The technology changes the way cruelty works. Humiliation doesn't end when you leave school anymore; somebody can record it, post it, share it, comment on it, and keep it alive indefinitely.
The show also does a much better job with Chris Hargensen (Alison Thornton) than I expected. Rather than making her the standard mean girl who exists to torment Carrie until the prom, the series spends time with Chris and gives her a life of her own. She's still infuriating, because she makes terrible choices and repeatedly makes other people's lives worse, but there's a tragic element to her story as well. The more we learn about her, the more understandable some of her behavior becomes without making it excusable. That's a difficult balance to pull off, and the series generally does a good job with it.
The cyberbullying material and the Chris storyline are, for me, much more interesting than the attempt to recreate familiar Carrie moments. Carrie's mom, Margaret White (Samantha Sloyan), is even turned into a social media personality, which is an intriguing and unexpected contemporary touch. But I kept finding myself more interested in what the series was doing with modern bullying than in the telekinesis.
Unfortunately, that's also where the show's biggest problem becomes apparent. The closer it gets to the supernatural elements everybody expects from Carrie, the less interesting it becomes. If this had simply been a psychological drama about a sheltered teenager being thrown into high school and becoming the target of online harassment, it might actually have been a stronger show. Of course, then it wouldn't have been Carrie, and Prime Video couldn't have profited off the familiar name.
The problem becomes impossible to overlook when it reaches the finale. The show introduces a whole new layer of supernatural mythology involving a group of telekinetics, and the story starts making increasingly strange decisions about Carrie and her powers. One of the strangest involves Emaline (Thalia Dudek), an outsider who has been hanging around Carrie throughout the series.
Emaline is already a fairly annoying character, so discovering that she isn't actually there in the conventional sense is not exactly the most devastating twist imaginable. At first, we're led to believe that she's an imaginary friend, a hallucination, which would have been easier to stomach. But no. She's an astral projector who has been communicating with Carrie from a distance. And by the end, Carrie runs off with her.
The prom sequence is even more problematic because the series fundamentally changes what happens to Carrie. Chris and her dimwitted boyfriend still set the whole thing in motion with a bucket of blood, but Carrie isn't actually responsible for what follows in the same way she is in the original story. She gives control of her body to Emaline, who is effectively the one unleashing the telekinetic mayhem.
There are also a couple of telekinetic agents watching the proceedings, along with a woman played by Katee Sackhoff who believes telekinetic children are dangerous enough that they should be killed. She brings a gun to the prom, and when Carrie/Emaline starts losing control, she attempts to shoot her. The other telekinetics prevent her from doing too much damage, although she does manage to hit Carrie, or rather Emaline while she's occupying Carrie's body.
It's a bizarre reworking of the prom massacre, and unfortunately it doesn't improve on the original in any way. De Palma's sequence remains one of the great pieces of horror filmmaking because of the way it builds dread, isolates Carrie, and then turns a moment of teenage humiliation into an eruption of terror. This version introduces additional characters and rules that aren't been nearly as compelling as the bullying storyline we've spent the rest of the series watching.
That's really the frustrating thing about this Carrie. There is a good show buried in here. Sometimes, it's a very good one. The new approach to Carrie works, the actress playing her is terrific, the social media material is timely and effective, and the expanded Chris storyline gives the series something its predecessors didn't have. But whenever the show starts worrying about how it can reinvent the supernatural side of Carrie, it loses sight of what was actually working. And by the time the final episode arrives, the show has piled so many new ideas on top of the original story that the prom massacre no longer feels like the culmination of Carrie's tragic journey, as an unnecessary twist makes the whole thing fall apart.
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