Mike Flanagan's Carrie television series is finally available to stream on Prime Video. However, unlike the Brian de Palma adaptation, Flanagan’s Carrie looks and feels a little bit different. For starters, the series takes place in a modern world, which means that social media now gets a chance at center stage in all the teenage drama that surrounds the story.
The changes, though, are bigger than that — much bigger. Of course, the ending to Carrie is as iconic as the name itself: after having pig's blood dumped on her at prom, Carrie uses her telekinesis to kill everybody. Flanagan's adaptation keeps the prom night slaughter, of course, but does much more with the story.
Let's take a look at the changes. After the prom night tragedy, the survivors are interviewed by a society of psychics and telekinetics that are monitoring Carrie (Summer H. Throughout the season, these interviews pop up, but it is an early one with one of Carrie's only friends, Sue Snell (Siena Agudong), who reveals that there were others at that fateful prom.
"It wasn't just Carrie," she says. The show leads us to believe that Carrie's other friend, Emaline (Thalia Dudek), is a figment of her imagination. However, it turns out that Emaline is, in fact, real and has been astral-projecting into Carrie's mind.
She ends up meaning more to the story than viewers anticipated, especially once Chris (Alison Thornton) and her boyfriend Billy (Arthur Conti) dump pig's blood on Carrie's head from the rafters of the stage. As the blood drips down her face, the crowd slowly morphs from shock to glee. Cell phones lift into the air, capturing the moment for social media.
This is when Carrie finally snaps, locking the doors and setting the gymnasium on fire, killing everybody trapped inside before destroying the entire town. But unlike King's book, Emaline appears and asks Carrie if she can "take over," meaning that Carrie wasn't the one who actually killed everybody, it was Emaline. After, Carrie runs to her mother, Margaret White (Samantha Sloyan).
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