Carrie’s smothering holy-roller mom, locking her up in prayer-closet solitary confinement. The eerily unlikely prom date. The swinging bucket that has haunted every coronation of school-dance royalty in film and TV since Brian De Palma first adapted the book in 1976.
It’s a tale as old as time: Warped by her mother’s zealotry and scapegoated since childhood by her classmates, 16-year-old Carrie has a late, traumatic menarche that reactivates her latent telekinetic abilities. Then, after accepting a pity date to the prom, she’s crowned queen and immediately gets pig’s blood dumped on her head by a resentful bully. The humiliation causes her to lay waste to the school and then the town, using her powers to exact revenge.
King’s book and De Palma’s film became classics of the horror genre. No less venerable a critic than Pauline Kael wrote of Sissy Spacek’s Oscar-nominated portrayal: “I don’t see how this performance could be any better.” Yet in the 21st century, new interpreters keep trying to improve upon it. With platforms scrambling to capitalize on popular IP, it’s no mystery why this would sound like a good idea to Hollywood executives.
But something else must be inspiring high-minded filmmakers like Boys Don’t Cry director Kimberly Peirce, who released a divisive remake in 2013, to keep resurrecting Carrie. The fourth screen adaptation of the novel (unless you count the pitiful 1999 sequel, The Rage: Carrie 2) is an eight-episode Prime Video series created by Mike Flanagan, who is known both for riffing on horror touchstones in Netflix hits like The Haunting of Hill House and The Fall of the House of Usher and for his features based on King novels like Gerald’s Game and Doctor Sleep. Premiering Oct. 7, his ambitious Carrie is the first that manages to fully get out from under the shadow of De Palma’s.
Yet it confirms a gradual shift in how the story is being told. What was once an account of an abusive mother and an evil bully unwittingly uniting to create a lethal monster has become, with each new incarnation, more like an indictment of society as a whole. All three Carrie movies are mostly faithful to the novel, dutifully reproducing every major plot point and set piece, as well as a lot of dialogue.
King’s writing is remarkably cinematic, which is probably why he’s our most adapted living author. But every Carrie is also a product of its time. De Palma, whose masterfully crafted version turns 50 in November, seems to lust after and fear the female body in equal measure—a common response within what was then a male-dominated genre to the feminist upheavals of the ’70s.
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