Author’s Note: Thanks for sharing the spooky month of October with me. Back to nonfiction until April!
Stephen King's first novel-length book, “Carrie” gave the world a nightmare vision of a sheltered and bullied young woman who finally takes all she can and uses latent telekinetic abilities to reap her vengeance on the small town of Chamberlain. The story propelled King into his role as the “King of Horror” and, like no other book, gave us a scathing look at the modern era with all its flaws and warts visible for the world to see.
When a cinematic version of the book hit the silver screen, directed by Brian de Palma, with Carrie played by Sissy Spacek, audiences were literally blown away by the intense and gory tale. In typical 1970s fashion, the film caught all the cruelty and brutality, but failed to entirely capture King’s inlay of social criticism. Spacek's performance was perfect, however, and the scene where Carrie, elected prom queen by bullies, is doused in pig blood on stage has lasted in the public imagination, much the way the shower scene in “Psycho” or the lone swimmer scene in “JAWS” have. There are several remakes, and all of them are what you'd expect. Updated for the current generation, they tell the same story with updated clothes and lingo. All of them are fairly forgettable.
Then I saw that Mike Flanagan (of The Haunting of Hill House, Midnight Mass and Fall of the House of Usher fame) had done a remake of Carrie for Amazon Prime Video. At first, the eight-part series seemed to irk Carrie's creator. But then, that news changed. King suddenly showed up everywhere practically screaming in glee about the series. I was curious, and decided to give it a try.
I watched it hesitantly, not to say grudgingly, at least at first. The idea of one of King’s shortest books at only 199 pages (later editions have about 320, with added material) being stretched on the sometimes attention-straining rack of streaming series into eight, one-hour long episodes seemed a little much to me. Especially when considering the wanton desecration of Tolkien’s histories of Middle Earth in the flagrantly noncanonical Rings of Power series Amazon produced. I didn’t think that Flanagan would do such butchery to King’s masterful tale of a shy and sheltered girl done wrong, but these days, how can one be sure?
I have now watched Carrie and I’m only going to say this: if you don’t have Prime Video, please sign up and watch Flanagan’s version. There’s way more depth than the original movie, but there is also a lot more social commentary, and it all fits within the whirling arc of King’s original work that was likely informed by his immediate experience working as an English teacher when the book was originally published.
Here Be Spoilers!
If you have read Carrie, you’ll know that Carietta White is a shy and sheltered teen of 16. Her fanatically religious mother, Margaret, has kept her sheltered and away from public life, mainly for reasons of fear and spiritual contamination, but in Flanagan’s version, Carrie’s parents (her father is killed in a work accident early in the first episode) have kept her sheltered because they are Christian doomsday preppers, convinced that the government is after them and that other people cannot be trusted. Because of his death, though, Carrie and her mother are forced into the world. Carrie has to go to school and Margaret has to go to work. Margaret, played with subtle psychopathic joy by Flanagan regular Samantha Sloyan, is dead-eyed and hateful, clearly showing her disdain and disgust for the world and barely able to keep from lecturing people about their folly. She is an Internet troll writ large in real life and as intolerable and hateful as this is to write, she is a “Karen” in all her pushy, angry, mean-spirited, self-righteous glory.
The story follows the events of the book fairly closely at first, but then stoops into much deeper details, giving us backstory and emotional development for each of the main characters. In this way, they become more than caricatures, they rise into three-dimensional and very sympathetic in all their horrible, self-centered tendencies. Where the story departs entirely from the novel, though, is where many people found the show to be too dissimilar from the book to be worth following; namely, by taking the framework of the story and bringing it fully into the modern, Internet Age.
Chris Harginson, Carrie’s worst bully, isn’t just a terrible person. She’s from a paternal line of unbraked self-regard, and she has learned from her father that it is okay to be an entitled, brittle, predatory and evasive person if it gets her what she wants. Her home life is collapsing—her father has embezzled money from his law firm, there is no money for her to go to Duke, her mother has left to move in with the father of a classmate—everything about her life makes the viewer gasp with empathy. How can we watch her life crumble and expect that she won’t be upset at how things are going? Carrie, simply by dint of becoming the latest phenomenon at a school where Chris is the main topic, becomes a target, a scapegoat, someone to blame just by being there.
Chris’s best friend, Sue Snell, popular, strong, though less emotionally manipulative, is the first one to see that Carrie is a real person, and not a target. She and her boyfriend, Tommy Ross, are quickly driven to take sides and both become genuinely concerned about Carrie and try to do the right thing as the story progresses.
The now infamous menstruation scene, in which Carrie is horrified that she is bleeding to death (her mother never taught her about her own body) shows the high school girls, led by Harginson, attacking Carrie, rather than helping her. They fling sanitary products at Carrie after pushing her into the shower, and capture everything on their phone cameras. King’s image from the novel is then punctuated with flickering lights and vibrating locker doors, as Carrie’s rage awakens her latent telekinesis, but it is given even more depth at the now ubiquitous instinct to record everything for future posting online.
Harginson, punished by their teacher for bullying, feels targeted and so plays nice with Carrie to get out of the crosshairs, but is resentful of Sue’s divided attention and starts an Instagram page called CarrieRed, in which she mocks all students at the school, but especially Carrie. No one knows who the page belongs to, and some think it might be Carrie herself, which involves the entire community in a protracted and disruptive battle about online bullying.
At the crisis of the show, Carrie is beginning to find out what life is like for a normal 16 year-old girl. She has a crush, she makes friends, she shows herself to be sweet, deeply caring and genuinely a good person. HEr relationship with Sue grows, too. Yet, caught between the hammer of her mother’s paranoia and reactive nature and the anvil of the CarrieRed page secretly run by Chris Harginson, she begins to feel the pressure and her powers, again, rear up clumsily. That’s when the most unusual (and noncanonical) part of the show happens. A group of unnamed women, all possessing some form of ESP, become aware of Carrie and start to look for her. The show even goes so far as to call the power (late in the last episode) the Shine. A young woman, a fellow student called Emiline, shows up to help Carrie with her powers midway through the story and becomes the catalyst for Carrie’s growing control of her abilities.
At the end, when Carrie is in the gymnasium, covered in pig blood and raging, it isn’t just the school that is burning, but the whole town, as in the book. Carrie uses her mental powers to shut the doors to the gymnasium where the prom is being held, and destroys her classmates in her rage. She then hunts down her bullies, and kills them, and when her mother, fearing what Carrie has become, tries to end her daughter’s life, Carrie also kills her mother by attempting to drop the house on her. In the Prime Video show, though, things go a bit differently, especially with Carrie’s mother, but the effect is no less horrific.
Reviewing a Redux
I’m not a cinema critic, but if I were, I’d probably not be able to write anything coherent about Carrie, mainly because I just don’t know how I feel, yet. My familiarity with the story and my tendency toward purism when it comes to book-to-movie/streaming shows makes me a little too fussy to be trustworthy. However, right now, I have a sense that I liked this version of Carrie, if not for its perfect retelling of the story, then for taking the opportunity to discuss current topics, to create a strong social criticism and to fill the unsaid gaps in the original movie with worthy thoughts.
First a little background for me. I read Carrie, after I saw the movie with Sissy Spacek, sometime in the late 1990s, more than twenty years after it was released. The movie was/is a cult classic. A bit dated, now, of course, it still deals accurately with themes of bullying and when things go too far for the victims. The story works as a substructure to drape current issues over, if done carefully. Bullying, social dynamics in a public school, the helplessness of school staff, the zealotry of religious parents are all still quite timeless problems.
Flanagan is dedicated to keeping the structure true and I appreciate that, and he did a great job of making sure that King’s work gets the treatment it deserves (not something one can say for many of the cinematic or made-for-TV versions, Ahem Stanley Kubrick) However, Flanagan takes all of these a step further and makes social media—namely bullying with social media platforms—the main point of the film and then hangs all these other issues upon it, creating a conflagration of ego, pride, hatred, narcissism, and, finally, rage.
Flanagan did his research, too. Females between 13-17 make up about 54% of victims of online bullying—the majority, compared with boys at 44%—and are more likely to hide the effects of bullying as a result of fear of reprisal or that adults won’t take it seriously. The sad fact is that, from a nationally representative Pew Research poll, young women are more likely to self harm, end their lives or turn to substance abuse to deal with bullying. Social media has facilitated all of this.
ESP 101
King’s original point, I think, was to show that, when a child is badly treated, they learn to deal with their abuse in a very specific way: children who are abused, become abusers. He used telekinetic powers as a literary device to show this, but the point remains: children with special powers and prowesses, if not taught how to use them, will be sure to use them for harm. In the 2019 retelling of the Superman myth, “Brightburn” the Gunn Brothers ask rather poignantly and terrifyingly, what would really happen if an alien child from another world came to earth with super powers. The answer is not pleasant.
Carrie’s powers are, in the novel, treated as the mainspring, propelling the story to its inevitable and gory end, but in the show, Flanagan takes things a step farther: it isn’t just that Carrie has super brain powers, but how she uses them. In the town of Chamberlain, where Carrie’s latent abilities are manifesting, people are seeing unexplained things, but there is also a larger structure; women with similar powers, actively searching for Carrie, but also others who want to destroy her, or use her, or give her the means to use her powers to get revenge. This hints at a wider world where having the “Shine” isn’t as rare as we might have thought. It also opens the show for another season with perhaps wider connections to King’s worlds.
Final Thoughts
Unlike most books and movies where women are the heroes, in this version of Carrie, male characters play only secondary parts. The female students, teachers, parents and members of secret clans ESP-users are all predominantly female. Men facilitate the ends, but generally, males are only second-rate, flat, predictable, and cookie cutter characters—literally caricatures. This is a story driven by females, told by females, experienced by females, about what females deal with and how they deal (or fail to deal) with the pressures of a patriarchal society where they have been the secondary players since the beginning of time.
Flanagan’s redux is about amending that scenario. Even the show’s music (which is fantastic) is by and performed entirely by women. He shows Carrie for what she is: someone who isn’t the master of her life at any level, desiring what all people want and need: love, acceptance, freedom to lead her life as she sees fit. What we get is the timeless tale of a young woman pushed too far and taking her revenge. Flanagan takes it a step further, and creates a scenario where Carrie gets her freedom, after she destroys the world that enclosed her. It is a story about birth and rebirth, Carrie White is a phoenix, but she is also the first and the most realistic female character to take back her destiny. Each episode begins with a story of a woman using her powers and the consequences of that action. The entire show ends with a fresh retelling: Carrie ready to be free, to be loved, to be feared.
I highly recommend you take the time to watch Carrie. It is worth every second.
