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.
Sissy Spacek in Carrie (1976) —GettyThe 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.
Summer H. Howell, left, and Samantha Sloyan in Carrie (2026) —Liane Hentscher—PrimeYou can find support for each of these readings in King’s own reflections. “The book is, in its more adult implications, an uneasy masculine shrinking from a future of female equality,” he wrote in his 1981 nonfiction book Danse Macabre. “For me, Carrie White is a sadly misused teenager, an example of the sort of person whose spirit is so often broken for good in that pit of man- and woman-eaters that is your normal suburban high school. But she's also Woman, feeling her powers for the first time and, like Samson, pulling down the temple on everyone in sight.” In her influential 1992 study Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, the scholar Carol J. Clover suggests that this tangle of intentions explains the broad and, in some ways, contradictory appeal of Carrie across genders. Its protagonist is, at once, a projection of female power and male fear and the universal horror of bullying.
Bullies face off against their prey in Carrie (2026) —Prime
If the 21st century Carrie movies spoke to a post-Columbine era of school shootings, then Flanagan’s series is a product of the Trump decade, in which seemingly every aspect of American life has fractured along bipartisan political lines. The educational realm has become a crucible for debates around censorship, technology, parental rights, gun control, LGBTQ inclusion, critical race theory, the teaching of science vs. religion, social media. Which explains how Flanagan and his creative team, which includes many female writers and directors, found in this slight story eight episodes’ worth of material.
An almost saintly figure who believes in kindness most of all, Carrie develops complicated friendships with smart, benevolent Sue (Siena Agudong) and Chris (Alison Thornton)—who has been spiraling since her mom moved in with a classmate’s dad and her own father’s financial woes have jeopardized her college plans. What she doesn’t know is that Chris is behind an anonymous social media account that posted footage of her locker-room nightmare before expanding to target practically everyone at school, teachers included. A constant nuisance to the administration, Margaret harangues Principal Grayle (Matthew Lillard) to intervene. But he dithers, questioning whether the free speech of kids on a platform external to school is his jurisdiction.
Matthew Lillard in Carrie (2026) —Robert Falconer—PrimeFor everything of value it adds to the story, Flanagan’s take can still feel a bit cluttered. There are too many interconnected framing devices, from on-camera interviews with survivors of Carrie’s massacre to history lessons on Joan of Arc. If you watched House of Usher, which filters the downfall of a Sackler-like family of opioid profiteers through the sieve of Poe’s Gothic tale, you’re probably aware that Flanagan’s social commentary can be blunt. His Carrie can get bogged down in meetings and assemblies where characters representing different facets of Trump-era vitriol and complacency monologue on what’s really wrong with the world today.
Yet at the core of this series is a perceptive diagnosis of that problem. More than individual bad actors who need to be brought down, there are people like Grayle and Margaret and Sue, whose pure intentions are undermined by complacency, indecision, disinformation, conformity, fear—all of it amplified to a potentially global scale by social media. Even Chris is lashing out as a direct result of her family’s dissolution and her father’s money troubles, which erode the class privileges to which she feels entitled. Amid extreme rhetoric, Flanagan implies, everyone who doesn’t work hard to avert atrocities is complicit in them. And there's precious little evidence that most of us are doing much to examine that complicity. Tragedy becomes, specifically, a tragedy of the commons as selfishness metastasizes into a scourge on the entire town. And Carrie becomes something between Frankenstein’s monster and Jesus Christ: an innocent persecuted for the sins of all mankind, but one whose all-too-human impulse to seek retribution incinerates any hope of forgiveness.
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