Most filmmakers wouldn’t dare to touch the so-called sacred texts of horror, but Mike Flanagan has made a career of running headfirst into them. Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw, Christopher Pike’s The Midnight Club, the works of Edgar Allan Poe, and a number of Stephen King classics (including the iconography of Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining) have all been given the Flanagan treatment.
His latest in the latter category is the series adaptation of Stephen King’s debut novel Carrie, which has already been adapted multiple times, most notably in Brian De Palma’s 1976 masterpiece starring Sissy Spacek. The story of Carietta “Carrie” White, though written over 50 years ago, still feels both timeless and ahead of its time: an exploration of familial intimidation, justified anger, and societal cruelty within the ruthless hierarchy of high school.
“At its heart, this is a story that’s always been about the choices we make between kindness and cruelty,” Mike Flanagan tells me. “We’ve always seen Carietta White as a character who is tormented by monsters.” The cinematic mother of the “Good For Her” subgenre of horror, Carrie White is often a young horror fan’s introduction to the righteous fury of a woman pushed to the brink through no fault of her own. She’s become a foundational pillar of the genre in American culture, and in 2022, the Library of Congress selected Carrie for preservation in the United States National Film Registry.
Which is to say, Mike Flanagan had his work cut out for him.
Every adaptation we’ve seen of Carrie since De Palma’s film has been in direct conversation with it, and Flanagan knew that retelling a story told so many times before meant doing something different. What’s the point otherwise? “I like to hope that one of the things we tried to do a little differently on this one was that our Carrietta is new to our world,” he says. “She comes into it without having been traumatized by it, and she comes into it curious and kind and empathetic.”
Summer Howell is the latest to step into the role, giving us a brand-new take on a character so many people across multiple generations have felt a kinship with — including Howell. “Your emotions, all that uncomfortableness… you can use it; that is your power,” she says. “That's why I connected with Carrie from the start because in this version she is so optimistic and excited and eager; she's got big emotions.”
This take on Carrie White might be an adjustment for some purists, but it feels like a natural progression for the character, even within the canon of her adaptations. In Kimberly Peirce’s 2013 adaptation starring Chloë Grace Moretz, Carrie White shows flickers of a genuine desire to make friends, be liked, and fit in. She’s a social outcast because the world has forced her to the margins, not because she’s found comfort in existing there.
“I think Carrie is still struggling with that as we close the season, but finding your power, believing in yourself, building a trust with yourself is so important, especially in the world where people create personas online before they really know themselves […] it's sad, and I just think people need more alone time and time to process and think,” Howell says.
But Carrie’s torment isn’t reserved for the halls of high school; in Flanagan’s new version, she was raised in isolation by paranoid, conspiratorial-thinking parents, with Samantha Sloyan perfectly capturing what a Margaret White would look like in 2026. Margaret is my favorite character King has ever written, and halfway through watching this new series I felt nauseated when I had to accept that Flanagan is right — Margaret White is a very normalized presence in 2026.
She’s a character who has always been very easy to hate due to her abusive actions, but a complicated figure because she genuinely and sincerely believes that her abuse is key to keeping her daughter safe. And perhaps more than any character in the world of Carrie, she has consistently been played by some of the greatest actresses ever: Piper Laurie, Patricia Clarkson, and Julianne Moore, to name a few. Sloyan embodies this new version of Margaret White down to her bones, even with the pressure of following in the footsteps of legendary performers.
“Margaret White was emblazoned onto me too from a young age, and I think what Mike did is he really set me free in so many ways from that by writing a Margaret who starts with as a loving mother, and that was not a challenge so much as it was a joy,” she tells me. “It was still important to me that Margaret was Margaret; that she was terrifying, that she was dangerous to Carrie, and that she was an immovable force that Carrie was pushing up against.”
She continues, “I think it was just really exciting to do that with Mike in particular, because I feel he writes human beings so well, people that we recognize and can identify with, and so it was a real challenge right to have Margaret be somebody that people might empathize with.”
Howell’s performance is truly spectacular and presents a Carrie White you can’t help but love and feel an innate need to protect, especially when, culturally, we all know what’s going to happen when she steps on stage to be crowned prom queen. And much of the ire she faces is dished out by Chris Hargensen, the tree from which all cinematic mean girls have flowered.
Flanagan’s series casts Alison Thornton in the role, but the extended runtime gives the audience more insight into why Chris is the way she is, without ever giving her a pass or turning her into a sympathetic figure who is just misunderstood. We have an explanation for her bullying, but it’s never presented as an excuse.
Whenever Chris acts out or whenever she's cruel, it's really coming from a place of pain,” Thornton explains. “As mean as she is, she has to be equally as vulnerable and in that amount of pain as well, and that's really how I tried to approach her.” Her partner in crime is Tina Blake, played by previous FANGORIA cover girl Josie Totah, and is enabled by dirtbag boyfriend extraordinaire Billy Nolan, played to scumbag perfection by Arthur Conti.
Like most adaptations, Carrie finds solace from time to time with classmates like Sue Snell (Siena Agudong) and Tommy Ross (Joel Oulette), and her teacher, Amber Midthunder’s Ms. Rita Desjardin. Interestingly, while Midthunder is the same age as Betty Buckley was in De Palma’s film when playing the same role (named Miss Collins in the adaptation), the series highlights how being a younger teacher allows Ms. Desjardin a different perspective on the school’s treatment of Carrie White, because she is young enough to have gone through high school in the age of social media.
“I think she's trying her best to really make an impact on her students, but the world moves on so quickly that I think she's sort of like struggling to keep up,” Midthunder says. “I think all of the administration is trying to catch up, so I think that it's really like that struggle of offering a helping hand and not knowing where to put it when it's not taken.”
Genre favorite Matthew Lillard, who plays high school principal Henry Grayle, echoes her thoughts and was struck by a moment Ms. Desjardin has when she confesses to her fellow teachers after hours that had she still been in high school, she fears she would have behaved exactly the way Chris Hargensen did when Carrie White famously thinks she’s dying when she has her first menstrual period.
“I think it is a really interesting sort of approach because you are then committed to stopping it before it gets out of control, ‘cause you know how bad it could go,” he says.
“That sort of sentiment is a really important piece of honesty,” Midthunder agrees. “The ugly honesty and that sort of like self-reflection, which is what this story needs.”
“This show is very much about what happens to kindness and what happens to earnestness in today’s world, and about how much we have normalized cruelty in our discourse,” Flanagan tells me. “It’s about how much we have normalized violence — whether it’s emotional or physical — and accepted that it’s something we’ve said is okay that our children must live with.”
Carrie is now available to stream on Prime Video.
