Carrie (2026- )

TV/Horror/Terrifying Social Commentary

Rated 15

Amazon Prime

Spoiler Free

Stephen King’s Carrie, first made by Brian De Palma in 1976, is one of the few De Palma films I enjoy. I keep meaning to go back to Scarface, but I didn’t hate Carlito’s Way and IMDb gives him a Music Department credit on The Godfather Part II so fair play; I’d kill a lot of people to have a credit on that. Don’t think it works that way though. Shame.

I didn’t watch the 2013 Carrie, even though it has Chloe Grace Moretz in it, because I thought “what the hell is this going to add?”. This new new new Carrie from Mike Flanagan is from Mike Flanagan who is awesome, so I was interested. What the hell is the 2026, Amazon Prime, Mike Flanagan Carrie going to add? Quite a lot, it turns out.

Carrie is a very famous story and even if you didn’t know it, every single image from it tells you what happens (roughly) at the end: people die when teenage girl goes full Blair Witch The Live Experience. That is no different here, but Flanagan and team lean into this in a very 21^st Century way. Sheltered by her religious and some might say abusive mother, a teenage girl is forced by social services into the school system. She falls through the ice in the most terrible way, but Carrie has talents the other kids don't...

There is a joke told in comedy circles, called The Aristocrats. It’s a sort of trade in-joke where the basic story is the same but each narrator adds their own uniqueness to it. Horrendously offensive, the joke of this joke is that there is no punchline. There was a very funny documentarymade about it, which gave the world one of South Park’s best ever moments. My point here is that sometimes it’s about how you tell the story, not the punchline.

Carrie expands on and contemporises the original film. The eight episode format allows greater character development which I enjoyed and in bringing the story firmly into our time put bluntly, it fucking terrified me. Superbly performed basically across the board but I’ll pick out Summer H. Howell (Carrie White) not just because she’s the lead but because she makes vulnerability and naivety becoming their opposite look so natural and believable.

Samantha Sloyan (Margaret White) makes a tricky character more subtle, Alison Thornton (Chris Hargensen) proves that a good story is made by its villain and I really enjoyed Matthew Lillard’s Principle Henry Grayle.

The storyline doesn’t drag, if anything it feels fleshed out and each sub plot unwinds as mysteriously as the main while adding to the bigger picture (which is what subplots are supposed to do, I know). The scariest moments are not the supernatural, they are Carrie’s real-world horror. Cyber bullying, peer pressure, the reality of gun violence, systems who really only care about the system- all perceived from the pure eyes of a teenager thrown into that world.

Everything in Carrie is nuanced, careful, kind… and cruel. Oh so cruel.

Bedsit it?

Christ yes, Carrie builds and builds and does much more than you think it might and perhaps doesn’t do what you think it would, for the better. This is excellent and a scary insight into teenage bullshit which might ruin the world. Kids, who’d have ‘em eh? Jimmy, Jimmy would. 10/10