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Mike Flanagan Did Prime Video Carrie Dirty in the Best Possible Way
He took Stephen King's most adapted story, modernized it, and made me a menace about it
I'm going to say something, and I need you to let me finish making my point before you come for me. I will defend Mike Flanagan with my entire chest.
The Haunting of Hill House rewired my brain. The Fall of the House of Usher is a masterpiece. Midnight Mass made me cry about vampires and religion at the same time. So when I found out he was adapting Carrie into an eight-episode series for Prime Video, I was fully prepared to love it before a single frame existed.
Is that a bias? Absolutely. Am I sorry? Not even slightly. And here's the thing: he earned it. This was a banger.
Carrie has been adapted to death. The 1976 Brian De Palma version is iconic, the 2013 one exists, and there's a TV movie nobody talks about. So the question everyone kept asking was, why do this again?
Flanagan's answer is to stop treating it like a horror movie about one weird girl and start treating it like a sprawling, aching story about cruelty, power, and what happens when you push an abused kid past her breaking point. It worked on me completely.
TMJ Rating: 4.5/5
What's This About?
Carrie White (Summer H. Howell) has spent her entire life locked away by her fanatically controlling mother Margaret (Samantha Sloyan).
When her father dies suddenly, the state forces Carrie into public high school for the first time, and she walks in wide-eyed and genuinely thrilled to finally exist in the world. That joy does not last. A viral bullying campaign, a fake "Carrie Red" social media account, and a telekinetic power waking up inside her all build toward one catastrophic prom night.
You know where this ends. Watching how it gets there is the whole point.
Why I'm Obsessed
Summer H. Howell is a revelation. She plays Prime Video Carrie as this bright, curious, aching girl rather than a sad sack from frame one, which makes every cruelty land ten times harder.
By the time she starts standing up to her mother, flipping the entire power dynamic of that house, I was cheering out loud in the flight. My fellow passengers were concerned.
And Samantha Sloyan as Margaret. Oh my god. They reinvented this character completely, turning her into a control-freak conspiracy theorist who weaponizes paranoia instead of just screaming Bible verses, and then has her start a whole Instagram account with a ring light.
On paper, that should not work. In practice, Sloyan sells every insane second of it. She's terrifying and tragic and occasionally, horrifyingly, kind of right.
Matthew Lillard as the principal is also doing career-best work, and Alison Thornton turns Chris from a cardboard mean girl into a genuinely compelling villain whose whole world is collapsing while she takes it out on Carrie.
The social media angle could have been a disaster. We've all seen the cringe version where an out-of-touch writer has teens saying things no teen has ever said. Flanagan actually talked to teenagers, and it shows. The anonymous gossip accounts, the pile-ons, the way one piece of cruelty metastasizes across a whole town- it all felt disturbingly real. You might like Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story on Netflix
Flanagan expands Carrie into a bigger Stephen King universe, revealing a hidden network of telekinetic women who've existed across history, hunted and feared and put down by the people who claim to love them most. There are these gorgeous historical vignettes scattered through the season, women with powers across centuries being called witches and destroyed for it.
As someone who wrote an entire dissertation on female power and resistance, this was absolute catnip. Carrie as the latest in a long line of powerful women the world tried to crush? I was feral. That's the stuff that justifies this entire adaptation existing.
The gore delivers too. Chris getting crushed in that car is a 10 out of 10 moment. The prom goes exactly as hard as it needs to.
Check out Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma
Where Prime Video Carrie Stumbles
The first half drags a little. A few early episodes hit beats we already know from the movie, and I kept waiting for it to break free. It eventually does, but it takes its time.
The prom also gets a bit chopped up. It kept cutting away from Carrie's big moment to the other storylines, and part of me wanted one long uninterrupted sequence of pure carnage.
And the ending plants a lot of seeds for future seasons, which some people will love and some will find distracting. The iconic grave-hand moment is gone, Carrie lives, and she rides off into an uncertain future with a mysterious new friend. I understand why some fans are mad. I, personally, am intrigued.
My Final Verdict
This is bold, gorgeous, emotionally brutal television that respects the original while refusing to just photocopy it. Howell and Sloyan are giving performances that'll stick with me all year, the witch-hunt mythology is exactly my wheelhouse, and the whole thing looks like a painting dipped in blood.
It's not Flanagan's absolute best (Hill House and Usher still reign), and the pacing wobbles early, but when it lands, it lands like a house falling on you. Give me season two immediately.
Did the social media angle hit for you or feel like too much? Are you furious they kept Carrie alive or are you, like me, ready to follow her anywhere? And can we please talk about those historical witch vignettes because I need to scream about them with someone. Comments. Now.
