Although Prime Video‘s latest adaptation of a classic Stephen King story took plenty of liberties with the source material, these creative risks paid off with a version of the plot that felt both fresh and familiar. No one knows the perils of adapting books to the screen quite as intimately as The Haunting of Hill House writer/director Mike Flanagan.
Plenty of Flanagan’s original projects, like Hush and Midnight Mass, have earned perfectly stellar reviews. However, both his most and least successful efforts are adapted from books by other writers. 2018’s The Haunting of Hill House radically reimagined Shirley Jackson’s iconic horror novel of the same name as a sprawling multi-generational family saga, and became one of the most acclaimed horror TV shows ever in the process.
Similarly, 2017’s Carla Gugino vehicle Gerald’s Game saw Flanagan adapt a Stephen King novel that had long been considered unfilmable. However, both 2019’s The Shining sequel Doctor Sleep and 2020’s The Turn of the Screw reimagining The Haunting of Bly Manor earned more mixed reviews, bringing Flanagan’s hot streak of adaptations to an end. Luckily, Prime Video’s Carrie proved that Flanagan remains a master of tweaking literary source material into screen gold.
Mike Flanagan Modernizes Carrie’s Story Perfectly
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Published in 1974, Stephen King’s debut novel Carrie remains one of his most famous efforts. While Pennywise might have ensured that It was even bigger, director Brian De Palma’s Oscar-nominated 1976 movie adaptation of Carrie seared the story of its telekinetic, bullied teenager into the minds of an entire generation. As such, reinventing Carrie 50 years later was a massive ask.
Fortunately, Flanagan’s long-awaited Carrie miniseries managed this tough task with a string of ingenious alterations. For one thing, Carrie and her mother have a far less unambiguously abusive relationship, which makes the cartoonish character of Margaret White feel like a more complex villain. For another, the backstories of Carrie’s bullies are explored in more depth, making them feel more human and believable.
Most intriguingly, Carrie’s experience of high school is no longer depicted as an ordinary suburban coming-of-age story with some particularly cruel bullying. Active shooter drills and metal detectors in high school halls make Carrie‘s high school experience feel alien and dangerous even outside the bullies, and the show is much more critical of the state of America’s chronically underfunded public education system than King’s book and De Palma’s movie.
Flanagan’s Carrie Changes Just Enough To Keep Fans Of The Book & Movie Guessing
While Flanagan’s take on Carrie still hits all the major beats that viewers have come to expect from the story, the writer/director also complicates things enough to keep even King’s oft-cited constant reader guessing about where the story is heading next. Sue is initially crueler to Carrie in this version of the story, while it is her boyfriend Tommy who is unexpectedly sympathetic to the new girl.
Similarly, Margaret White occasionally seems like she really does want the best for her daughter and is just hopelessly ill-equipped to raise her in the modern world, only for her to then refer to the monstrous, abusive zealot of King’s novel just as viewers start to see her side of the story. While Crystal Lake humanized Friday the 13th‘s Pamela Voorhees in much the same way, Flanagan’s King retelling faced a unique challenge here.
Violent Christian nationalism has only grown as a major social threat in America since Carrie was released in 1976, with sources such as The Southern Poverty Law Center and Center for American Progress citing this as one of the country’s biggest existential problems. As such, making Margaret White excessively sympathetic could read badly, but making her a straightforward villain would sap King’s character of any pathos and complexity. Fortunately, the masterful Flanagan managed to find the perfect balance in Prime Video’s Carrie.
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