Sneha Jaiswal (Twitter | Instagram)
“Ugh do we really need another live-action adaptation for Carrie?”
That was my first thought when the ‘Carrie’ official teaser popped up on my YouTube feed. I’ve already seen two older movies, and read Stephen King’s original novel while in college (a terrific debut and absolutely worth reading if you’re a horror fan).
Although when the teaser-trailer declared the series is ‘from showrunner and director Mike Flanagan’, I immediately shifted from ‘not going to watch this one’ to ‘maybe it will be worth checking out’. Flanagan’s ‘Haunting of Hill House‘, ‘Midnight Mass‘ & ‘The Fall of the House of Usher‘ easily count among some of the best horror series I’ve seen.
For those who don’t know: the plot follows a socially isolated teenage girl with telekinetic powers, raised by an abusive, fanatically religious mother. After enduring relentless bullying at school, she finally unleashes her supernatural abilities in a terrifying act of revenge.
Stephen King and Mike Flanagan sound like a killer combination for a horror series. And while many novels deserve to be made into mini-series if not a long one, Carrie actually is the kind of story which is nearly perfect to be film-sized.
More importantly, the novel is deeply rooted in the 1970s. Carrie’s innocence and ignorance weren’t just personality traits, they were products of a life spent almost completely cut off from the outside world by her mother. In 2026, however, that premise becomes much harder to sell.
The teaser clearly shows Carrie using what appears to be a smartphone, and unless it’s borrowed from someone else, the technology aspect really changes things for the premise. A teenager with unrestricted internet access simply isn’t as isolated as Carrie was meant to be.
Flanagan and team may well have found a clever way to modernize that central idea (perhaps Carrie simply isn’t allowed to own a phone or access the internet), but based on the teaser alone, that’s the one aspect that makes me the most skeptical.
Carrie is set to release on October 7 on Prime Video. Watch the teaser-trailer below.
well, Carrie’s mom is a complete xtian fanatic, so the shift to banned electronics is not too big of a leap.
i am open to a good remake, even modernized, provided they hold true and do not attempt to add extra social morals or ‘lessons’.. but that creator has done well in the past.
original film was amazing. I thought the additionals were bad, and the ‘Sequel’ with Carrie’s goth daughter was just bad bad bad..
so- i say bring it on 😉
Yeah. Mike Flanagan’s been doing great horror work, so I am interested in watching this adaptation. Especially since the Haunting of Hill House was better fleshed out than Shirley Jackson’s original novel. Flanagan uses the bones and makes a completely different creature.
agreed-
i grew up loving Jackson’s short story The Lottery.. lives rent free.
so years later i read Haunting of Hill House and found it not to be a horror at all. it was amazing, but it was mainly just a house in a prejudiced world and a woman who was a Lesbian pretending not to be and going slowly mad because she has to pretend to be two people. more sad than horror. maybe I read too much into it, but i loved it regardless
but the tv series.. bang. hit the horror mark
Honestly, I don’t remember anything about the book. And I actually read the book after watching the series. The Lottery on the hand is definitely more memorable with its twist and well, the short length helps : D
sometime in the 90’s/00’s some one made a move ‘ Lottery 2’
skip it. it was terrible. my friends and I made the assumption when we rented it, but we thought it would be good to at least mock.
it wasnt.
Haven’t seen it. But ‘Lottery’ feels like a story that works better in words than in live-action. Not written for the screen. Although I guess maybe in the hands of the right screenwriter, it could work as a short film.