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.
