Carrie , With Kid Gloves

The following article contains spoilers for the TV adaptation of Carrie .

The climax of Carrie , Stephen King’s debut horror novel, is so famous that even people who haven’t read it or seen any of the numerous adaptations know the basics.

The eponymous Carrie White, driven to the edge of sanity after years of abuse from her classmates and hyper-religious mother, gets drenched in a bucket of pig’s blood at her prom.

She then uses her latent telekinetic powers to destroy her high school and her hometown.

It’s an extreme reaction to an extreme situation, the climax of a revenge story in which vengeance is just another tragic act of violence.

The line between villain and victim blurs.

King published the book in 1974, in the shadow of the atomic bomb.

It’s a lean, nasty snapshot of troubled young adulthood in a world seemingly drowning in paranoia.

The showrunner Mike Flanagan’s new adaptation for Prime Video—the first time Carrie has been translated to a television series—transports the protagonist (played by Summer H.

Howell) and her classmates to the present day, where social media traps the teenagers and their bewildered guardians in a cycle of surveillance and shame.

Many of the modernizations make sense: Technology serves as a convenient conduit for the characters’ impulses.

But the show is almost too empathetic to its main characters; it doesn’t allow them to revel in their spitefulness, as they do in the source material.

It treats many of them as victims of larger forces beyond their control—and robs viewers of the catharsis of Carrie’s big moment. [ Stephen King: My books were used to train AI ] In order to inflate the compact novel into an eight-episode series, Flanagan has taken some liberties.

His Carrie expands on secondary elements hinted at in the book, such as interviews with survivors of that terrible night and investigations by various groups into paranormal phenomena.