Spoiler Free Carrie (2026) Review

As with every new adaptation of a beloved novel or remake of a beloved film, the announcement that Mike Flanagan was going to be making a new adaptation of Stephen King's Carrie in series form was met with a chorus of "That's been done already, and one of them is great, so why do the same thing again?"

Now, as is just as common, Flanagan's adaptation has been released, and there's an equally loud, vocal chorus screaming, "BUT THEY CHANGED THINGS! THAT'S NOT MY CARRIE!"

This is one of the more boring and tedious aspects of discussions about storytelling and fandom, for me. I say this as a big Carrie fan. I've read King's novel a number of times. The most recent being in the last two or three years. It's still on my shelf, because the chances are good I'll read it again. Brian De Palma's movie is among those titles I've made it a point to grab a new copy of throughout the many different new eras of technological formats. I owned it on V/H/S, then on DVD, and then on blu-ray and now in a 4k version. I can't say I'm so much a fan of the 2022 tv movie, but I can say I wish Angela Bettis performance in the role of Carrie had been surrounded by a better movie. Bettis is outstanding.

I know the other versions have their fans and defenders, but they're not for me, and that's fine too. King's novel and De Palma's movie are always there for me to return to, when I want to revisit that vintage Carrie story that cemented my love for the story and characters. The versions I'm not so enthusiastic about can still exist for the people who appreciate them, and that's great for all of us. However I may feel about Carrie, it's not mine. It's technically Stephen King's, but in a broader sense, it belongs to all of us, and part of what that means is that it's in that canon of stories people who love it are going to want to re-adapt, re-tell, re-envision and so on. There's no stopping it. It's one of the things human beings have done with storytelling since we started telling stories. We can accept it as a personal affront to our sensibilities, but that seems like a waste to me. I don't yell at the sun for rising or setting.

I try to my best to approach each new iteration with openness, because if they are good, chances are they're good because they're either technically excellent in their execution, even if they don't change much of the original story or they do change things from the source material, and part of why they're good is what those changes bring to the discussion of the relationship to the source material. There are some of the changes to the source material in this Carrie adaptation I don't find as satisfying as the previous versions. I'll get into them further, but there's an issue of the television format that contributes to this. I can also look at this iteration and see why it's a worthwhile story to tell using the framework and characters from King's original novel, and the writing and performances are outstanding. Fealty to source material isn't the only form of respect I recognize in an adaptation. Another form of respect is recognizing how source material might provide a framework for something substantial and believing the story is worthy of that substance. This is the case in Flanagan's Carrie.

Additionally, each new iteration of Carrie on screen means more people will read the novel, and everyone wins when people read more.

It pains me to see so many in the horror crowd acting not quite so different from the Star Wars fandom, Marvel comics fans, and the various fandoms that gleefully and cynically undermine anything that doesn't zealously adhere to whatever their vision of the source material is or was. I don't quite understand the need to go much beyond, "That doesn't appeal to me," and into a celebration of a collective disinterest. Even when the reason a movie, series of novel doesn't appeal to me is the creator themselves, unless they've done something demonstrably terrible and their continued work in the industry puts other people at risk, I'm not even particularly interested in spending time slagging or attacking them. If I just don't like their work, I don't like their work, and I can be honest about that, but spending hours or days slavishly worshipping my own distaste and trying to rally a crowd around it seems far less interesting or useful, when I could be focusing on work I do respect and enjoy.

In the case of Mike Flanagan, he's a repeat offender in the adaptation departments. Some of those adaptations have been extremely faithful to the source material, and others, especially those that already have other adaptations, haven't been so faithful, so he has already pissed off a number of different fan communities by violating their sense of ownership, and some of those take glee in announcing what they see as hackery, at every opportunity.

There's an aspect of Flanagan's work that's been particularly interesting for me, individually. One of the most common criticisms of it is its sentimentality. I'm generally skeptical of overly sentimental storytelling. In my experience, it's often a perspective that can only stand on its feet through the sin of omission. It often tries to inspire some positive sort of sentiment, but the perspective of the people making it requires omitting or over simplifying uglier truths. Especially when it's work attempting to take on subject matter involving real harm in our real world, sentimentality often becomes a kind of escapism I don't find fulfilling or useful. It always feels like a disservice to or somehow paternal in its perspective on the audience.

I'm skeptical of sentimentality, but it doesn't mean I don't have room for it at all. In the case of Mike Flanagan's work, he doesn't shy away from those uglier parts of who and what human beings are. It's part of why his work has found a large, dedicated fan base in horror. Those uglier parts of who and what we are, and how they manifest in our contemporary world, are what the horror in his work derives from. He never shies away from the fact that they are part of what being human is.

Looking at the whole of his catalog of work though, I see someone who is attempting to communicate to his audience, his fellow human beings, that if we saw each other the way he sees us, we'd be better to each other. He does so with respect for the audience, by not attempting to hide from the uglier truths of who and what we can be. He also does this by writing about how difficult it can be to see or make the kind of decisions that add up to us being better to each other. The dramatic elements of his work are often taken from that exact struggle, whether its the protagonist or antagonist. He doesn't minimize it, nor does he minimize that many different factors and influences come into how we make those decisions. He's interested in how we choose and why, but if there's one thing that emanates from his work, it's that we deserve a better world, and should be better to each other, because we're all human.

Maybe this is my personal bias, because I'm glad a voice with that perspective is part of our broader storytelling environment, and especially when its done with the level of skill and care so much of Flanagan's work demonstrates. Do I want the whole of the movie and television landscape to start trying to imitate Mike Flanagan? No, because I don't trust anyone who isn't invested in storytelling like it to respect the audience as much as he seems to, and hence, they won't do it well. I don't get the feeling he believes he's teaching the audience anything, so much as he's trying his best to tell a good story and highlight aspects of what we can all see if we decide to look. I come away from most of Flanagan's work, feeling the person behind it has the love of storytelling and their fellow human beings, in every cell and atom of who they are, and wants to scream it without ending up institutionalized. In this way, Carrie is very much in line with Flanagan's other work.

All of that being said, the aspects of what I don't find fulfilling in this adaptation of Carrie come from it being a television series, and not a limited series. There is clearly a hope this will get picked up for another season. As someone to whom the novel and De Palma's film have meant so much, part of what gave them that meaning is the finality of the conclusions. By the very nature of attempting to craft a Carrie story as the first of multiple seasons, with the original novel as the basic premise and structure, it doesn't have the finality of the previous versions.

This also falls into why I have been gun shy in terms of writing about ongoing television series. I don't often feel I can say how I feel about a story, if it's not finished. Unless a season of television is created with the understanding there will be no subsequent seasons, the "limited series" model, a show by definition has to leave aspects of the story and characters journeys open. Endings can help make a story that didn't seem to work come together. They can also take a story that does seem to be working, and misunderstand what was compelling about them in the first place. The number of series that fail to succeed at both ending a season well, and keeping enough open for following seasons is indicative of how difficult it is to do.

This is my biggest gripe or misgiving about this adaptation of Carrie. What Flanagan and company are leaving on the table for what I hope would be another season is intriguing. It is, to me, an interesting way to approach and talk about the story of Carrie, what place it has in the broader world of storytelling, what the character represents to us and interrogate all of that. Because we haven't seen it yet, I don't know whether it is going to work. I get the feeling it will be a big swing thematically, and that's interesting in and of itself, but I have only the barest guess how it might be approached and what the execution might look like. As much as I do chafe at the lack of finality, as a fan of the previous versions of Carrie, I can see where its suggesting it can go could make for interesting storytelling. So, in this specific way, I leave this season of television conflicted, but somewhat hopeful. That hope is engendered by what does work in this season of television. If Mike Flanagan and his cadre of long time collaborators bring the same level of care, curiosity, insight and humanity, it'll be another excellent season of television.

What does work in Carrie is... everything else.

The way it's been brought into the present day, the way it approaches the themes that grow out of it being a present day story of Carrie White, Margaret White, Chris Hargensen and Sue Snell, is outstanding. It's about what's changed in the experience of childhood since King's novel was released, and how that effects everything from parenting to education to community cohesion. Part of the achievement of Carrie, is that it is very clear that we are all still human beings, same as we have ever been, but our world we're living in has changed in a way we can't just ignore and be expected to act the same ways within. If we want anything better for each other, ourselves and especially for the people experiencing childhood today, we're going to have to start addressing many of the things we've refused to.

In this way, the writing in Carrie is as good, if not better than any of Flanagan's other work. There is a steadfast denial of easy answers, and a probing curiosity about why we make choices that are bad for each other and for ourselves. This does involve changing some aspects of the original characters and story, but those changes are in service of taking Carrie White and the characters around her out of the mythical realm King's novel installed them in, and making them the stuff of human beings living in 21st century America.

This isn't a story about Good and Evil, in the grand sense. It's a story about human beings trying to do the best they can in a complicated, complex set of circumstances and events, and among them is one person who is extraordinary in more than one way, or possibly one very old way. What this adaptation is interested in is why people make the decisions we do, even when they are sometimes clearly bad decisions for ourselves and/or those around us, and how contemporary life, and the many influences within it, encourage and discourage us in either direction.

What that means is nuance. These are fully drawn characters, grown from the archetypes of King's novel. There's a certain perspective that refers to this nuance itself as sentimentalism, that portraying these characters as more than the simple archetypes of Good and Evil that are the poles of King's novel and so much of his work, is being treacle. I don't agree with this. We can agree people make bad decisions, and often those decisions are based on perspectives and worldviews that are destructive or harmful. None of us is made on our own though. The "self made man," is one of the most plainly false archetypes we have. We're made by so many different influences, which include our own choices, but we're all taught everything we believe to be right and wrong, and the environments we live and exist in can undermine or support those. What's being referred to as sentimentalism in drawing all of the characters in a nuance in keeping with the complexity of human beings, is a refusal to accept individualism as both the culprit and answer related to the problems which are most troubling, most distressing and whose scope has the highest costs. Mike Flanagan refuses to lie about the fact that everything about human beings is relational, and our most insistent problems have collective roots and will require collective solutions, and that's much harder to sit with than someone who is inherently or innately evil, doing bad things.

One of the things being called into focus is how our individual selfishness layers with each instance, until certain kinds of wrongs and bad decisions become utterly mundane, and how that mundanity allows them to have ripples through the lives of everyone in this story. It's part of the reason for setting Carrie today. We haven't changed, but our environment has, and that we haven't been adult and mature in addressing how that is interacting with what human beings have always been, demands a mature reckoning if we want better results for children, and as adults.

The short version is that what's good here, is excellent. What's not, isn't so much the fault of the story and creators as it is a fact of the medium itself.