Think you know Carrie? Think again.

For my money, Mike Flanagan is one of the best, if not THE best horror showrunners and filmmakers working today. When students ask me, “What is your favorite modern horror?” I usually point them to Flanagan’s TV shows on Netflix. When I heard he was adapting Carrie, Stephen King’s first published novel and legendary film, I was excited.

            Flanagan’s Carrie is unquestionably excellent. It has all the marks of a Flanagan production – a great cast (many of them returning faces from previous Flanagan movies and shows), a story, while full of horror, still brimming with heart, and the unique cinematic signature he puts on all his projects. It is a highly relevant and extremely modern take on a story almost fifty years old, and while it is a good adaptation, maybe a great one, there are some elements Flanagan adds to the story I find highly questionable, ones that even denigrate the heart of the original story and character of Carrie White.

            When we meet Carrie (the excellent Summer H. Howell), she is the isolated child of a domineering, extremely religious mother (Samantha Sloyan) and a conspiracy-theorist, government-hating father, who has just died. Carrie, who has been homeschooled her whole life and is largely ignorant about much of the outside world, is forced to attend Ewen High School once she is discovered by social workers and her mother is forced to go to work. This part of the series, while modernized, plays out much like the original story and movies; Carrie – awkward yet sweet – instantly becomes the target of the local Mean Girls – culminating in Carrie, having her first period and not understanding, cowering in the shower while the other girls pelt her with feminine products and film the whole thing on their phones.

            From there, Chris Hargensen (Alison Thornton), a popular girl whose life is in turmoil as her parents go through a messy divorce, creates a fake “Carrie Red” account she uses to not only torment Carrie, but also bully and expose the dirty secrets of many other students and staff members of the school. The account goes so viral that even Carrie’s anti-technology mother Margaret creates her own account, finding purpose and using it as a platform for school reform and change.

            While there are likely some fans that will not like the extremely modern spin on the tale – Carrie’s bullying, her rise, and ultimately bloody and violent fall all coming about as a result of social media, it is precisely the way this story would play out in the modern world. While the story goes from zero to sixty a little too quickly - involving the whole town surrounding the school like angry villagers – this tackles a lot of modern issues, from teen bullying, cyberbullying, the power of social media, school shootings, the anti-school and education movement in our culture, and more. These are liberties Flanagan takes that make sense to me. There are few things he does that don’t.

SPOILER ALERT: This next paragraph will reveal some important moments from the series that deviate from the original story; I will bracket it with another notice that the spoilers are done.

            There are several elements that depart from the original story, some of which, I believe, deviate so much as to ruin certain aspects of the original tale.

            First, Carrie’s powers. The portrayal of them makes Carrie look like a member of the X-Men as opposed to a teen that has some powers she does not understand, and the images of her reaching her hands out like a Jedi feels a little too Elevenish (a la Stranger Things). In this iteration of the story, Carrie learns to use and exploit her powers early, much of it due to a new, mysterious friend named Emaline (Thalia Dudek – more on this character later).          

            Secondly, the show portrays Carrie’s mother Margaret and Chris, her number one bully, as sympathetic characters. While Margaret gets less sympathy than Chris, she is ultimately portrayed as a woman with a hard life who tried to do the best for her daughter, even if she was domineering. As such, when Carrie starts using her powers on her, she comes across as more of a victim, rather than a deserving villain.

            Chris is portrayed as a girl going through an extremely difficult period in her life. Her mom has shacked up with a man she hates, a man with a daughter she wants nothing to do with. Add that to the fact that her father is in financial ruin and can no longer afford college (even though she was just accepted to Duke), Chris is a girl whose world has spiraled out of control; her creation of the fake account and bullying of Carrie is a last-ditch effort to regain some kind of control in her life. While her actions are never excused, far too much attention is given to her story. This is of course a modern trend in storytelling - the deconstruction of the idea that there are "good people" and "bad people." Chris is a complicated person like us all that makes some very bad choices. This is real life, however, not all stories need to be "real," in this sense. The heart of the original story was that Carrie was an innocent victim, her bullies were archetypal characters. Giving Chris a backstory makes the drama murky.

            Finally, the biggest addition to the Carrie White story is the inclusion of other girls who have powers. Starting with Emaline, we find out that there are girls across the world with supernatural abilities like Carrie’s, an organized group that wants to find her, contrasted with another woman who seeks to kill such girls. These elements, quite frankly, are messy, unnecessary, and veer the story away from its core. The idea was that Carrie White was a troubled girl who just happened to have powers, one who snaps after an extremely terrible prank is played on her at the greatest moment of her young life. The reader and viewer were sympathetic to Carrie and cheered the death of her tormentors. In this iteration, while there are people we want to see get theirs, the story has become something else. In this iteration, Carrie’s tormentors, including her mother, were complex people who made mistakes, and Carrie is someone who gives in to the dark side of her abilities. In what feels like a hopeful effort to bring the story - a story that should have ended on Prom Night, back for a second season - Carrie escapes with Emaline to go find their way in the world. She feels as much a potential villain as a victim in that moment. While I won’t say it ruins the story, it certainly changes, and I don’t believe for the better.

END OF SPOILERS

       Typical of a Mike Flanagan project, the actors are great. Summer H. Howell is perfect as Carrie, and when I saw Samantha Sloyan was playing her mother, I was ecstatic. The subplot of the power of social media and its destructive power will appeal to modern viewers, while fans of the original may bristle at some of the changes described above. I know I did.