The Cutprice Guignol

As many of you might already know, I am a person with a larger than average investment in Carrie by Stephen King.

Not necessarily because I love it – no, I actually have pretty mixed feelings about the book as a whole, in case you didn’t already get that from the twenty-part deep-dive I did into it a few years ago. But because it’s one of the most iconic female-fronted horror stories of all time, from one of the greatest writers ever to work in the genre, and for that, it will always have a place in my heart – for all its faults, I still don’t think there’s another book quite like it, that contends with societal disgust towards certain outsiders and the violence – both physical and emotional – that can be inflicted against someone who has become a representative for everything wrong with a person. Carrie as a character is iconic for a reason, a victim-turned-perpetrator who explores the excruciating pain of feeling as though you have nowhere and nobody who accepts you.

And that’s likely why there have been quite a few adaptations of it already – Brian De Palma’s 1976 movie, a 2002 TV movie written by Bryan Fuller intended as the start of a full series, 1988 and 2012 musical adaptations (the latter of which served as the basis for a Riverdale episode), and a 2013 movie starring Chloe Grace Moretz as the titular Carrie. And some (me) would argue that we’ve pretty much seen everything we need to see of this story on the big and small screen alike, and that there are plenty of King’s other, lesser-adapted works that might have made better fodder for a new TV series, but that didn’t stop Mike Flanagan and Amazon in churning out a new miniseries adaptation that came out earlier this week.

Mike Flanagan is a creator whose shown himself to be pretty capable of taking classic horror literature and putting an interesting spin on it while remaining reasonably true to the book’s central themes – The Haunting of Hill House and The Haunting of Bly Manor, while they’ve got their faults, serve as proof of that. So I came into this version expecting to see some changes from the book, not least the fact that the action had been moved to the present day. And that’s fine – I don’t think that you have to approach an adaptation with a slavish adherence to canon, especially if it’s already been done a half-dozen times already, but the changes you have to make, to my mind, have to be at least good. And that’s where Flanagan drops the ball.

Look, I’ll cut to the chase (a mere four paragraphs in – you’re welcome): I think Mike Flanagan’s Carrie sucks. I truly didn’t expect a writer with a modicum of skill in this genre to flub it so badly, but he did, and frankly, I’m gobsmacked that nobody noticed just how much this script (which is bloated beyond rescue to eight episodes) missed the damn point. Carrie herself (played by Summer H. Howell) is a homeschooled girl who had been raised by her paranoid, conspiracy theorist Christian parents till the death of her father, which doesn’t necessarily sound bad on paper, but Flanagan really doesn’t land the execution of this character in the way he needs to. Carrie should be, in some form, a character who brings to the surface those uncomfortable feelings of disgust and disdain we may hold, however unfairly, to those who are not socially or culturally adept in the way we expect them to be – I already talked at length about the fact that her physical appearance is so different here than it is from the book, but that’s just one of a number of ways that Flanagan skirts making Carrie feel like a true outcast. She’s attending high school parties, being asked to prom by older boys, has the whole school behind her in her battle against Chris Hargensen (who we’ll get to) – beyond the iconic period scene that opens her arc, she doesn’t feel like a true outsider as much as a fish-out-of-water, the crushingly oppressive atmosphere of the book lost in this bland, meandering eight-episode arc. The religious aspects of her character have been played down quite significantly, which could have worked if they were replaced with the conspiracy theories that her father raised her believing, but instead, she feels too quick to shrug them off and find connection with other students.

Margaret (Samantha Sloyan) is probably my favourite part of this new adaptation, even if she doesn’t feel true to her original version at all. For a show that put so much about the oppression of women at the top of pretty much every episode, it was a bit disappointing to see certain aspects of Margaret’s relationship with womanhood and motherhood chopped down so badly, especially where they could have fed into Carrie’s storyline; there seemed to be this nervousness about truly making her loathe Carrie as she does in the book, rather replacing it with an intense love that is twisted into something dangerous. But it’s a shame that Sloyan’s performance here is going to be bogged down by all the shite surrounding it, because this version of Margaret feels like the most deftly-modernised of the bunch, a fundamentalist mother suspicious of the institutions her daughter has become a part of who rallies support through social media under the pretence of helping her daughter stand against bullying. Sloyan really shines, vicious and cruel and sly and even loving at times – I don’t think it’s an accurate rendition of Margaret White, but I think she’s an interesting character in her own right, which is something.

The rest of the characters leave between “something” and “everything” to be desired for me – Sue Snell (Siena Agudong) is hopelessly defanged, the cruelty she’s capable of downplayed into a couple of snide comments that take away from the richness of her character and the conflict she struggles with over her treatment of Carrie. Rita Dujardin (Amber Midthunder – by the way, watch Prey if you haven’t already) suffers with a plot that trails off completely towards the end of the show after a moderately interesting start, and Billy (Arthur Conti) is left almost entirely underdeveloped despite some potentially interesting parallels with his storyline and the school-centric violence that serves as a throughline for the series. Thalia Dudek gets the short end of the stick as the inbearably irritating Emaline, Carrie’s similarly-empowered pal, who basically stands around hitting every teen outsider cliche you can imagine and occasionally “She’s Really Good!”-ing Carrie while she blows up cars. Chris Hargensen (Alison Thornton) probably benefits the most from the expanded runtime with a fuller backstory that helps delve into her motivations for tormenting Carrie a bit more but that still feels more suited to a hand-wringing teen drama than a supernatural horror show.

Which brings me to another one of my biggest problems with the series – it just doesn’t have the feel of a horror show, at least for the most part. This is Thirteen Reasons Why Not, eight glacially-paced episodes of teen drama tropes and the most hilariously intrusive and on-the-nose song choices you’ve ever heard with the occasional interjection of Summer H. Howell furrowing her brow really hard and making a cabinet shake slightly. There’s an overarching plot regarding a mysterious cabal who have powers of their own – which we’ll get to, don’t worry – but Carrie’s powers don’t feel like this unwieldy, terrifying manifestation of her abuse, but a side-note to slot into the episode at the last minute just before everyone breaks for lunch. The series’ biggest conflict revolves around the functional equivalent of a social media Burn Book, and the best episode by far comes in the form of the attempted resolution of that storyline – with virtually no horror to it at all. I’m all for social horror, the exploration of the ways that we can torment and hurt each other without magic powers, but this is fucking Carrie, for God’s sake. The horror, aside from the last episode, is exceptionally thin on the ground.

And, oh, that last episode. The Black Prom is probably one of the most iconic setpieces in all of horror, and, even if the rest of the series left me pretty cold, I was still looking forward to how Flanagan carried it out. And, truly, if I wasn’t already turned off the show already, this would have been enough to get me writing strongly-worded letters directly to the Flanagan residence once and for all. The execution (if you’ll excuse the pun) is all wrong; what should be a terrifying, confusing, hectic sequence is instead, inexplicably, told in retrospect by a few of the people present, cutting away from the action to go to confessional talking heads, draining all the bite out of the setpiece in the first place.

But perhaps Flanagan’s most egregious mistake in the whole series is that Carrie is not actually the one who carries out the massacre. She’s invaded by the spirit (or something to that effect) of Emaline, who offers to “take the wheel” for her after she is drenched in pig’s blood, which she accepts. If there’s one thing that you just can’t change about this climax, it’s that Carrie is the one who commits this atrocity – by the time the Black Prom happens, we should have seen enough to understand her and her motivations that it makes sense and even has an element of narrative catharsis despite its abject injustice. It’s clear Flanagan either didn’t feel like he had done that or was too unsettled by the thought of making his leading woman a willing mass murderer, and either shows a pretty dreadful mishandling of the source material. By lifting most of the blame from her shoulders, we don’t get this story of tragedy and the cycle of brutality and how a person like Carrie is driven to this; we get a soporific bloodbath that’s there because it has to be. There was only one punch Flanagan couldn’t pull, and he pulled it.

But he did, because there are going to be future seasons of Carrie, whether we like it or bloody well not – which will, no doubt, revolve around the cult led by Katie Siegel in the show proper (and, hey, while we’re in these brackets – check out Influencer, starring Cassandra Naud, who’s criminally underused as part of this cabal). Siegel’s role is mostly reduced to reading Wikipedia pages about the historical oppression of women for their magical powers with the searing intensity of someone glancing over a grocery list, and this, for me, is another point where the show really drops the ball. Not only does it bring to mind that iconic Ursula Le Guin quote about the way women’s knowledge is mysticised beyond functional use, but it tries to tap into this sense of collective autonomy that’s been stripped from women over the centuries and the fury that’s left many with. I’ve written a little about my issue with female rage shows before, but Carrie, arguably, is the female rage story – one that opens with a period and closes with her exacting revenge on her tormentors after years of abuse but that does not absolve her of her agency in her final act. But where the show loses its grip on this is by trying to parallel Carrie with the historical oppression of women (both real and fictional) while also removing her ultimate agency in the final act – he wants to acknowledge her as part of this history of women with powers who have been dismissed, downplayed, and persecuted, while presenting this without the depth of autonomy Carrie as a character needs to make it stick. It felt like such a shallow attempt to imbue the show with a feminist angle, and I hate to see something like that thrown into the mix in such a slapdash way.

Mike Flanagan’s Carrie is not a good adaptation of the book, nor a good take on the story in its own right. It’s a painfully slow, bloated, punch-pulling mess that feels less like a version of King’s iconic story and more like a teen drama with a couple of supernatural elements tossed in at the last minute to justify the Halloween-adjacent release date. But, with two thousand words behind me by now, I’d like to hear what you made of it in the comments below – did you love it, hate it, something-in-between it? Let me know!

Check out my review of the Carrie book here (and my ongoing deep-dive into Christine, also by Stephen King, if you’re interested), and, if you’d like to support my blog, please consider supporting me by buying my books or dropping me a tip via my Support page.

(header image via Lifestyle Asia)