Carrie Review: Mike Flanagan’s Stephen King Reinvention is an Instant Modern Horror Classic
The Haunting of Hill House showrunner updates King’s debut novel for the digital age in this series starring Samantha Sloyan and Matthew Lillard
by Alex Kaan 1 October 2026
Amazon MGM Studios
Mike Flanagan has made a half-sequel to The Shining (Doctor Sleep), adapted a Shirley Jackson classic into a Netflix show (The Haunting of Hill House), and turned Edgar Allan Poe’s most famous stories into a sprawling miniseries (The Fall of the House of Usher). And yet, making another version of Stephen King’s 1974 debut novel, which has already spawned another classic in its own right in Brian De Palma’s 1976 film, is surely his biggest challenge to date. Or, at least, it’s the Flanagan project that will face the most scrutiny from fans, burdened with answering the near-impossibly difficult question: “Why do we need another Carrie?”
Fortunately, the showrunner has a very persuasive answer. Sharp, tender, and devastating, Flanagan’s Carrie is a bold, urgent adaptation that updates King’s classic for our hateful digital age and follows the De Palma film in delivering another essential version of the story.
The good thing about a Carrie adaptation already being done to perfection 50 years ago is that it has freed Flanagan to take bold swings with the source material, delivering less of a contained story about a bullied girl and more of a larger-scale commentary on the ease with which we can lose sight of the value of kindness in a contemporary reality forever changed by the internet. Consequently, he makes this Carrie White (Summer H. Howell) as innocent as possible: a girl with a pure heart and impeccable manners, homeschooled by her conspiracy theorist father and religiously zealous mother, Margaret (Flanagan regular Samantha Sloyan). When the former dies in a freak construction accident, the state intervenes and forces Margaret to get a job and Carrie to go to school.
Summer H. Howell (left) as Carrie White and Samantha Sloyan (right) as Margaret White. Courtesy of Amazon MGM Studios.
Now enrolled at Ewen High School, the experience quickly turns as disastrous as one would expect for a girl who repeatedly references classic American literature and has never used a cell phone or a computer before. It becomes clear that Carrie’s genuine sweetness is utterly foreign and even irritating to the majority of the students and faculty. These new figures in the protagonist’s life include catty queen bee Chris Hargensen (Alison Thornton) and her best friend Sue Snell (Siena Agudong), the popularity-obsessed Tina Blake (Josie Totah), Sue’s uncommonly good-natured jock boyfriend Tommy Ross (Joel Oulette), gym teacher Rita Desjardin (Amber Midthunder), guidance counsellor Peter Morton (Tim Bagley), teacher Seth Peist (Rahul Kohli), and Principal Grayle (Matthew Lillard).
While Carrie starts off loving the experience, mesmerised by the experience of using a desktop for the first time, things take a dramatic turn for the worse with the infamous locker room scene. Under the impression that she’s dying because her mother never taught her about menstruation, Carrie gets her first period, panics, and slips in the shower, all while being filmed by her classmates and pelted with tampons. If that wasn’t enough, Chris, spurred on by a fraught home life, creates an Instagram account with the handle “Carrie Red”, where she posts the video and follows it up with a stream of mean-spirited blind items sent in by her peers. While the 2013 remake already incorporated the cyber-bullying element (with a recording of the incident shared to YouTube), that film follows the beats of De Palma’s version too closely to feel necessary. The thrilling thing about Flanagan’s take is that once the locker room scene happens, there are still seven episodes of escalating tension to go.
Playing a wide-eyed version of the character whose kindness is slowly eroded by the social media-fuelled cruelty of her classmates, Summer H. Howell is spectacular in the titular role, with the eight episodes allowing her ample time to both build empathy for Carrie and tease the character’s violent turn. The result is the most fleshed-out version of the character yet, and as strong as Howell’s performance is, it is matched by a career-best turn from Samantha Sloyan as her mother, who, in this case, genuinely loves Carrie despite her severely misguided parenting.
Matthew Lillard as Principal Grayle. Courtesy of Amazon MGM Studios.
Perhaps the best feature of this eight-episode adaptation is its focus on how the bullying ripples across an entire community, which allows the ensemble cast to shine in meaty roles. Standouts include Matthew Lillard as a principal out of his depth and Alison Thornton as chief mean girl Chris, to whom Flanagan cleverly dedicates a generous amount of screen time to make her a foil to Carrie rather than a clear-cut villain. Also impressing are Siena Agudong and Amber Midthunder as Sue and Rita, respectively, who both take pity on Carrie, and Arthur Conti as Chris’ drug-dealing partner-in-crime Billy Nolan, with the actor making a career for himself of playing creepy, edgy love interests after Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma.
With all credit to the actors, another surefire reason the performances are so strong across the board is the writing. The fact that the writers’ room consulted actual high school students is evident and Flanagan and co. thankfully avoid the pitfall of older creatives trying to capture the spirit of the contemporary youth with forced slang and out-of-touch characterisations. Stylistically, there’s a coldness to the cinematography and a sombre piano-driven score that matches the bleak tone. And to call this series “bleak” is somewhat of an understatement: all the tragedy of the past versions remains, but the topical references to 2020s America enrich the material, with a meaningful awareness that, today, Carrie is effectively a school shooter story.
While it may be the least overtly frightening series of Mike Flanagan’s oeuvre, Carrie wisely makes the harrowing high school drama the chief source of horror. That is, until its show-stopping take on the iconic prom sequence, which is audacious in its brutality. But the finale is also the one place where the series stumbles. Without spoiling anything, Flanagan has expressed a desire for a three-season series, and the last episode suffers from the all-too-familiar problem of spending too much time setting up future instalments rather than wrapping up the one at hand. That said, the conclusion is so explosive that the show still ends on a high.
Heartbreaking and piercingly relevant, Carrie is another home run for Mike Flanagan and an invigorating reimagining of one of horror’s most famous tales.
All eight episodes of Carrie will be available to stream on Prime Video from October 7th.