Carrie TV Show

Carrie TV Show

Mike Flanagan is the USA horror auteur behind such hit shows as Midnight Mass and The Haunting of Hill House. A new USA series from him would normally be a cause for celebration by fans of the genre. But when they were first released, the stills and trailer for his eight-part adaptation of Stephen King's 1974 classic Carrie did not meet with universal approval. Some fans were disappointed, even angered. The reason for their annoyance? As with other screen versions, there seemed to be departures from the novel, which tells the story of a bullied teenager wreaking revenge on her high school – especially with regard to the way Carrie looks and behaves.

Various USA X users have pointed out that, as one of them put it, "everyone decides to cast her as a skinny, conventionally attractive girl" which is very different to how she is depicted in the book. Another suggested that no adaptation "has ever captured the full extent of Carrie's novel characterisation. She's an incredibly angry girl, and is usually depicted as sad/naïve on screen". A third alleged that "Hollywood would never do the book version [of Carrie] in a million years".

Get used to the name Summer H. Howell: It could become ubiquitous in Hollywood after "Carrie."

Howell, 22, has been acting since she was 8 and previously starred in a pair of "USA Chucky" movies. But her remarkable turn as Carrie White in Mike Flanagan's USA TV series adaptation of Stephen King's classic novel (streaming Oct. 7 on Prime Video) could bring her an entirely new level of fame, as "Wednesday" did for USA Jenna Ortega.

"I can still remember the feeling of right after the call, knowing I had the role," she says. "It's really weird how your body can remember feelings. It was definitely life-changing. The first thing my mom said to me after I told them was, 'Oh, your life is going to change forever.' She was crying immediately, and I couldn't fully process in that moment."

With "Carrie," Flanagan felt another faithful adaptation of King's novel about a bullied telekinetic girl would be pointless when the 1976 movie already exists, so he made many drastic changes. Among the biggest: Carrie, in this version, has spent her entire life locked away at home before going to school for the first time when the story begins. In the book, she has been in school, and consistently bullied, for years. 

The show also reconsiders why Carrie is bullied in the first place. This Carrie is defined by her empathy, so the series suggests that cruelty has become such an epidemic that kindness stands out. This is part of why Flanagan felt it was unnecessary for Carrie to match the book's description of a "chunky girl with pimples," which led to some criticism of Howell's casting.

"The idea of her being tormented for her physical appearance I felt like had been done many times, and while that's absolutely still a major problem for kids and adults in the world, I thought it was really interesting to see how the world targets kind people and earnest people," Flanagan says, adding that taking appearance off the table left him "free to cast whoever does the best performance, which is what you want to do regardless."

"I was the only actor I knew in my school growing up," she says. "I'd be gone randomly for a month every couple of years, or whenever I could get a job, and I'd come back. And that's what people knew me as. So maybe they just assumed things about me, and it made it a little difficult to connect with people truly."

True to its 2026 setting, much of the bullying in "Carrie" occurs through an anonymous Instagram account, which Flanagan says reflects how social media has "normalized cruelty." But although the account initially torments Carrie specifically, it soon targets many others in school, even teachers. And because the account takes submissions, a large number of students are either complicit or actively involved. 

"It's not as simple as the bully and the victim," Flanagan says. "There's this whole other ecosystem around it, and the degree to which we engage with, or amplify, or refuse to engage with, or refuse to criticize these things when we see them."Carrie's primary bully, Chris Hargensen, is more three-dimensional, with an expanded plot involving difficulties at home. "What she does is from a place of pain and desperation," star Alison Thornton says.But perhaps the most drastic change concerns Carrie's mother, traditionally depicted as a monstrous lunatic who hates her daughter. Samantha Sloyan was initially concerned Margaret White would be too familiar after she played a religious zealot, Bev, in Flanagan's "Midnight Mass." But her concerns were eased when she learned Flanagan had a radically different take: A loving Margaret, driven by a desire to protect Carrie.

"She loves her daughter, and I love her for that," says Sloyan, who connected to the idea of "loving somebody and being bound to them in so many ways, but still being two different people, and the difficulty of navigating that."

This Margaret was inspired by Flanagan's fears over his son starting high school when teens "have to grow up in front of the whole world in a way that can live forever on the internet."

King was on board with the big changes and particularly "loved" how Carrie and Margaret "were the opposite of the characters he expected," Flanagan says. But the "most exciting thing" for the author, Flanagan notes, was the show expanding to explore how Carrie exists in a "long legacy" of women with similar powers.

In another modernization, Margaret eventually starts her own Instagram account to defend Carrie and turns it into a platform for anti-bullying advocacy, though Carrie questions who she's really doing it all for.

Sloyan says this plot further speaks to the "insidious" side of social media. "She becomes so excited by the likes and the attention, and the approval and feeling important. We see her really start to fall for that."

In her own life, Sloyan stays off social media, and Howell is aiming to do the same.

"My generation has been programmed to be addicted to our phones, and we have to make the decision when to put it down and not to believe those comments," she says. "…It's been interesting, especially with the show coming out and many comments of different opinions. I try to avoid it now."

While Howell couldn't process landing the role at first, she's had "plenty of time" to digest it since. And with the series now arriving, she's bracing for a dramatic shift in her life.

Carrie was King's first novel and centres on a 16-year-old girl who has been tormented for years by her classmates. She finds no comfort at home because her widowed mother is an abusive religious fanatic: breasts and showers are among the many thing she regards as sinful. Carietta "Carrie" White has a latent telekinetic power, typically unleashed when she is stressed, afraid or angry.

The novel begins with her being terrified by her first period, which arrives when she is in the shower after PE class. The other girls mock her ignorance and the stress – or maybe the onset of menstruation – reawakens her telekinetic power. The story then reaches a tragic climax days later when she is humiliated at the school prom.

King describes Carrie in the showers thus: "Carrie stood among them stolidly, a frog among swans. She was a chunky girl with pimples on her neck and back and buttocks". She's clearly meant to be – for want of a better word – "plain".

Yet in the four screen versions to date, she has been played by conventionally good-looking actresses. In Brian De Palma's 1976 classic, Sissy Spacek played Carrie. In a 2002 TV movie, it was Angela Bettis. Chloë Grace Moretz starred in the 2013 film and now, in this new Prime Video drama, it's 22-year-old Canadian newcomer Summer H Howell.

As entertainment writer Kayleigh Donaldson wryly observed in a recent article for Pajiba: "Even in a story of cruelty and bullying, the world thinks having Carrie White be a fat girl is too much…You can imagine a teenage girl setting her school on fire with her magical mind powers but she can't be larger than a size 6 (UK 10) because that's stretching credulity?"

​​​​​​​In addition, book Carrie is in some ways an even darker creation than screen Carrie has ever been, both less naive and with greater agency around her destructive powers. She fantasises about the havoc she could wreak if she chose to: "She did not know if her gift had come from the lord of light or of darkness, and now, finally finding that she did not care which, she was overcome with an almost indescribable relief," King writes.

When her prom date is late, she decides that if he doesn't show up, she will use her power to destroy the house. She is smiling and giggling throughout her bloody vengeance at the prom. But on screen, she tends to be sweeter and more innocent. Even in the prom scene she seems to be using her powers reluctantly. 

Flanagan's new version, which is set in the present day and is being promoted with the tag line, "If you think you know her story, you're dead wrong", is likely to upset book purists even further. Without giving away spoilers, it introduces some major departures from, and very significant additions to, the novel.

However, one big change already evident in the trailer is that this Carrie is newly arrived at school, having previously been home-schooled until her father's death. In the book, her father died before her birth and she attends school from the usual age. This is a key difference because it means that when we meet Carrie she is, in Flanagan's words "open to the world, earnest, curious and untraumatised". It has the effect of making the bullying she is subjected to feel even more cruel. 

Do such differences between the book and screen versions matter? Dr Sorcha Ní Fhlainn is a horror expert and reader in film studies at Manchester Metropolitan University, who believes Flanagan's show will work on its own terms, and is smart in how it modernises the story.

"It updates the ongoing horrors of teenage life at school, where Carrie is desperate to fit in," she says, noting how it now centres social media, which offers new modes of ridicule.

Ní Fhlainn agrees that Flanagan's Carrie is not the "frog among swans" that King describes but says "her 'otherness' is absolutely coded in her making of her own clothes and [background of being] home-schooled. Like so many school-set horrors, this Carrie seems to conjure new means of navigating the familiar horrors of teenage life and bullying."  

Film-maker Liam Gavin directed the cult horror film A Dark Song and two episodes of Flanagan's The Haunting of Bly Manor, his reimagining of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw. Gavin points out that, of course, deviations from the text and casting decisions are not always made purely for artistic reasons. 

"With any adaptation, there's always going to be a tension between the source material and the needs of the market," he says. "Production funding is frequently dependent on cast, and so there can be external pressures. It's not always fair or just, it unfortunately 'just is'."

In other words, in an industry which often lacks casting imagination, lead roles of all kinds still tend to go to performers that are conventionally good-looking. That's because producers and studios seem to feel that they will have the greatest audience appeal – though whether that really is the case or not is rarely tested.

In addition, the novel intermittently gives the reader direct access to Carrie's thoughts and feelings to help us understand her. We don't have that in the screen versions – hence, perhaps, the softening of her character, to make her more immediately sympathetic.However Gavin also says that it is fair that a creative director might not want to be completely faithful to a text. "It can also be just as stifling from the other direction," he says. "It's not always incumbent on a director to be slavish to whatever source material he or she is working from."Certainly, this version of Carrie really does feel like something new. Flanagan has made an engrossing, surprising, layered show that is very much about the now, while also honouring its 50-year-old source material. It absolutely delivers on both horror and coming-of-age drama and is well served by terrific performances, especially from the lead. No doubt the depiction of Carrie will continue to stimulate debate but even hardcore lovers of the book should find something to enjoy here.

Posted on 2026/10/12 08:52 AM