I do not know if it is possible anymore to spoil a story with a plot twist and ending so widely referenced across pop culture, but regardless, spoilers ahead for “Carrie.”
I was bullied as a freshman in high school. The harassment I faced by insecure and socially inept teenagers was not unique, though what was peculiar was the particularly constrained environment at the Catholic private school I attended that year. I was unable to finish the year in-person because of the torment I faced.
While I was home completing my studies for the year privately, I found comfort in books. Specifically, I read “Carrie” by Stephen King and found solace in this raw, visceral and ultimately sympathetic portrayal of a scared teen girl failed by those around her.
I add details of my experience of bullying not to find sympathy but to demonstrate what Carrie’s story meant to me in that moment. I related to her yearning to live free from her mother’s religious control, her inability to fit in at school and her frustration that her cries for help went unheard. While my own exhausted explosion was mental, and did not involve a school dance or any pigs’ blood, I understood Carrie.
Carrie’s rage and destruction are emblematic of her society’s refusal to offer her help, instead isolating her and leading her to spiral. King’s story is a central work in horror fiction and pop culture’s conception of coming-of-age stories, which is why there have been so many attempts to represent or reimagine the story, most recently through the vision of iconic horror director Mike Flanagan.
Previously, I watched the original 1976 “Carrie” directed by Brian De Palma and the 2013 remake starring Chloë Grace Moretz. Both left me disappointed. I did not feel that either adaptation truly grasped the central characters or allowed Carrie’s rage to fully manifest. While they focused on the destruction she caused, they did not capture how her mentality progressed through her experience and switched, leading to the manifestation of her rage through her telekinetic powers on prom night.
Flanagan’s 2026 Prime mini-series adaptation took many liberties that I enjoyed, setting the story in a modern day high school and confronting how bullying and “othering” can spiral through social media. I especially appreciated his realistic depiction of the cruelty teenagers are capable of, especially behind the shelter of their phone screens.
Unfortunately, Flanagan’s omission of key details in Carrie’s story reveals he and other creators’ own misogyny in their refusal to depict patriarchy as what led to Carrie’s destruction.
Misogyny is what leads Carrie to feel othered at school. The bully’ s harassment of her stems from her inability to conform to patriarchies’ depiction of what women should be: attempting to please. Significantly, the Carrie of King’s novel is plus-sized and struggles with acne. Through her appearance, she does not adhere to patriarchal conceptions of femininity, which is a central contributor to her torment.
Obviously, Carrie cannot control her appearance, but does not dwell on it. Though she is insecure, does not devote much time to her looks, a rebellious act under a social structure which prizes women’s outward appearance over their minds. Carrie does have what matters most: kindness and an open heart. She wants to befriend her classmates and be happy within the structures in place but she realizes that she cannot. The other students, due to their own insecurity and will to melt into the crowd, have cemented her as an “other,” and refuse to accept her because of external factors and others’ perception.
While Summer H. Howell, who plays Carrie in Flanagan’s depiction, captured the hopeful innocence of the original character, she does not look anything like King’s description. Howell is conventionally attractive with perfect skin. Removing this aspect of Carrie’s character made her bullying less believable and less poignant. By casting an actress who looked like she could have been in Chris, the bully’s, popular click, Flanagan undermined commentary on patriarchy’s othering of non-conventionally attractive women, a theme central to the story.
Misogyny is also what leads to the puritanical religious views Margaret White, Carrie’s mother, holds, through which she controls and terrifies Carrie. Carrie suffers religious abuse at home, as her mother shames her as “sinful” for the regular biological phenomena of menstruation. This moment is a central exaggeration King uses to criticize how women are shamed and taught to hide their natural biological processes and how religion is used as a tool to guilt women for the very existence of their bodies… and Flanagan leaves it out.
Altogether, Flanagan presents a much more restrained Margaret, a change I do not think was necessary in a modern adaptation. Flanagan recognizes Margaret’s fanaticism, presenting her as a zealous conservative conspiracy theorist, but downplays the harm that her ideology has on Carrie, undermining a core factor to her spiral. Flanagan himself said in an interview “Margaret White has always been an abuser… In ours, she fiercely loves Carrie and just doesn’t know how to protect her.” I believe this change undermines Flanagan’s attempted critique of the MAGA ideologies Margaret espouses throughout the show, as it does not present the harm that such views have on children raised under them.
In the book, Carrie is plagued by guilt because of her religious upbringing and faces indecision over fitting in with and mirroring her peers due to her sheltered past. In the show, Flanagan’s Carrie is unaffected by her mother’s ideology in an unrealistic way, especially considering she did not know anyone other than her parents until high school. Removing the weight of Margaret’s religious control as a factor towards Carrie’s eventual unraveling removes part of the central commentary of misogynistic structures which repress female expression.
Carrie’s dad is not in the book nor any of the film adaptations and I find Flanagan’s choice to depict him and change his actions to be an immense failure in capturing the book’s commentary. Margaret reveals at the end of King’s novel that Carrie’s father sexually assaulted her and led to her pregnancy with Carrie. This is a tragic but important detail towards understanding how Margaret views and treats Carrie, acknowledging the often cyclical nature of abuse. By portraying Carrie’s dad as a kind fanatic, Flanagan fails to capture this important detail in the story which explains Margaret’s own trauma and actions.
In this adaptation, I cannot excuse Flanagan’s omissions of important details from the source material due to its length. Flanagan had eight episodes to adapt a roughly 250 page novel, and chose to add story lines while simultaneously omitting the central critiques the novel makes against misogyny and the cycle of abuse.
My own connection with the source material relied on King’s aptitude at representing the spiraling effects the expectations of patriarchy have on girls and women. The things that Flanagan chooses to focus on over the course of the show twists Carrie’s story to be about something other than the harm women suffer under patriarchy. His refusal to confront the root of this harm in the original story reveals a wider pattern of male directors omitting the harms of patriarchy when portraying women’s stories. While he recognized the significance of kindness as a cure to Carrie’s experience, he failed to recognize misogyny as the root of this cruelty.