Carrie Review: Mike Flanagan Is Back in Top Form With Prime Video's Eight Hour Series

When I sat down with my screeners for Carrie, I had the same question I'm sure many of you have: how do you turn an hour and a half movie into an eight hour series? The answer, I'm happy to say, is that Mike Flanagan pulls it off. He is back in top form, and Carrie is his most modern and mainstream project to date.

Each episode runs close to an hour, so it really is about eight hours. All eight episodes drop on October 7 on Prime Video.

Why I was worried about Mike Flanagan, and why Carrie proved me wrong

Some of you are probably asking who I am to doubt Mike Flanagan. I would say a realist, because his last couple of shows have not been good, although I know a couple of you still stand by them. Flanagan certainly has a devout following that will love even his lesser works. Some of you really like Doctor Sleep, even though I don't understand it at all. Its scores actually aren't that bad, but its box office is another story, and some of his recent movies barely blipped on the pop culture radar. So I think I had good reason to be concerned.

But not only is he back with Carrie, he is changing things up. There's no gothic horror and no intricate set design, and that's fine, because this show isn't supposed to have it. It makes a very strong and, I think, effective choice to personify high school. It's safe and mundane, of course, until it isn't. High school, even without the world of Stephen King, always has its darker aspects. I think that was a good choice.

Carrie starts slow but is a phenomenal binge

Carrie basically only has two major events: the inciting incident and, of course, prom. Carrie is associated to this day with her horrific prom. So the show hints at the destruction of prom right at the start and then sets out to show how it all happened. That old trick.

Things are a little slow at first. So slow out of the gate that I wondered, if this were weekly, whether they could keep people coming back until it really starts to cook. It doesn't wait until the very end, but I'd say the first two episodes or so are maybe not as telekinetic as you might like.

Thankfully, Prime Video is once again launching a new show as a binge, and Carrie is a phenomenal binge. I was so skeptical going in that I planned to see an episode or two with dinner. I turned around and it was about 5 in the morning. I'd gotten through five episodes, I think, and had to go to sleep, then finished the rest the next day. Prime Video's strategy is to start with a binge for season one before going weekly for season two and beyond.

Mike Flanagan is setting up an X-Men style franchise of witches

Carrie season two? It sounds strange, but Flanagan is clearly setting up a franchise. No, she doesn't go to someone else's prom. What they're setting up is kind of X-Men, and as a major X-Men fan, I was not going to complain. Instead of mutants, we're talking about female witches, given the X-Men treatment, and I don't hate it. A second season hasn't been green lit, but I think it needs one.

The thread running through the first season is that women throughout history have seemed to demonstrate special abilities. One question it raises: what if the woman who could lift a car off her child wasn't just running on adrenaline, but actually has powers? Like mutants, the witches all have different powers, and at least in season one, they're all women. Summer H. Howell's Carrie could easily be a darker Jean Grey, and she even looks like Sadie Sink, although I prefer Howell's performance. The whole cast is phenomenal, and it's one of the things that really helps the show.

There's a twist in the witch storyline that I guessed immediately because I read a lot of comics and see a lot of movies, but that didn't make it any less satisfying. They acted like it was supposed to be a real shocker, and I thought, "who wouldn't have guessed that?" Still, I enjoyed waiting for it and seeing it revealed. The show is slowly building its own mythology, which is not at all in the book, and for now it's on the edges. But if Carrie is a hit, I'm sure this mythology will explode in a second season. I also like that the show hints at Carrie being part of the larger Stephen King universe. It made me sad that all these shows are on different services, because what I wouldn't give for a Carrie White and Dick Hallorann team up.

Carrie's modern update is potent with social commentary

The original novel came out in 1974, and the famous movie was rushed out just two years later in 1976. This Carrie takes place today, over 50 years later. It works out quite well, because the way they modernize the story is very clever and makes it potent with social commentary. I enjoy that in my stories, particularly when it's this well done, and it really makes you think.

In this version, Carrie has been locked away her whole life, homeschooled and not allowed to leave the house, something we've seen in the news with actual discoveries of children sequestered like this. That makes it feel all the more current and real. Then there's an incident, and social services says she must go to her local high school. That turns out to be a big mistake, though her situation at home was certainly also very bad.

Because she's been locked away, Carrie almost seems like she's from the 1970s, since that's when her mother chose to stop evolving, emotionally and intellectually. Carrie makes her own clothes, and some are beautiful, but she knows so little about the world, from pop culture to technology to basic facts, some of which her mother knows but chose to withhold. Carrie is still very smart and picks things up quickly, but it's an unforgiving learning curve with the whole high school watching her brutal lessons. Back then, entertainment and the news chose what to report because they were the only voices informing people, so the world seemed more innocent, and more damage can be done now because of technology. When Carrie and her mother see what the world has become, their reactions are both a commentary on how bad things have gotten and a question of whether we should be okay with these things. That adds another layer that helps fill the longer episodes. Howell captures this balancing act perfectly: you believe her Carrie is an innocent, but you also don't think she's stupid. She comes across as incredibly intelligent with tremendous inner strength.

Samantha Sloyan's Margaret White is complex, not just a villain

The dynamic with her mother is really interesting. More and more parents today are choosing to homeschool their children and not buy into science; they're anti vax. As there are more parents like that, maybe they would think Margaret White knows what she's talking about. That was fascinating to me.

If you thought Samantha Sloyan was good in Midnight Mass, she's even better here. Her Margaret White is complex and nuanced, not just some villain. While she is abusive and absurd, she sprinkles in some valid points now and then, so you find yourself listening in case there's a gem in there.

Social media makes the bullying of Carrie worse than ever

Bullying has always been part of the Carrie story, but it's the worst it's ever been thanks to social media, which is a huge part of the series. It also spreads beyond kids. There have always been parents bullying their kids, as with Margaret and Carrie, but now adults are bullied by other adults and even by their students. It's rough out there.

The queen bully has always been Chris Hargensen, and the actress playing her is a casting coup. This version of Chris is totally out of control and unrelenting. It's shocking to see, and as it unfolds, it seems like an unsolvable problem. We always like to think Carrie should have found a better way, but I honestly don't think there was one. To the actress's credit, she makes Chris totally believable even with how far she goes, and also a tragic figure, as the show explains why Chris hates Carrie and won't stop even when it starts to destroy her own life. I also really liked adding her home situation with her father and mother to the mix.

Matthew Lillard leads a strong adult and teen cast

Another way they fill eight hours is by spending a lot of time with the adults in Carrie's world: the parents and the teachers. This not only enriches the story but widens the appeal, much like Stranger Things has great teenage and adult characters. The strongest casting is on the teaching side, with Matthew Lillard as the school principal and Amber Midthunder as a teacher trying to help Carrie. You might think Carrie isn't for you, but don't you love Matthew Lillard? He's a full on supporting character with a lot of screen time, and you could totally tune in for him. I'm loving his return. He's in the upcoming Man of Tomorrow because he's friends with James Gunn, who wrote Scooby-Doo, which Lillard starred in. I don't know why it took so long for Gunn to cast him. He was on Daredevil, but he should have been on Peacemaker.

The teen supporting cast is very good too. Josie Totah is excellent as another top mean girl, and the actor playing a dropout still hanging around the high school as a bad influence is so smarmy; you may remember him from the Beetlejuice sequel. Tommy Ross is played well, and I can see why that actor was cast, but he looks way too old for high school, maybe even too old for college, especially since everyone else is somewhat age appropriate. Siena Agudong is very good as a popular girl who tries to befriend Carrie while everyone tells her not to. It's the least interesting role of the group, but she does the best she can, and someone has to be nice to Carrie.

The prom episode meets very high expectations

Telekinesis is my favorite superpower. I think it feels tied to our emotions, especially anger or frustration. When you're frustrated, you wish you could put a bubble around yourself or push something away. Even though Carrie starts small, it taps into that feeling. It takes a couple of episodes for her powers to get going, but the show uses anticipation well, since we know where it's headed. She eventually becomes very powerful, and the way she uses her powers becomes increasingly clever and surprising. A couple of times I thought, I never thought of doing that.

People will have very high expectations for prom, and I think the show meets them. The episode before ends just as the blood hits Carrie, and oh boy, did I press play after that cliffhanger. In that tease she's in her prom outfit, just crowned queen, covered in pig's blood, the iconic visual from the film. You'd think you couldn't top it, but when I saw how Summer H. Howell looked in that moment, I said to myself, "What a shot." The bulk of prom is a single episode, a multi step massacre, some steps drawn from the book. I was on the edge of my seat; it was gruesome, and just when I thought it couldn't get worse, it did. Flanagan doesn't go full horror like the 1976 movie. Instead it has a fantasy comic book element, maybe even manga esque, which makes it fresh and fits what everybody's into right now.

Carrie joins the growing movement of books adapted as series

The show is very well written and acted, which gets it through the slower parts, and every episode has cliffhangers that keep you going. I really like this trend of adapting books as series instead of movies, so nothing gets left out. Mildred Pierce drove that home for me. I love the original movie, so when HBO did a version, I called it sacrilege, but a year or so ago I gave it a shot for Kate Winslet, Guy Pearce and Evan Rachel Wood, and was amazed by how much the movie left out. Netflix's East of Eden, which just dropped, is shockingly better and fuller than the famous film. Together with Carrie, they make me very curious to spend more time with the first Harry Potter book this holiday season on HBO.

Carrie isn't scary like Welcome to Derry, even though it's coming out around Halloween. The closest comparison I can make is Scream: a slick package with jump scares, killings and blood, but very hometowny. What's interesting is that, outside of the telekinesis, and maybe they'll take away from this if they go the X-Men route in season two, Carrie highlights how humans torture and torment each other. "No goblins or ghosts needed." To some degree, I think that's what Carrie is really about. If this sounds like something you would enjoy, you will enjoy it.

Should Carrie get a second season that leans fully into its X-Men style witch mythology, or should it stay a self contained story?