Review: Carrie Has More Room, and So Does the Dread (Part I)
Carrie (2026) Developed for television by Mike Flanagan Now streaming on Prime Video
By Devin Smock | More Horror
SPOILERS THROUGHOUT
This review covers Episodes 1-4 only.
Nobody needs another version of Carrie simply because the title can be recognized from space. Stephen King’s novel has been adapted, remade, continued and turned into a musical. Brian De Palma’s 1976 film still works. The bucket is still hanging up there. We know what is in it, and we know where it eventually goes.
Mike Flanagan was the reason I was excited anyway.
Flanagan has shown that he understands the difference between adapting King and simply collecting the recognizable parts. The first four episodes of this new Carrie series do not run from what we already know, but they also do not sprint toward prom as if that is the only reason anybody came. Television gives the story something the movies never really had: time.
Time is dangerous in Carrie. It means we have to live with the humiliation instead of jumping from one famous scene to the next.
This version begins with Carrie White still hidden from the world by her parents. Her father Ralph’s sudden death exposes the family’s existence and forces Carrie and Margaret into contact with schools, authorities, jobs and people they have spent years avoiding. That is a significant change from the novel and the earlier films, but it gives this adaptation a practical way to place Carrie inside a modern public school without pretending she has somehow been there unnoticed the entire time.
Summer H. Howell plays Carrie as someone trying to learn rules everybody else absorbed years ago. She is not stupid and she is not walking around like a loaded weapon waiting for the script to pull the trigger. She is painfully unprepared. Every conversation becomes another test nobody told her she was taking.
Then comes the locker room.
The scene has always been awful because Carrie genuinely believes she is dying while the other girls laugh at her. Bringing phones and social media into it could have been the cheapest possible modernization. Unfortunately, it also makes perfect sense. The cruelty no longer ends when somebody leaves the locker room. It can be recorded, uploaded, replayed, edited into a joke and delivered back to the victim by a thousand strangers. The original humiliation had walls. This one does not.
That is where the first four episodes give me exactly the right amount of anxiety. Carrie is not safe at school, but home is not relief. It is another trap with different wallpaper.
Samantha Sloyan’s Margaret White is frightening because she does not need to be screaming every second. She can sound protective while tightening the rope. She loves Carrie, or at least believes she does, but every piece of care comes poisoned by fear, control and religious certainty. The softer moments do not excuse her cruelty. They make it worse because we can see how Carrie might mistake possession for love.
Howell and Sloyan understand that the relationship is the heart of the story. The telekinesis matters, obviously, but a floating object is not nearly as upsetting as watching a child look to the person hurting her for comfort.
The series format also allows Sue Snell, Chris Hargensen, Tommy Ross, Miss Desjardin and the rest of the school to exist as more than pieces being moved toward one bloody night. Sue’s guilt has room to develop. Chris’s cruelty has a social ecosystem around it. The adults have enough screen time to reveal what they see, what they miss and what they decide is somebody else’s problem.
That does not mean everything here is material rescued directly from King’s pages. This is not a museum-piece adaptation. Ralph’s expanded presence, Carrie entering public school for the first time and the machinery of viral humiliation are major inventions or updates. Eight episodes give Flanagan room to restore things other versions compressed, use the novel’s wider view of a community and build new material around it.
So far, that expansion works more often than it feels like expansion for its own sake. The danger with stretching Carrie across eight episodes is obvious. Dread can build, but it can also sit around until it turns into padding. Halfway through, the series is still mostly applying pressure. It lets Carrie experience small pieces of the outside world, lets us hope one of them might remain good, and then reminds us what story we are watching.
Flanagan directs the first two episodes, with Kate Siegel taking the third and Axelle Carolyn the fourth. The change in directors does not make the series feel stitched together. The visual language remains patient and close to Carrie, especially when a crowded school makes her look like the only person without instructions.
The first four episodes are not a complete meal, and I am not going to grade the ending before I have seen it. What they establish is promising: a Carrie that understands the old story while finding a modern form of public humiliation cruel enough to stand beside it. More importantly, the show remembers that Carrie White is not frightening because she has power. She is frightening because everybody around her keeps teaching her what power is for.
So far, so pretty good.
7.3/10 for Episodes 1-4
