'Carrie' Review: Mike Flanagan Brings New Depth to Stephen King's Horror Classic
By Shauna Bushe - October 6, 2026
TV - Premium TV
Honestly, no body was asking for another Carrie retelling. Between De Palma’s 1976 classic and an unnecessary conveyor belt of remakes, Stephen King’s tragic prom queen felt fully told. But Mike Flanagan has a unique style for a tragedy and the way he approaches Carrie is not by rushing into the bloodshed but by slowing everything down, using eight episodes to dig deep into the corners of what makes Carrie White tick. The result is a study of isolation, religious paranoia and what happens when the system fails a child.
What is Carrie about?
Carrie (Summer H. Howell) is a shy teenager who has spent her life completely secluded from the outdoors, with her fiercely dominating, religious mother Margaret (Samantha Sloyan). Following the sudden death of her father, Carrie is thrust into the cruel pressures of a modern public high school. As she navigates cruel bullies and social hierarchies, Carrie begins to discover she has destructive telekinetic powers and a taste for revenge.
Including pieces of Carrie lore really helped shape this series stay connected to the source material in ways, even though it carves out its own narrative overall. Inserting the humiliating scene where Carrie gets her first period immediately establishes just how isolated from basic human development she is and exposes the casual mob mentality of her peers is lying in wait.
Flanagan’s directing style has always been defined by patience; Haunting of Hill House, Midnight Mass, Hush, they all start with a slow burn and end with a satisfying pay off, he brings that same exact approach here. Flanagan grounds Chamberlain Main as a dull, dying town where secrets rot behind closed doors. Long, deliberate camera angles and oppressive cinematography, accompanied by a dreadful score builds an unbearable atmosphere. Carrie’s telekinesis is treated not as a flashy superhero gimmick, but as a violent, physical manifestation of her losing control. While expanding the story into an 8-episode format leads to mid-season burn out – halting momentum for local drama, and town politics – the slow burn ultimately pays off. When Flanagan zeroes in on the central horror, Carrie’s eventual collapse feels less like a spectacle of evil and more like a dam breaking after years of relentless pressure.
When the inevitable prom sequence arrives in the final stretch, Flanagan avoids relying on showstopping gore, instead he frames the iconic set-piece into a devastating tragedy. What makes the massacre so deeply horrifying isn’t just the bloody spectacle, but the heart-breaking waste of human life caught in the crossfire. As the cruelty of her peers pushes Carrie past her breaking point, her loss of control claims the life of those who never deserved it. Most upsettingly, Tommy whose genuine kindness offered her a glimpse of hope, and Principal Grayle who was simply helpless in stopping the cycle of terror.
Taking on the iconic role of Carrie White inevitably carries weight. In the shadow of Sissy Spacek’s Oscar nominated performance, Summer H. Howell deliberately chose not to watch the original, in alignment with Flanagan, they decided it would be best to ensure her interpretation remained entirely unpolluted. With that, Howell crafts a distinct, modern Carrie who begins with rigid, robotic mannerisms before slowly adapting to the rhythm of her peers. She also injects a surprisingly keen sense of fashion, hinting at a personal style her mother’s strict control had long supressed. Yet, across both versions, the central heartbeat remains the same: both iterations capture a deeply tragic arc rooted in emotional overload rather than cruelty, where a girls brief, genuine attempt at normal human connection is crushed by the world around her.
However, stealing every scene is Samantha Sloyan as Margaret White. Sloyan possesses a remarkable talent for projecting deep emotion with minimal expression; her eyes pierce your soul and sit there, creating a pit of unease. The dynamic shared with Howell serves as the emotional backbone of the series – a dangerously charged relationship that makes their screentime utterly magnetic.
Across the rest of Chamberlain, Amber Midthunder leads as gym teacher Miss Desjardin, bringing a grounded empathy to Carrie, treating her as a human being rather than an immediate inconvenience. Meanwhile Siena Agudong’s Sue Snell and Alison Thornton’s Chris Hargensen are the typical toxic friction found in high-school hierarchies. Their dynamic is further elevated by Tommy Ross, whose genuine kindness gives Carrie a fleeting taste of normalcy, and Billy Nolan, who provides the dangerous, volatile muscle behind Chris’s cruelty. Rounding out is Matthew Lillard as Principal Grayle, embodying a faculty member that is painfully out of his depth and devastatingly ill-equipped to handle the festering spite in the school halls.
Even if the eight-episode format forces a few bold departures from King’s novel and De Palma’s iconic blueprint – which will divide a lot of fans – Flanagan’s Carrie is a masterclass in patient, tragic horror. Anchored by Summer H. Howells vulnerability and Samantha Sloyan’s suffocating screen presence, the series expands the lore beyond a simple revenge tale into a devastating character driven examination of inherited trauma.
'Carrie' releases on Prime Video on October 7, 2026.
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Shauna Bushe
Writer
Shauna is always down to talk about movie lore, collector of all things physical media and driven by a life long love for horror cinema.
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