First broadcast 7 October 2026.

The first question anybody has, and I suspect fair enough too, is why commit to another adaptation of Carrie? Stephen King’s 1974 debut novel was a massive commercial hit, and continues to sell in bookshops today. It was promptly adapted into a successful feature film in 1976, directed by Brian De Palma and starring Sissy Spacek and John Travolta. There was also a much less successful sequel, The Rage: Carrie 2, in 1999, and an impressively made but somewhat redundant remake in 2013. There was even a 2002 made-for-television film, and a famously disastrous stage musical. Honestly, and in the grand scheme of things, Carrie feels all adapted out.

Here we are, however, with writer/director Mike Flanagan’s all-new eight-episode Carrie, streaming via Amazon Prime. Why bother?

First of all, Flanagan is a superb talent with a demonstrated penchant for adapting Stephen King to the screen. This is Flanagan’s fourth King adaptation, and his previous works – Gerald’s Game (2017), Doctor Sleep (2019), and The Life of Chuck (2024) – have all been masterful. He is not simply very good at what he does, he has a remarkable handle on that blend of the uncanny and the ordinary that makes King’s fiction so effective.

Secondly, Flanagan is coming to the original text from a contemporary perspective. His Carrie is a new version in which high school shootings and social media have changed the context of King’s story and characters. It is clearly not undertaking a line-for-line adaptation, and its characters already feel richer and more developed than any of the films before it. Flanagan’s version of Carrie White, played excellently by Summer H. Howell, is younger than before, and a more optimistic and outgoing person. Both changes help the character seem believable and appealing. Her classmates, who in the tighter confines of a two-hour movie are rather two-dimensional, get their own backstories and personal dramas. They feel less like cyphers and more like people. Samantha Sloyan gets to play Carrie’s domineering mother Margaret with the sort of narrative space previous actors could only dream about. Hers is a Margaret that has time to express love for Carrie, however misguided her actual behaviour becomes. Matthew Lilliard gives an engaging performance as high school principal Henry Grayle.

Perhaps the biggest challenge facing any new adaptation of Carrie is audience familiarity: by-and-large the audience already knows how Carrie White’s story ends. Flanagan clearly understands this, and sidesteps it entirely by starting his series at the end before flashing back. We open on carnage, and a high school gymnasium on fire. We see journalists interviewing the survivors. What happens in Carrie is clearly less important than how and why it happened. With that shift, Flanagan takes control of his own series. Based on the first hour, it is looking very promising.

Carrie is now streaming on Amazon Prime internationally.