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A horror classic Carrie is annoying people

Releasing next week, the latest take on Stephen King's novel has been criticised for its casting. The heroine is a softer, more conventional-looking character t...

aribkhan 3 min read · 5 days ago

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Releasing next week, the latest take on Stephen King's novel has been criticised for its casting. The heroine is a softer, more conventional-looking character than in the book.

Mike Flanagan is the horror auteur behind such hit shows as Midnight Mass and The Haunting of Hill House. A new series from him would normally be a cause for celebration by fans of the genre. But when they were first released, the stills and trailer for his eight-part adaptation of Stephen King's 1974 classic Carrie did not meet with universal approval. Some fans were disappointed, even angered. The reason for their annoyance? As with other screen versions, there seemed to be departures from the novel, which tells the story of a bullied teenager wreaking revenge on her high school – especially with regard to the way Carrie looks and behaves.

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Carrie was King's first novel and centres on a 16-year-old girl who has been tormented for years by her classmates. She finds no comfort at home because her widowed mother is an abusive religious fanatic: breasts and showers are among the many thing she regards as sinful. Carietta "Carrie" White has a latent telekinetic power, typically unleashed when she is stressed, afraid or angry.

The novel begins with her being terrified by her first period, which arrives when she is in the shower after PE class. The other girls mock her ignorance and the stress – or maybe the onset of menstruation – reawakens her telekinetic power. The story then reaches a tragic climax days later when she is humiliated at the school prom.

King describes Carrie in the showers thus: "Carrie stood among them stolidly, a frog among swans. She was a chunky girl with pimples on her neck and back and buttocks". She's clearly meant to be – for want of a better word – "plain".

Yet in the four screen versions to date, she has been played by conventionally good-looking actresses. In Brian De Palma's 1976 classic, Sissy Spacek played Carrie. In a 2002 TV movie, it was Angela Bettis. Chloë Grace Moretz starred in the 2013 film and now, in this new Prime Video drama, it's 22-year-old Canadian newcomer Summer H Howell.

Dr Sorcha Ní Fhlainn is a horror expert and reader in film studies at Manchester Metropolitan University, who believes Flanagan's show will work on its own terms, and is smart in how it modernises the story.

"It updates the ongoing horrors of teenage life at school, where Carrie is desperate to fit in," she says, noting how it now centres social media, which offers new modes of ridicule.

Ní Fhlainn agrees that Flanagan's Carrie is not the "frog among swans" that King describes but says "her 'otherness' is absolutely coded in her making of her own clothes and [background of being] home-schooled. Like so many school-set horrors, this Carrie seems to conjure new means of navigating the familiar horrors of teenage life and bullying."

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Film-maker Liam Gavin directed the cult horror film A Dark Song and two episodes of Flanagan's The Haunting of Bly Manor, his reimagining of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw. Gavin points out that, of course, deviations from the text and casting decisions are not always made purely for artistic reasons.

"With any adaptation, there's always going to be a tension between the source material and the needs of the market," he says. "Production funding is frequently dependent on cast, and so there can be external pressures. It's not always fair or just, it unfortunately 'just is'."