Meet the modern Carrie White. Mike Flanagan‘s brand-new Prime Video TV show, simply titled Carrie, reintroduces us to the telekinetic teenager, whose image of her pig blood-stained face at the prom has been ingrained into horror since the Sissy Spacek film came out in 1976.
Now, starring Summer H. Howell as the high school pariah, the series takes place today — smack in the middle of the digital era. Per its official synopsis, Carrie “has spent her life hidden away inside the walls of her home with her fiercely protective mother, Margaret (Samantha Sloyan).
“After her father’s sudden, untimely death thrusts her into the unforgiving ecosystem of public high school, Carrie is forced to navigate a viral bullying scandal that tears through her community, the relentless pressure and casual cruelty of the social‑media age, and the awakening of mysterious telekinetic powers that rise alongside her adolescence,” the rest of the synopsis reads.
Here are the main differences between the brand-new Carrie series, the original film and its story by Stephen King. (Warning: spoilers are ahead on the new Carrie series)
The most obvious difference between the Prime Video series and King’s book and the 1976 film is the use of cellphones and social media. Horror fans and readers recognize Carrie’s traumatizing “Plug it up” scene, when she is bullied and humiliated over her first period in a gym locker room shower. In the film, Carrie is pelted with tampons by her classmates. In the TV show, the scene is heightened with the use of phones, as bullies record Carrie on the ground, screaming and bleeding.
Flanagan spoke with TotalFilm about the choice to add phones to the period scene, noting the creative team wanted to display the “normalization of cruelty” in today’s digital society.
“Yeah, we talked a lot about how it changed when there were phones in people’s hands, that scene especially. And in every other version, that’s the first scene,” the executive producer explained. “And so one of the first things we kind of started to play with was, I think that’s the end of the pilot, and I think we’re gonna walk us into that. It’s so tough to even imagine doing any story, any serious story about the modern teenage experience without engaging with the topic of social media because it is so ingrained in their day-to-day lives.”
