Carrie: First Period (2026)

50 years ago, director Brian De Palma and screenwriter Lawrence D. Cohen adapted the first published novel by Stephen King—a 1974 coming-of-age odyssey with a supernatural horror twist named after its eponymous antihero, Carrie—into what would become, fittingly enough, only the first-ever adaptation of a Stephen King novel. Boasting a pair of career-defining and Oscar-nominated performances from Sissy Spacek as Carrie White and Piper Laurie as her Bible-thumping, abusive mother, Margaret, the result, although slightly diminished by a campy undertone, remains the definitive interpretation of King's story that set the template for every bullied high school revenge film that followed in its wake. 

Since then, there have been two added cinematic adaptations: a made-for-TV remake in 2002 written by Bryan Fuller and directed by David Carson, and a big-budget theatrical remake in 2013 co-written by original author Lawrence D. Cohen and Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and directed by Kimberly Peirce, the first and only woman to take a directorial stab at the timeless tale. As is probably the case with most remakes of iconic originals, neither adaptation came close to snatching the bloody crown off the head of De Palma's, despite Carson's second-best one taking a more novel-accurate approach and featuring some of the strongest performances of all three casts. 

When it was first announced in October 2024 that Mike Flanagan, one of the most prolific and beloved horror filmmakers and showrunners working today, if not the most, would adapt Carrie into an eight-episode miniseries as his first project under his first-look overall TV deal with Amazon Studios, my curiosity and exhilaration were piqued. Here is a man who crafted the greatest horror film I've seen from the past decade, which happens to be his first Stephen King adaptation of a previously unadapted and thought-to-be-unadaptable novel, as well as one of the best entries in the home-invasion slasher subgenre to date. Furthermore, since his adaptation of Gerald's Game, Flanagan has adapted two more novels from King's oeuvre: Doctor Sleep, a sequel to The Shining, which sits at the bottom of Flanagan's horrorography, and his first departure from the horror genre, The Life of Chuck. 

For better or worse, King trusts Flanagan wholeheartedly with his works, making him the current go-to King adapter. If someone were to make a fourth attempt at telling this story of an adolescent female outcast who uses her newfound telekinesis to exact vengeance on her sadistic classmates and fanatical mother after being pushed too far at her senior prom, who better than Flanagan, known for bringing a fresh and character-driven perspective to well-worn material? 

Unfortunately, I don't have Amazon Prime Video, but they were generous enough to release the first episode on YouTube, and based on this introduction, cleverly titled "First Period," it's clear that Flanagan, acting as writer and director, has a lot more on his mind than lazily recycling the familiar beats that we've seen in the previous three adaptations. In the final scene of "First Period," Sue Snell (Siena Agudong) says to her unseen interviewer, "You think you know what happened at prom," and it's safe to put our trust in Flanagan that he will deliver on that implicit promise of delivering a radical alteration to the prom-night massacre and King's story as a whole.

Beginning with scene 2, Flanagan delivers on his promise of contributing something new to the prom table via introducing audiences to the hitherto unseen Ralph White (Tahmoh Penikett). In the novel and subsequent trio of cinematic adaptations, Ralph wasn't a character in his daughter's story. In the former, he was killed in a construction accident prior to Carrie's birth. In the original 1976 De Palma film, he abandoned his wife and daughter for another woman, who also happened to be a mentally unbalanced religious fanatic. In the 2002 and 2013 remakes, his whereabouts go undiscussed. In a faithful translation from King's source material, Flanagan subjects Ralph to the tragic fate he suffered on the page, getting crushed by debris while working construction in the opening scene. 

In the short amount of time devoted to Ralph in his first onscreen appearance, Flanagan opts against developing him into much of a full-fledged character, writing him with zero lines to speak. More problematically, his death, which sets the relatively original plot of TV Carrie into motion, is perfunctorily rushed through with minimal buildup, save the sinister shot of a wall of sand slowly crumbling in a ditch while Ralph is working with his back turned. Following this tragic accident, Flanagan uses expository answers by a co-worker to fill in Ralph's enigmatic personality and background, a rather lazy shorthand for character development. Through this plot device of a character, we learn that Ralph was a Marine veteran and doomsday prepper, and a taciturn, antisocial loner, rejecting his co-workers' frequent invitations to sit with them at lunch and accompany them to the bar for after-hour drinks. A conspiracy theorist distrustful of the government, Ralph did his job while letting nobody in on the private details of his personal life. 

In scene 1, Flanagan acknowledges our collective history with the arc of Carrie by opening with a series of frantic 911 phone calls that play over documentary-like footage of a catastrophic fire tearing through the streets of Chamberlain, Maine, foreshadowing the impending prom-night massacre for which we all come to a Carrie adaptation in the first place. Even though De Palma's film came out 50 years ago, and King's source novel two years earlier, Flanagan demonstrates that Carrie is a timeless story by transposing it to 2026. To achieve this, he applies a few smart modern touches to its framework: the distressing ubiquity and routineness of school shootings, metal detectors at the front door, and a cellphone in every hand. Except Carrie's, of course. 

Leading up to the inevitable blood-and-fire-soaked catharsis, Flanagan takes numerous liberties with King's novel and the previous cinematic adaptations, the most innovative of which involves the upbringing of Carrie White (Summer Howell) herself. Howell's Carrie is not the Carrie we grew up with. In the versions portrayed by Sissy Spacek, Angela Bettis, and Chloe Moretz, she was a shy, insecure, friendless outcast who had attended public school her entire life. Raised without a father under the domineering thumb of a psychotic mother who would beat, chastise, and entrap her daughter in a closet as punishment for wholly imagined misbehavior, Carrie's life was defined by undeserved abuse and trauma. At school, she was mercilessly bullied by nearly every one of her classmates, none more prominently than queen b(itch) Chris Hargensen, whose life goal was to emotionally stomp the life out of anyone who fell outside the boundaries of social normativity. As a result of a lifetime of torment, Carrie regressed into a trembling ball of trauma, keeping her head down, hiding her face behind her hair, sitting in the back of the class, never attempting to talk to anyone or make social connections. 

In Flanagan's adaptation, Carrie begins her journey as a well-adjusted, optimistic girl who spent the first 15 years of her life living in secrecy with both of her parents, Ralph and Margaret (Samantha Sloyan). Born in her parents' upstairs bedroom, Carrie was never given a birth certificate and never permitted to leave the safe confines of her house. As described by social worker Nancy Piper (Crystal Balint), the White family was "a cult of three." Growing up, the closest Carrie had to a friend was her next-door neighbor, Estelle "Stella" Horan (Naika Toussaint), who continually sneaks books into Carrie's birdhouse. Thanks to Stella, Carrie is far more well read than those two grades her senior. 

After Ralph's untimely passing, the private utopia manufactured for Carrie is annihilated. Because Ralph didn't believe in life insurance, and his workers' compensation will take six months to pay out, Margaret is left with two conditions in order to maintain custody of her daughter: she must reenter the workforce for the first time in 15 years as a cashier at an S-Mart and Carrie must enter public school for at lest her sophomore year, if not her junior as well. And so begins her emergence into the real world at the teenage hellscape that is Thomas Ewen Consolidated High School.

Considering that Carrie grew up with only her parents as her companions, providers, and sources of human contact, with no signs of physical abuse, it's bizarre that Carrie exhibits zero grief over her father's passing. As Nancy explains to the unseen interviewer, Carrie's whole world had been cracked open, and the first words that came out of her mouth to her upon inspection were "Are you okay?" It's as though Ralph had died a year or so earlier, rather than the same day, so why is Carrie not even shedding a tear for the father she'll never see again? What an unsettling oversight on Flanagan's part. 

On the positive side of Carrie's 2026 makeover, rather than the "clenched fist who's absolutely shaking out there in the world," Howell's rendition of Carrie is an openhearted, unbruised flower: open, curious, ecstatic to assimilate into public high school with kids her own age, eager to learn a variety of subjects that her mother didn't teach her, particularly computers because she's never used one. Due to having been raised in a refreshingly loving household, Carrie is remarkably friendly, feeling no insecurity or hesitancy of introducing herself to her peers and making friends. Because she's been sheltered from the harsh realities of the modern world by two parents who've done their best to give her the world, she has no reason to fear anyone, for better or worse. Carrie is polite and formal, introducing herself with her full name, Carietta White, and a handshake. As in her previous incarnations, unfortunately, her ignorance to real-world, hot-button tragedies and feminine biology renders her unprepared for and traumatized over a school shooter drill and her first experience with menstruation, both of which occur over her first two days of school. 

In a similarly stark contrast to her predecessors, especially the first two played by Piper Laurie and Patricia Clarkson, Sloyan's Margaret is written as more than a one-dimensional, foaming-at-the-mouth, cold-as-ice religious fanatic and child abuser. She's still religious, to be sure, insisting that she and Carrie pray away the awful first days they both encountered at work and school, but this Margaret is more of a self-righteous conspiracy theorist like, or rather because of, her late husband. She considers the students and especially teachers at public schools pitiful and asleep, and is outraged over Ewen's attempts to prepare their students for the potential tragedy of a school shooting, misconstruing the drills as an implicit attempt to desensitize children to violence. Margaret points out the hypocrisy of training kids to react appropriately to a shooter while police officers aren't trained in how to eliminate them. "The fact is that no state in our union requires school shooting drills for police officers, but for some reason, 37 states require them in school on a yearly basis." While she may be stating a factual statistic, in no way is Flanagan endorsing her worldview that it's toxic to make students as prepared as possible for such a harrowing event. Just look at what that lack of preparation does for Carrie. 

Nevertheless, while the motivation for her refusal to educate Carrie on menstruation is unclear, her sheltering of her from the reality of "babies killing babies in the classroom" stems from a place of love and misguided protection. Sloyan's rendition of Margaret bears a resemblance to that of her immediate predecessor, Julianne Moore, sharing a relationship with Carrie that's loving, tender, and affectionate, at least in the beginning. While Margaret still prefers that Carrie dress conservatively for school in a Navy neck, she allows her to create her own clothing to better fit in with her fashionable peers and asks her to design a blouse for her to wear beneath her work vest so that even if she's having an awful day, she'll know that she's "wrapped in [her] daughter's love." Margaret's grief over her husband's death manifests not in tears but steadfast denial, keeping his shirt draped over a kitchen chair, snapping at a police officer for moving his work boots, and still referring to herself as "Mrs. White."

The two other major supporting characters given an internal makeover are Sue Snell and Chris Hargensen (Alison Thornton). Previously, Sue started as one of Carrie's bullies, experiencing a pang of remorse after partaking in a locker-room hazing. Now, Sue makes an effort to befriend Carrie from the jump as a favor to her mother, Eleanor (Mapuana Makia), a realtor who discovered Carrie and Margaret cowering in their prayer closet when she and social workers broke into their home. As hard as she tries to compliment Carrie on her unappealing self-made clothing and teach her the ropes of high school—homeroom doesn't require books, for instance—Sue loses her patience at her emotional stuntedness at one point when Carrie tackles her to the floor to protect her from a mock shooter. 

Likewise, Chris Hargensen was one of the most reprehensible bullies in horror history, a sadistic, irredeemable, soulless sociopath whose only pleasure in life emanated from the pain she inflicted on others. Not only had she been torturing Carrie since grade school, Chris put a target on the backs of anyone who could be classified as an outcast. In the novel, she once slipped a firecracker into the shoe of a girl with a hair lip and nearly blew off two of her toes. 

In a major first-time deviation, Flanagan attempts to flesh Chris out into a complex, morally conflicted, potentially redeemable human being by supplying her with an underlying psychological motivation for her cruelty. Chris is devastated by the recent separation of her parents, her father, John's (Michael Trucco) coldness and indifference to her, and his inability to afford her tuition for Duke, where she's been accepted alongside her best friend, Sue. That's another relationship change. In the movies, Sue and Chris were initially just members of the same social circle, with Sue distancing herself from Chris after realizing what a bully she was. In Flanagan's miniseries, they're lifelong best friends who have desperately been planning to go to college together. 

To purge herself of her anguish via transferring it to others, Chris lashes out at Brooklyn Kirby (Rowan Danielle), whose father is dating Chris' mother, and Carrie for her innate innocence and naiveté, and out of jealousy over "stealing" some of Sue's attention. Chris feels as though she's being replaced by Brooklyn as her mother's daughter and by Carrie as Sue's best friend, and like a pit bull, she can instantly smell that Carrie is different, an easy target. Rather than a natural-born sadist, Thornton's Chris is dealing with a lot of pain, which she conceals beneath an aggressive exterior.

For his "First Period," Flanagan keeps Carrie's telekinetic outbursts to a minimum, displaying her power in fear-fueled flashes. The first time her telekinesis manifests is when a mock school shooter enters her study hall. As he aims his fake rifle at her face, the lights swing, the desks rattle, and a TV falls from the wall onto the actor's foot. As Carrie awakens from a nightmare of her deceased father, her bedroom window shatters and a light fixture in the kitchen swings gently above Margaret's head. 

However, Flanagan falls back on some contrivances to drive his story forward: Carrie just so happens to have the same homeroom as Chris, Sue, and Tina Blake (Josie Totah); she sits in front of Sue and Chris and beside Tina; in this school, gym class, study hall, and homeroom are composite classes that combine sophomores and seniors; on his students' first day back from winter break, Principal Henry Grayle (Matthew Lillard, in a refreshingly benevolent horror role) thinks it's an appropriate time to perform an active school shooter drill but didn't think to inform Carrie, a new student who has been homeschooled her entire life until this very day; on each of her first two days of school, Carrie suffers a humiliating, ignorance-fueled panic attack in front of her classmates. 

Some of Flanagan's dialogue is eye-rolling. When Chris picks up Sue for their first day back at school, Chris says, "It's you and me, Snell. Ride or die." First of all, the sound of someone referring to their best friend by their last name doesn't ring true; second, this line spells out the depth of Chris and Sue's friendship in a way that suggests Flanagan doesn't trust us to glean it from Agudong and Thornton's chemistry. If two people really share a ride-or-die companionship, they shouldn't have to say it aloud. Their interactions should speak for themselves. Further, Sue's opening and closing statements in the episode are so artificial and overly serious that they verge on parody, designed more to foster suspense and attract return viewings for the next seven episodes than to accurately reflect the way a teenager would speak after enduring the greatest trauma of her life.

For the first time since Carson's 2002 made-for-TV remake, Flanagan commences his story in the aftermath of the Black Prom, rewinding the clock and relaying the events that culminated thereto in flashbacks. Working alongside co-editor Brett W. Bachman, Flanagan uses interviews of the survivors of the Black Prom and acquaintances of Carrie's as a framing device. While this post-prom documentarian tactic serves as a bookend for "First Period," Flanagan and Bachman intersperse it throughout the episode, cutting from the flashback of the main story to a present-day interview with Stella Horan, which segues into a flashback of her introduction to Carrie as a little girl (Juliet Rose Foley). 

Therein, Carrie snuck through her backyard hedges into the Horans' adjacent backyard and introduced herself to Stella, expressing curiosity as to the non-Bible book she was reading. Soon after, Margaret caught Carrie and chastised her for talking to one of "them." All Margaret means by "them" is a whore, apparently, but Flanagan bypasses an opportunity to expose Margaret's probable racism. Stella is a black woman, and it's more likely Margaret would want to shield Carrie from her because of her color than her alleged promiscuity. Unlike in Carson's film, Stella isn't sunbathing in a bra and underwear; she's fully dressed in a T-shirt and shorts. The only part of her body exposed is her legs.

Prior to the traumatizing shooter drill, Flanagan and Bachman present Carrie's first day of high school with an upbeat montage of her in algebra, science class, and computer lab, walking the halls to her next class, asking for help with directions, taking in the overwhelming variety of public school all at once. For someone as wide-eyed and new to the world as Carrie, it's so much, but also so exciting and awesome. 

One technique that distracts from, rather than enhancing, "First Period" is a voiceover of the unseen interviewer, voiced by Flanagan's wife and muse, Kate Siegel, narrating the forthcoming Black Prom destruction as Carrie walks home from her first day of school. It's unengaging to listen to. 

In the final moments of the episode, Flanagan and Bachman make the surprising choice to reveal the culpability of Chris and her future boyfriend, Billy Nolan (Arthur Conti), in the Black Prom and the accidental death of Tommy Ross (Joel Oulette) via a shot of him lying on a stage with blood gushing from his head. Clearly, Flanagan trusts that we know these details are inevitable, but it still feels like he jumped the gun. 

Flanagan and Bachman use match cuts to contrast the tranquility of the present with the chaos lying in store: a shot of the street in the daytime abruptly cuts to one of a crater in the middle, surrounded by fires, in the night; a ground-level shot of Carrie walking home in the daytime in knee-high socks and a homemade dress cuts to one of her barefoot in a blood-soaked prom dress at night. When Carrie introduces herself to guidance counselor Peter Morton (Tim Bagley), Flanagan and Bachman transition from a close-up of her extended hand to homeroom and gym teacher Rita Desjardin (Amber Midthunder) shaking her hand, illustrating that this is the way Carrie instinctually greets everyone.

In compiling the soundtrack for "First Period," Flanagan overdoses on melancholy, girly songs to accentuate the emotions of his female characters, whether it be the nerve-racking anticipation of Sue and Chris as they reload their application statuses for Duke on their computers or the humiliation and resentment of Carrie as she walks home from her first day of school. While Flanagan clearly feels compassion and empathy for all of his characters, his overuse of these songs, which don't sound that good on their own, betrays his desperation to underline his feminism, drowning the supernatural horror beneath the atmosphere of a teen soap opera. 

In only one scene does Flanagan create the vibe of a supernatural horror show and flaunt his expertise in using stillness and darkness to engender dread. As Carrie struggles to fall asleep owing to her traumatizing first experience with a school shooter drill, she awakens—or thinks she awakens—to a heart-stopping image: a silhouette of a male figure standing in front of her bed that evokes the Moonlight Man from Gerald's Game. A streak of light illuminates his eyes to reveal his identity: Ralph. Suddenly, he falls down, as though crushed by invisible debris. As if Flanagan wants to remind us that Carrie is in fact a horror show, he resorts to a somewhat cheap, shrug-inducing nightmare jump scare that ends with Carrie waking up for real. The exterior shots of the neighborhood are filtered through a dark blue color palette that visualizes the deterioration and gloom of its characters' worlds, particularly those of Carrie and Chris. 

Any fan of Carrie knows there are two iconic, blood-soaked set pieces that every adaptation is obliged to stage: the locker-room period assault and the Black Prom. While we're six-seven episodes away from the explosive telekinetic bloodbath, "First Period," as foreshadowed by its very title, concludes with the former assault, and Flanagan and his cast do an admirable, if not groundbreaking, job of distinguishing their "Plug It Up" set piece from the previous three. Three changes stand out, two of which are faithful to King's vision: (1) Carrie gets her period at her locker in front of her classmates rather than in the shower, (2) her period is noticed first by the other girls, who have to inform her, and (3) the girls are fully dressed. Flanagan foregoes nudity entirely, which feels more relatable in a modern high school, where students aren't required to shower after gym. 

Flanagan patiently builds up to the reveal of Carrie's first period. After Carrie stands up from the locker room bench to go to her locker, Tina (serving as the instigator for the second time after Katharine Isabelle's most demonic rendition) notices a droplet of blood on the bench and eagerly alerts Chris. Flanagan and Bachman cut to a back shot of Carrie at her locker, the blood leaking through her white (of all colors) pants. Sue gently tries to warn Carrie, who doesn't feel anything wrong. She turns to Chris, who directs her attention to the blood drop. Frantically, Carrie unzips her pants and feels around in her underwear, pulling her hand out to find her index and middle fingers covered in blood. She stares at her fingers in confusion and rapidly mounting horror. "Why am I bleeding?" she stammers, backing away and clueless what to do. Initially, Chris tries to help Carrie and give her advice, like throwing her pants in cold water. Cinematographer Michael Fimognari switches to a POV shot of Tina, Sue, and Chris to convey Carrie's panic and their mix of amusement, repulsion, and bemusement at Carrie's ignorance to her own bodily functions. Chris turns on a shower and escorts Carrie by her arm thereto, where Carrie slips on the floor.

Suddenly, Chris appears to change her mind and turns her initially genuine-seeming attempt to help into a hazing, throwing tampons at Carrie as she flounders on the wet floor and cries for help, under the belief that she's bleeding to death. Consumed by the liberating power of groupthink, the other girls, most of whom are background characters, join in on the tampon-hurling, except for Sue. Here, Flanagan presents a fourth change to the fourth rendition: previously, Sue contributed to Carrie's bullying in this scene, soon after realizing the immorality of her actions; 2026 Sue is completely innocent, neither throwing a single tampon nor uttering a single chant. Not that that lack of moral complexity necessarily makes her more interesting. Her only crime here is in her failure to intervene and put a stop to the bullying. Instead, Sue stands transfixed with shock, horror, and guilt over the sadism of her own friends and classmates.

Chris whips out her cellphone and begins the infamous chant, "Plug it up!" Immediately, the other girls fall in line, save sweet Sue. Sure, Flanagan isn't the first adapter to add the horror of cellphones to Carrie's locker-room freakout. Peirce's remake got there first. But instead of Chris being the only one to record Carrie, several other girls follow her lead there too, naturally including Tina. 

While Howell is wide-eyed, moving, and endearing in the titular role overall—her slender frame, soft voice, and pretty, youthful appearance that belies her 21 years of age evoking Spacek—her contorted face, terrified whimpering, and anguished screaming still fall short of Spacek and Bettis, whose performances in this particular scene remain the most physically committed and convincing.

As Carrie's telekinesis manifests once more, causing a fluorescent overhead light to explode, Flanagan segues into his most radical and potentially ruinous new development, cutting to a cult of psychic young women who live together in a mansion run by a mysterious, unseen female leader. (Hmm, any connection between the unseen cult leader and the unseen interviewer?) This original development is a double-edged sword: on the one hand, it hints at a broader universe alluded to in King's book, suggesting that Carrie is part of a sorority of gifted women who are seeking to find her and bring her into their found family; on the other, it detracts from the poignancy of Carrie's bullying and the intimacy of her story. 

Being the fourth adaptation of a supernatural horror story adapted, in Flanagan's own words, beautifully and iconically 50 years ago, it's easy to glance at this eight-episode miniseries and dismiss it outright based on its very existence. Brian De Palma's Carrie is the original adaptation, and based on this first episode, it's poised to retain its crown as the definitive, the most passionate, the most entertaining. So why remake it a third time, right? For one, instead of a fourth movie (which is the route I admittedly wish Flanagan had taken), Flanagan has gifted us the first miniseries, meaning we can expect more time with the characters, more room to let their backstories and developments breathe. But does that make it essential? No, but like Linda Cardellini said in defense of her slasher prequel series, Crystal Lake, no movie or show is legitimately essential. It's entertainment. You either get on the ride and give in to its familiar pleasures or you don't. If you're not interested, don't watch. No one's forcing you. 

It's difficult to truly judge the first episode of a TV series because it's not a self-contained story. There are seven more episodes en route to completion. Having said that, "First Period," despite its narrative conveniences and tonally incompatible soundtrack, confirms Flanagan's promise to build something new out of the constituents of Carrie as opposed to taking the Kimberly Peirce way out and slapping together a copy-and-paste recast with cellphones. In this era of ubiquitous horror remakes, that in and of itself is something to celebrate.