Carrie

The new series Carrie updates the Stephen King book for the digital age, and plays with what we think we know in some surprising ways. Streaming on Prime Video, it follows a young Carrie who has led a sheltered life with her overbearing mother. But as Carrie enters high school, she has a rough go of it. The signposts are familiar – the showers, the prayer closet, the prom, the pig’s blood – but showrunner Mike Flanagan (The Haunting of Hill House and Midnight Mass) builds out the world around those events. Looking for more TV and movies inspired by Stephen King? Check out these episodes: Glen Powell is ‘The Running Man’ in the latest Stephen King adaptation https://www.npr.org/2025/11/14/nx-s1-5608037/glen-powell-is-the-running-man-in-the-latest-stephen-king-adaptation A new generation is down to clown in ‘IT: Welcome to Derry’ https://www.npr.org/2025/11/03/nx-s1-5591373/a-new-generation-is-down-to-clown-in-it-welcome-to-derry ‘The Long Walk’ is a long walk to nowhere https://www.npr.org/2025/09/12/nx-s1-5538136/the-long-walk-is-a-long-walk-to-nowhere Dance with Tom Hiddleston through 'The Life of Chuck' https://www.npr.org/2025/06/17/1254291431/dance-with-tom-hiddleston-through-the-life-of-chuck Connect with Pop Culture Happy Hour: Letterboxd https://letterboxd.com/nprpopculture/ / Facebook https://www.facebook.com/pchh Our weekly newsletter https://www.npr.org/newsletter/pop-culture Support public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. This show’s perks include bonus episodes and sponsor-free listening. Learn more at plus.npr.org http://plus.npr.org/. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

• 0:00Speaker 00

  If you appreciate the nuance and context we bring you here at Pop Culture Happy Hour, look into NPR Plus. When you join, you're supporting the kind of deep dive storytelling that makes shows like Pop Culture Happy Hour possible. You also get perks like early access and bonus episodes for a wide variety of NPR shows. Join us at plus.npr.org. You look at this particular King novel, right, which was published when the guy was very, very young, and the beats are so familiar. I mean, there's been a sequel and a TV movie and a film remake and famously a musical, and we don't have time to get into the musical here today, folks, but trust me, it's a rich text.

• 0:43Speaker 00

  Why remake Stephen King's Carrie, much less do it as an eight-episode streaming series? Well, if anyone can justify that, it's probably Mike Flanagan, the writer-director behind terrific shows like The Haunting of Hill House, Midnight Mass, and The Fall of the House of Usher. With the new Prime Video series Carrie, Flanagan updates the book's themes of bullying and abuse for the digital age and hires some familiar faces from the Flanaganiverse to give it new life. I'm Glen Weldon, and joining me today on NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour is Jordan Cruciola. She's the editor of the action movie newsletter, The Action Desk. Hey, Jordan.

• 1:19Speaker 01

  Hello, reporting live from inside the Flaniverse. Hello, hello.

• 1:24Speaker 00

  There we go. There we go. Now, look, Jordan, you know the story of Carrie. I know the story of Carrie. Everybody knows the story of Carrie. Young Carrie White has led a sheltered life with her overbearing mother. Carrie here is played by Summer H. Howell, and her mother, Margaret, is played by Flanagan favorite Samantha Sloyan. But now Carrie must enter her town's public high school. Carrie has, I think it's safe to say, a rough go of it. Now, the story's signposts here are familiar: the showers, the prayer closet, the prom, the pig's blood. But the series builds out the world around those events, playing with what we think we know in sometimes surprising ways. It's streaming now on Prime Video, and

• 2:06Speaker 00

  we should mention that Amazon supports NPR and pays to distribute some of our content. Jordan, what did you make of this new Carrie?

• 2:15Speaker 01

  I feel like people who might know me from the internet, they would identify me as a Flanastan. I'm a big Mike Flanagan fan. That does not mean I like everything he's ever done. Midnight Club didn't really catch for me. Like, I'm not just all blindly in the bag. I had my reservations about Carrie. I feel like in the lead-up to watching his episodes, I had seen kind of mixed reviews coming out about the show. So I was kind of standing, trying best I could to be neutral, waiting in judgment. I came out of this a much bigger fan than I was anticipating being. This is like my recent appearance talking about Verity. I didn't go in thinking this is, you know, I was ready to make a decision when I was there. And I thought that this was great. I thought he did a great job. It's

• 2:57Speaker 01

  a supernatural drama series. I wouldn't call this a horror series unless it's about the horror of bullying and social caste systems in a present-day high school, but it is absolutely a really good character drama series with supernatural elements. I'm in. I highly recommend.

• 3:11Speaker 00

  Okay. You know what? I am too, and I wasn't prepared to be. So we're coming from the same place. I mean, I'm not the biggest Stephen King guy, but I am a Flanagan. I probably should have seen this coming. You look at this particular King novel, right, which was published when the guy was very, very young, and the beats are so familiar. I mean, there's been a sequel and a TV movie and a film remake and famously a musical, and we don't have time to get into the musical here today, folks, but trust me, it's a rich text. Look, if you know what's coming, and you also pretty much know that the prom probably is not going to happen until episode eight, a big part of you is sitting there wondering, what are we doing?

• 3:54Speaker 01

  The very first thing you see in this series is like a newsreel horror show of the aftermath of tragedy at prom. I like that as the lead-in is like, listen, we know, we get it. Here you go. And then we spend the show walking up to that fateful day.

• 4:10Speaker 00

  Right. But that's the thing. Eight episodes are eight episodes. And so you're sitting there going, well, don't tell me we're going to get a flashback episode with the mom or the principal or the school custodian. I mean, so just know that that doesn't happen, thankfully. What does happen is that you spool out more thread. So you can do what I think are some really interesting things with a character who canonically is kind of a victim until suddenly she isn't. And then you play with things like her guilt, her culpability. You give Carrie some real badass agency at some points in the show. You let the relationship with the mom ebb and flow in the ways that relationships with

• 4:51Speaker 00

  moms ebb and flow. And there's real reconciliation at one point. And I think if the story was the beeline that it is in the novel, this wouldn't work. But I was grateful that Flanagan lets the characters breathe and lets the story itself kind of undulate, you know?

• 5:06Speaker 01

  The thing that had me most, that I was most on the edge of my seat for about the show, was when I heard way back when that happened, when it was announced that Samantha Sloyan was going to be Margaret White. I was like, I actually don't need to anticipate a single other detail about what's going to happen here. This is perfect. Obviously, he works with his repertory, his same sort of repertory players often, but Samantha Sloyan, one of the great actors working in television today, she is so good. And her particular brand, a boy, is there anybody doing righteous, zealotry, quiet terror than

• 5:47Speaker 01

  Samantha Sloyan right now? No. No, there simply is not. There was a tendency in the 2000s when we started rebooting all these properties to give your bad people characters very sad backstories in order to give us the hurt people, hurt people of it all. This show could have done that in the most characteristically sort of insufferable ways possible, which was, I think, a real Achilles' heel of the Carrie remake starring Chloe Moretz from the 2010s. It was all the sort of things we infused into the remake era that just made it feel flat. It made it feel run-of-the-mill. And it was the, look how sad the bully's home life is. This includes those factions. This includes those hurt people, hurt people

• 6:30Speaker 01

  elements. But I think Carrie's them off in such a way that I found extremely compelling. I think Samantha Sloyan affects that perfectly as Margaret White. And I was so impressed for this entire season run by this Chris Hargason. She was outstanding. And if you want to talk about where the horror lives in this show, it is with that character. And she was so good.

• 6:57Speaker 02

  Hey, Carrie. Hi. I just wanted to come over here and say I'm sorry that your mom is such a [BLEEP]. Honestly, if I was married to her, I would throw myself into an open trench, too.

• 7:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, I completely agree with that. I think that's the magic of this particular, that's the alchemy of this particular adaptation. Because in Carrie's bully, Chris, who is played by Alison Thornton, you know, one of the reasons I think I've never been a King guy is he paints in broad strokes, especially when it comes to bad guys who tend to be, you know, mustache-twirling cartoons. And I've heard from folks who say, look, he's writing about good and evil, so that's always going to be archetypal and elemental, which I just think is a grad school way of saying flat. Flanagan knows something, and you've already referenced this, something that a lot of his contemporaries don't seem to know, which is that you can explore psychology and emotional history, emotional health, without slapping the trauma label on absolutely everything. Because you've got more tools in your toolbox,

• 7:58Speaker 00

  right? And yes, the character Chris gets backstory. And don't think I didn't groan that first shot of her at home at breakfast.

• 8:07Speaker 01

  1,000%. I was like, oh, okay, tell me how we should feel bad for Chris Hargason.

• 8:12Speaker 00

  Exactly. And you gird your loins because you think we're going to get trauma justifies her behavior. But Flanagan's better than that. There is a scene, and this is about the actress, really. There's a scene on Carrie's first day where Sue and Carrie have this nice moment between them. And then the camera abruptly cuts to a shot where we can see Chris in the background staring at Carrie with this baleful hate that is so funny. I mean, to see that kind of twisted rage on this face that is so not twisted, right, that is so composed and symmetrical and conventionally attractive, it is terrific.

• 8:51Speaker 01

  There's a brand of cruelty that comes from like those movies of the 70s where you watch it, you know, like the plug-it-up scene, the throwing the tampons at Carrie. And even though that's come into other adaptations of this, there's a kind of like raw, bare cruelty of bullying in the 70s that makes you feel you want to shudder in a corner. This is so horrific. This does not have the raw, bare cruelty of the 70s. You can't recreate that in new circumstances, really. But the way that it communicates the overwhelming cruelty within the most darkly terrifying character and character moments of this show feels so effective. This Chris Hargason was Alison Thornton. I think what she pulls

• 9:34Speaker 01

  off and how they realize the social darkness of the series through her also is the perfect substrate on which I think, instead of just being like, what if Carrie but phones? It feels like the way that they fold the technology into this show and the kind of like the vehicle for so much of the horror that happens throughout this is a social media account called Carrie Red that is run by Chris Hargason, our chief bully, that's a meme account, that's a bullying and like evil, dark-sided, doo-wah meme account. It is ruining the fabric of this like small community. The way it all laces together, as realized so much through this performance

• 10:19Speaker 01

  by Alison Thornton and this Chris Hargason, I think it makes the phone element and the like, hey, the internet's gotten really bad out there, guys, feel actually to me like a value add narratively, instead of just a way to drag this story into 2026. And I was really impressed by that.

• 10:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, because in the wrong hands, this could come off as an the kids and their avocado toast, you know, middle-aged writers' room saying that kids are always on their phones kind of thing. But it doesn't feel like that.

• 10:49Speaker 01

  And tragedy girls, doing it for the likes, doing it for the lols. And it's so much more than that.

• 10:54Speaker 00

  Yeah. After the break, we've got more thoughts about Carrie.

• 10:57Speaker 03

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• 12:47Speaker 00

  Welcome back. This is the thing. The crux of the story is Carrie and her mom. And I think no matter how much you loved the OG movie, Summer H. Howell here, she's got more notes to play than the great Sissy Spacek had. Piper Laurie is terrific, but Samantha Sloyan, I'm joining your fandom here. I'm not, I've already been in it, but like, she is perfectly cast in this. This is a character actor with character actor features that means she can play a real person who is just wrung out by life, right?

• 13:16Speaker 05

  You don't know how insidious these places are. They don't want you to think for yourself. They want to tell you who to be and what to believe, and God forbid you ask questions. God forbid you stand up for yourself. They will crucify you. The world is not kind to people like us.

• 13:35Speaker 00

  I want her to play every Flannery O'Connor character ever. And the script just flatly asks more of her than the OG movie did of Piper Laurie. And not just in terms of screen time, but in terms of emotional registers. She's just got more to do.

• 13:50Speaker 01

  There is a thing that Samantha Sloyan is just so good at is that even in her calmest moments, she's never not the most frighteningly unhinged thing on screen.

• 13:59Speaker 00

  Right.

• 13:59Speaker 01

  And so it's like, so we are sustaining a madness. I think the, where the show really got me was like, there are so many things where you could bring something into the current moment and give the little tells, the signifiers for how we're making a show and talking about it in 2026. And Carrie's dad dies at the very beginning of this, and so she has never left the home, let alone, like she's never left the property. So this is her first day at school. It's her first day out of the Kimmy Schmidt bunker. And so dad dies, mom wants to retain custody, so mom has to go out and get a job and work with people. Carrie has to go to public school because they're going to be surveyed by social workers being like, can you keep your kid in this house? Turns out dad, she describes one point, is like, I think he was really afraid all the time.

• 14:42Speaker 01

  We hear red dye, we hear chemtrails, we hear spy satellites, we hear like they're poisoning the water, like he's that guy. And I think that actually the way that they lace all that in, it does feel to me, it felt relatably like watching like a family in your town, I come from a small town, where they like, they just started buy it into things bad at a certain point.

• 15:06Speaker 00

  Right. And the important thing with the character of Margaret, the mom, is that they've decided to tweak her vibe, her motivation. There's still God in the mix, but she's a lot more, as you say, she's a lot more QAnon than Christian.

• 15:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:20Speaker 00

  Which means, you know, we don't get the dirty pillows line, which some of us were waiting for, but fine.

• 15:26Speaker 01

  I am in my back of my mind waiting for this.

• 15:28Speaker 00

  But you couldn't sustain that, to your point, you couldn't sustain that over eight episodes. At one point, Margaret needs to make a choice, you've also mentioned this, to kind of get into the mix of what's going on at the school that the Piper Laurie character would never make, could never make. Even back then, in a different kind of way. It needs to be of the moment. She needs to be able to join the world and still retain this sensibility, which is also of the world now.

• 15:59Speaker 01

  I thought it was clever to work in the aspect of the parents' rights movement.

• 16:02Speaker 00

  Right.

• 16:03Speaker 01

  And the notion of advocacy for a child as something that becomes a sword and a shield that people carry, even if it starts there and they start well intentioned, they start genuine.

• 16:14Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 16:15Speaker 01

  I, the audience was watching the show being like, yeah, this school isn't doing enough. Like, why isn't the school like doing anything? Even with this well-meaning, like good guy principal, who is Matthew Lillard playing this perfectly, but it is just like, you see the limits of like the administrative bureaucracy of a school. They're not the FBI. They're not a police department. So you're getting that, that they're kind of just letting this happen. And so then when Margaret White steps in and it's like, I'm a parent and the parents have to protect these kids, you're like, good for you. And then you're like, oh, wait, no. And then you start feeling like what that parents' rights movement, heavy scare quotes around that, starts to mean in the real world practice, which the show does then start to bleed toward. There are a lot of effective moments throughout the course of these eight episodes of where

• 16:59Speaker 01

  you can really go like, that's how it starts. And then it does see it through to its supernaturally horror-tinged, quote-unquote, logical conclusion of that's how it starts. And if you don't stay so checked in to the grounding reality of what you're doing and ask yourself regularly, like, is this really about me? Am I really doing the most good for the most people?

• 17:21Speaker 00

  Right.

• 17:21Speaker 01

  Or am I just out here for me now? And because this is a, is a genre work, they're not out there for the good of the people. And poor Carrie White, truly the genuinely sweetest girl that you ever did see on God's green earth, is going to be the vehicle for everybody's like hatred or redemption narrative.

• 17:39Speaker 00

  And also, not for nothing, you will see, if you hang in with this show, and I think we are encouraging to do so, you're going to see some of your favorites, more of your favorites from Flanagan's actor stable.

• 17:50Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 17:50Speaker 00

  And also, maybe because this thing we shot in Vancouver, this may or may not explain why this thing exists as a kind of ad hoc Battlestar Galactica reunion.

• 17:59Speaker 01

  What a twist.

• 18:00Speaker 00

  I know, right? You can't spoil everybody who shows up, but every time somebody new showed up, I was like, so say we all.

• 18:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. So say we all, absolutely.

• 18:10Speaker 00

  Last question. There is an opening for some version of this show to get a season two. The world of this show, let's say.

• 18:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:20Speaker 00

  Which would involve dropping a lot of the quote-unquote signposts, a lot of the things it's recognizably Carrie.

• 18:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:27Speaker 00

  And entering into a wider world that's more Flanagan, more.

• 18:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:32Speaker 00

  King, maybe. Can't really spoil anything, but are you on board if this world continues in another season?

• 18:39Speaker 01

  My trust in Mike Flanagan has me say yes. The bits of possible future ensemble that we are teased, I'm like, I know some of these players, I like some of these players, but it is funny to think of like, from the world of Carrie. Not just like based on the, but like, but from the world of Carrie comes Carrie season two.

• 18:58Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 18:59Speaker 01

  And I'd be willing to give it a chance. I would enter it skeptically.

• 19:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. Okay, so folks, I think we are both on board with this series. We think you should be too. We would be notionally on board for.

• 19:09Speaker 01

  Notionally on board, yes, yes.

• 19:11Speaker 00

  Another show in this world, which would not be this show, but it would be, if it's headed by Mike Flanagan, we're Flannigan's.

• 19:19Speaker 01

  Uh, yep.

• 19:20Speaker 00

  That brings us to the end of our show. Jordan Crucial, thank you so much for being here.

• 19:24Speaker 01

  Thank you so much for having me. And I really appreciate the opportunity to go long on the Petri dish of Alison Thornton's Chris Hardison as a window into our society at large now. Yes.

• 19:37Speaker 00

  Exactly. And it's, it's a sad state of affairs, but I mean, she does it well. This episode was produced by Hufsa Fathama and Mike Katsepin, edited by our showrunner Jessica Reedy. And Halokhiman provides our theme music. Thank you for listening to Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR. I'm Glen Weldon, and we'll see you all next time.

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