In 1974, Stephen King published his first book, Carrie. In 1976, it became his first novel to get a screen adaptation. Five decades later we have nearly as many King-inspired movies and TV shows as we do actual King stories, especially considering that so many of them have been adapted multiple times.
Carrie is one of King’s most enduring works. It’s already become two feature films and a made-for-TV movie. The notorious Broadway musical it inspired later attained cult-beloved status and spawned multiple parodies. But one of its most high-profile spotlights is yet to come, in the form of Mike Flanagan’s eight-episode series for Prime Video. He’s a proven creator of potent horror tales, working again with one of his favorite authors, and it feels like 2026’s Carrie has the potential to be the best on-screen interpretation in 50 years.
But first, let’s look back at all the versions of Carrie White—high school misfit turned superpowered mass murderer—to hit big and small screens, and peek ahead at what’s next.
Brian De Palma hadn’t yet attained household name status when he took on Carrie, but the film’s success surely aided his ascension. Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie earned Oscar nominations for their memorable turns as Carrie and Margaret White; the latter’s shrill, repeated cries of “They’re all gonna laugh at you” became so ingrained in pop culture they inspired an Adam Sandler comedy routine nearly 20 years later.
But it’s Spacek’s eerie performance that really lingers. She hardly resembles King’s physical description of the character (a “chunky girl with pimples” who’s compared to an ox, a pig, and “a fat, whiny bag of lard”), setting a standard that would continue throughout future depictions. But her Carrie does convey the weight of being constantly bullied by her classmates at school while also enduring physical and emotional abuse at home.
The movie begins with blood, as Carrie—a klutzy failure in gym class—gets her first period during the nudity-filled group shower scene. The humiliation of that moment as the other girls taunt her confused terror comes in stark contrast to Carrie’s dreamy ecstasy of soaping up under the water, a mood echoed later when Carrie allows herself to believe her golden moment of being crowned prom queen is genuine.
Of course, a lot more blood is about to ruin her naive delight, as the ultimate prank, dreamed up by the villainous Chris Hargensen, turns into tragedy for everyone caught up in Carrie’s psychic meltodown. It’s horrifying, but it’s so cathartic. We’ve been rooting for this childlike outcast as the blows start accumulating: the principal who repeatedly calls her “Cassie,” the teacher who makes fun of her for calling her future prom date Tommy Ross’ poem “beautiful,” the ever-present ugly graffiti (“Carrie White eats shit”), and the cruel glares and whispers that follow her down every hallway.
Her mother, whose religious fanaticism is elevated by mental illness, ensures there’s no comfort at home.
When Spacek’s Carrie starts to realize the strength of her powers, it helps her stand up to her mother and accept Tommy’s invitation to the dance. She gets a makeover that affects not just her appearance but also her posture and confidence. We want that for her, and that makes the inevitable ruination of what could have been her salvation hit all the harder.
Carrie’s vengeance wipes out most of her classmates and teachers, and in this telling it also takes down Sue Snell, Tommy’s girlfriend, who had asked him to take Carrie to the prom as a sort of apology for the locker-room fiasco. Sue survives that horrible night, but at what cost? De Palma’s delicious jump-scare ending shows us how haunted she is, and the movie ends with Sue screaming with the realization that she’ll never wake up from her nightmare.
Carrie White only appears in flashbacks—snippets of De Palma’s film pop up throughout—so this one’s a little bit of a cheat, but The Rage: Carrie 2 does focus on a character we eventually learn is Carrie’s half-sister. Amy Irving also returns to reprise her role as Sue, now a guidance counselor with serious boundary issues who starts to suspect that Rachel (Emily Bergl) might have telekinetic capabilities simmering within her.
You need only read the title of the movie to see that history will repeat itself, and while The Rage: Carrie 2 feels carefully constructed to fit the high school films of its era—there’s even a Scream-style prank call—you can see a certain rebel spirit in Bergl’s performance and Katt Shea’s direction. Rachel isn’t part of the popular crowd, but she’s not a sheltered innocent; she’s been in foster care since her mother was locked up in “Arkham” (yes, really) for claiming her young daughter was possessed. She’s tough. She’s independent. She listens to Billie Holiday while toiling at a drive-through photo developing shop.
And she’s got her potentially dangerous emotions well under control—she tells Sue she doesn’t cry, even after her best friend leaps off the school roof after being rejected by the image-conscious jock she’d been seeing in secret—until she doesn’t.
Rachel’s subjected to the usual casual bullying, especially after a football hero takes a genuine interest in her. How dare she cross teenage social boundaries and presume she’s just as good as anyone else! But there’s an escalation from cheerleaders calling her “skank” to outright cruelty when a surreptitiously shot video of Rachel and her new boyfriend is broadcast at The Rage’s prom equivalent, a house party. The movie enters its “fuck around and find out” phase in gory ways that feel very ‘90s horror, including CDs used as deadly projectiles and an inadvertently hilarious castration via harpoon.
Also very ‘90s is the way Rachel’s barbed-wire tattoo snakes across her skin as her fury grows and the body count at the party rises. The jump scare in the movie’s coda is far sillier than De Palma’s, but there’s a contextual note that makes The Rage: Carrie 2 even more chilling: it was released not long before the Columbine High School massacre, a real-life tragedy that made Hollywood rethink its approach to teen violence.
Whatever reverberations Columbine had on entertainment seemingly dissipated quickly, because NBC unveiled its Bryan Fuller-scripted take on King’s classic just a few years later. Directed by David Carson, a British TV veteran who’d also helmed Star Trek Generations, this Carrie unfortunately suffers from its downgraded production values (so much shaky cam) and special effects that probably looked dated even in 2002.
Fuller’s script also shapes this Carrie as a tale told in flashback via the police interrogation of Sue Snell, played by Kandyse McClure, and other students after the prom disaster. As the main narrative counts down to that fatal night, we also get to see this film’s Tommy Ross liken Sue’s left-field request that he take Carrie as his date to “something in a Freddie Prinze Jr. movie.” (A clear nod to She’s All That, of course.) Another pop culture reference surfaces when one of the girls at the prom appears to be wearing an exact replica of Julia Roberts’ 2001 Oscar dress.
The reliably great Patricia Clarkson is fine as Margaret White, but the standout performance comes from Angela Bettis, who makes Carrie so fragile and feral that you can easily see why she invites ridicule from Chris and the other mean girls. It’s still too early for social media to be wielded as a weapon, but we do see technology has progressed enough for Carrie to research “miracles” on the internet (Margaret, horrified: “The internet?”) while trying to figure out just why she’s able to move objects with her mind.
There’s a glimpse of the girl that could blossom from this walking open wound when Tommy, her secret crush, convinces her he really, really wants her to be his prom date—and soon after, when she tells Sue she knows Sue thinks she’s better than her: “It’s OK. Everyone does. Doesn’t mean it’s true, though.”
Carrie’s abilities begin to build just ahead of prom night, when she applies a hands-free shove to her hovering mother, and we see furniture casually levitate as she anxiously awaits Tommy’s arrival. The bloodbath comes as we know it will, but this Carrie ends with a big surprise: Carrie doesn’t die, as is tradition. She’s saved by Sue, who helps her flee town. That explains why Sue is so combative and evasive when being questioned by the cops and was presumably meant to set up a sequel that never did arrive.
Julianne Moore and Chloë Grace Moretz star in Kimberly Peirce’s feature adaptation—but even a fantastic cast (including Judy Greer as the kindly Miss Desjardin; at this school, gym class includes water polo) and superior cinematography and special effects can’t answer the pressing question of why this exists in the first place.
For once, Carrie is played by an actor who’s actually a teenager, and Moretz’s performance is as self-assured as Moore’s is spooky. But the movie hits all the expected beats. Carrie gets her first period in the school shower; Margaret punishes her daughter with Bible-soaked abuse; Sue asks Tommy to take Carrie to the prom; Chris pushes the pig blood prank; Sue is one of few survivors (with a variation: she’s pregnant, something Carrie’s able to telepathically discern); and Carrie gets the last word, sort of, in a tepid graveside jump scare.
So it’s a fine movie. It’s better than The Rage and much better than the 2002 made-for-TV version. There are some flourishes, like the odious Chris getting an extra-awful death scene. But given the choice, you could just watch De Palma’s version instead.
We’ll have to wait until October 7 to rate Flanagan’s series, which arrives in an eight-episode binge drop, to see how Carrie fares in 2026.
The new trailer that arrived this week shows Carrie—Summer H. Howell, who looks to have some of Spacek’s fragility about her—showing up for her first day of class after years of homeschooling. That’s a big change right away, since even going back to the book, Carrie has always had years of pent-up angst over how she’s treated by her peers.
Also new: the metal detector she and other students must pass through at the entrance. The sense that this Carrie will be achingly of the moment also comes through in the glimpses of bullying through social media, with cell phones greedily capturing Carrie’s awkward new-girl fumbles. This idea is introduced in the 2013 film, but it doesn’t become the focal point of Carrie’s struggles as it apparently will here.
With an extended amount of storytelling space available to Flanagan, we may also learn more about the world beyond just Carrie’s isolated point of view and the origins of her powers. Both topics are examined in the novel but have only gotten passing mentions in the adaptations to date. In The Rage, Sue Snell becomes obsessed with Rachel’s apparently inherited abilities. And as King fans will recall, his book reveals that telekinetic people exist beyond one teenage girl who gets pushed to the brink in the doomed town of Chamberlain, Maine.
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Source: Gizmodo