has always been precious to me. Finding Stephen King’s novel in the school library when I was 15, hiding from my own bullies, I quickly made Carietta White my own private heroine: the hounded misfit who hits back against her tormentors with pure, unfettered rage, in a way I could never quite muster in myself. 

At its heart, is a tale of female rage, teenage angst and isolation at its most destructive. Given it was first written in 1974 by a 26-year-old man chain-smoking in a trailer, it has remained an incredibly astute piece of work. It’s a middle-fingered salute to a world that refuses to understand you and continues to resonate with young women half a century later.

Brian De Palma’s 1976 film is a masterpiece, too. A rare horror that earned two Oscar nominations,  was that rare adaptation that actually improved on the original material – so much that all subsequent remakes have adopted his changes, rather than remain “book accurate”. 

As I aged up, horror auteur Mike Flanagan’s work drew me in with his impeccable ability to blend supernatural horror with all-too-human fears and desire for connection with his Netflix series The Haunting of Hill House and . So, the news that Flanagan was adapting  into an eight-part series for Prime Video left me elated. The ultimate combination. 

So with fist-pumping joy, I shamelessly begged for early access as soon as the first trailer dropped – the perks of being a TV journalist. But with the screeners came a three-page letter from Flanagan, warning us the show was a “reinvention” rather than “a preservation” of the tale. 

“Oh well,” I thought. “These things need to be modernised. I trust him.” But then I kept reading. “Knowing King’s versions of the central characters had already been played so iconically led to an unavoidable conclusion,” he wrote. “If I did this, it would only be exciting if we changed those characters on a fundamental level.” Oh no.

But Flanagan doesn’t just reinvent the characters. He’s wiped the show of everything that makes the story so wonderful. The teenage girl delivering her own bloody, powerful moment of reckoning after years of torment is gone, replaced by a scared little mouse with no autonomy, self-control or rage. 

Summer H Howell brings childlike wonder to Carrie, who’s now forced into high school at age 16 rather than being tormented every day from first grade like a lamb to the slaughter – a key element to what makes her finally hitting back so satisfying. But Flanagan is scared to have her do anything bad of her own volition. Instead, now all major moments are taken over by new characters to save Carrie getting her hands dirty. The series even takes away her voice – lifting Carrie’s dialogue from the book word-for-word to hand a key death to a character who doesn’t even have a name. 

Margaret, Carrie’s callous and unrepentant mother, is changed beyond recognition. Gone are the days of religious extremism spurred by resentment towards the daughter (born from a sexual assault by her now-dead husband) she raised alone. Now, played by Samantha Sloyan, she is a frazzled, strict yet loving woman who’s not vengeful of the world, but fearful of it –  after years locked inside by a husband who died 16 years later than he originally did. Turning an actively cruel woman into just another victim of circumstance means her life choices are no longer hers. 

And then there’s Chris Hargensen (Alison Thornton), Carrie’s lead tormentor, who is stripped back to a scowling teen whose main job is to look sad that her daddy’s not paying her enough attention. Here it’s her best friend Tina White (Josie Totah) who’s allowed to have fun and just be a pot-stirring bitch for the sake of it.

This is not the Carrie I know and love. The relentless misery Carrie suffers at the hands of the world around her is painful to witness and uncomfortable to read, but it’s also what makes her retribution, drenched in blood as she burns her small town to the ground, so satisfying. “Sometimes being a bitch is the only thing a woman has left to hold on to,” King notes in another novel, but it’s never more true than in Carrie. After a lifetime of horrific abuse and rejection, Carrie earned her vengeance. 

With Prime Video’s , Flanagan had the opportunity to do something magical, with a reinvention that told the painfully human elements, and its gloriously bloody fallout, through a bright, 21st century lens that could maintain the story for a further 50 years. Instead, it’s an ironically puritanical way to portray the ultimate revenge story, attached to its core material only by name and a few key scenes. 

Honestly, by the metric of “teenage girl with telekinesis”, he should’ve just made a gritty remake of . At least that would’ve been a twist we wouldn’t have seen coming. 

‘Carrie’ is streaming on Prime Video