Actor Ewan McGregor as Danny in Doctor Sleep.
By
Ben Sherlock
Published 14 minutes ago
Ben Sherlock is a Tomatometer-approved film and TV critic who runs the massively underrated YouTube channel I Got Touched at the Cinema. Before working at Screen Rant, Ben wrote for Game Rant, Taste of Cinema, Comic Book Resources, and BabbleTop. He's also an indie filmmaker, a standup comedian, and an alumnus of the School of Rock.
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Mike Flanagan’s next Stephen King adaptation is an eight-episode miniseries based on Carrie, but that story might feel stretched thin in that bloated format. Carrie was King’s first novel (or, at least, the first one he got published), so it’s a seminal part of his oeuvre. But it’s been adapted a bunch of times already, and it seems unsuited to a full-blown miniseries.
It won’t be the first King novel to be adapted into a limited series, but unlike bigger King novels like It and The Stand, Carrie might be stretched thin in miniseries form. Flanagan hasn’t steered us wrong yet — he’s the best adapter of King’s stories since Frank Darabont — but he might be making a fundamental mistake with his Carrie TV show.
Carrie Doesn't Have Enough Story For An 8-Episode Limited Series
Carrie is covered in blood with flames in the background in Carrie.
Carrie will be Flanagan’s first project under his new overall deal with Amazon Studios, but the fact of the matter is that the book just doesn’t have enough story for an eight-episode limited series. We’re introduced to Carrie White, a viciously bullied high schooler with latent telekinetic powers, and when she’s finally pushed to her breaking point, she unleashes those powers on her classmates — and that’s about it.
There’s a lot of interesting dramatic substance in Carrie’s relationship with her overbearing, religiously devout mother Margaret that a TV show could sink its teeth into. It’s important to show that it’s not just the bullies at school who push Carrie to go on a vengeful rampage; the bully at home is a big part of it, too. But that’ll only get Flanagan so far.
There is one aspect of Carrie that a TV series could expand on. The book often fails to depict Carrie in a sympathetic light. In many of its passages, Carrie’s bullies have more nuance than Carrie herself, so Flanagan could work on that and make Carrie a more sympathetic figure. But that alone won’t be enough to justify an eight-part retelling.
A Feature Film Is The Perfect Medium For Adapting Carrie
Sissy Spacek covered in blood in Carrie
A feature-length film is the perfect medium for adapting Carrie. The story is even laid out like a feature screenplay: it has the inciting incident with Carrie’s period in the shower; it has the second-act escalation with Carrie discovering her powers and Chris planning a diabolical prank against her; and it has the third-act climax with the massacre at the prom.
The previous feature film versions of Carrie have managed to tell the story in its entirety without having to cut anything meaningful. The key plot beats from King’s novel fit neatly into the structure of a 90-minute movie. The 2002 version added flashbacks and the 2013 version added a prologue with Carrie’s gruesome home birth, and neither of those additions felt necessary.
Brian De Palma’s Carrie is one of the greatest horror movies ever made; it perfectly translates everything important from King’s novel — Carrie’s growing desire for revenge, Sue’s redemption arc, Chris doubling down on the bullying, Margaret’s abusive, overbearing parenting — without feeling rushed or truncated. If anything, it could be a little shorter; it definitely doesn’t need that tuxedo fitting sequence.
Stephen King's Book Is Padded Out With Superfluous Material
The cover of Stephen King's Carrie
The book itself doesn’t even have enough story material to sustain a full novel. It’s padded out with letters and news reports to add more pages to the spine — and even then, it ran just shy of 200 pages. King tells the story from the perspectives of multiple narrators in a needlessly elaborate framing device, with a collection of reports and newspaper clippings in roughly chronological order.
Critics have interpreted this framing device as showing us that, no matter how you look at it, or whose perspective you take as gospel, there’s no explaining what Carrie did on prom night. But, while it just about works on the page, there’s no way to translate that epistolary storytelling to the screen in a TV adaptation. It’s a purely literary device.
Mike Flanagan Has Never Fumbled A Stephen King Adaptation
Tom Hiddleston as Chuck Krantz squinting in the sun in The Life of Chuck.
While I’m skeptical that Flanagan can make Carrie work as a miniseries, or that we even need another adaptation of Carrie in the first place, I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. Flanagan has dedicated a lot of his filmmaking efforts over the past decade to adapting his favorite King stories for the screen, and he hasn’t stumbled yet.
Flanagan is currently three for three when it comes to King adaptations. Gerald’s Game was a masterwork of character-focused horror, Doctor Sleep walked a fine line between its faithfulness to King’s source material and its reverence for Stanley Kubrick’s Shining adaptation, and The Life of Chuck is one of the most wholesome, life-affirming, deeply moving films of the year.
So, there’s reason to have faith in Flanagan’s take on Carrie. He’s taking time away from his long-gestating adaptation of The Dark Tower series — effectively his passion project — to work on Carrie, so he must have a killer idea for it. In Flanagan we trust. Just going off his track record, it’ll probably be awesome.
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