Mike Flanagan’s eight-part adaptation of Stephen King’s debut novel brings the horror of adolescence into the age of social media. It is a thoughtful, visually assured reimagining of a familiar nightmare, but in its determination to preserve Carrie White’s innocence, it ultimately compromises the tragedy that makes her story endure.

Series: Carrie
Created by: Mike Flanagan
Based on the novel by: Stephen King
Starring: Summer H. Howell, Samantha Sloyan, Siena Agudong, Alison Thornton, Thalia Dudek and Joel Oulette
Platform: Prime Video
Release date: 7 October 2026

The Girl Who Would Not Stay Buried

There are few horror stories as thoroughly embedded in popular culture as Stephen King’s Carrie. Since its publication in 1974, King’s debut novel has become a foundational text in the mythology of the bullied outsider, its imagery absorbed into the collective vocabulary of horror. The shower-room humiliation, the pig’s blood, the prom queen’s crown and the telekinetic fury of a teenage girl pushed beyond endurance have acquired lives of their own, reinforced by Brian De Palma’s celebrated 1976 adaptation. To revisit Carrie is therefore to confront not simply a familiar story, but a series of images whose cultural familiarity threatens to obscure the tragedy from which they emerged.

Mike Flanagan, one of contemporary horror’s most accomplished storytellers, approaches the material with an understanding that faithful reproduction is not necessarily the same as meaningful adaptation. His eight-part Prime Video series relocates King’s nightmare to a world in which social media has transformed the nature of teenage humiliation, where identities are curated for public consumption and the private boundaries that once offered some protection from cruelty have become increasingly porous. It is a modernisation that feels both natural and necessary, recognising that the mechanisms through which young people construct, negotiate and defend their identities have changed considerably since King first introduced Carrie White.

Flanagan is an especially compelling filmmaker for this undertaking. His work repeatedly demonstrates an ability to combine strong visual direction with emotionally attentive storytelling, drawing on the talents of a network of collaborators while maintaining a clear thematic sensibility. He understands that horror is not simply a matter of frightening images or supernatural spectacle. Its most enduring power emerges when the monstrous exposes something recognisably human: grief, repression, guilt, shame, religious fanaticism or the terrible consequences of refusing to acknowledge another person’s suffering.

That instinct serves Carrie well. The series is not content to reproduce the familiar sequence of abuse, humiliation and supernatural retaliation. It expands the social environment surrounding its protagonist, gives supporting characters more room to develop and explores the ways in which cruelty becomes embedded in the structures of everyday life. Yet its ambition eventually encounters a contradiction. In broadening Carrie’s world and attempting to preserve the possibility of a future for her, Flanagan alters the emotional architecture of the story. His Carrie is frequently perceptive, often affecting and unmistakably the work of a thoughtful horror storyteller. But when its tragedy reaches the point at which it must finally confront the consequences of its own construction, the series appears unwilling to follow through.

The Facade and the Girl Beneath It

At its heart, Carrie has always been a story about the distance between the person we are and the person the world permits us to become. Carrie White grows up in a household governed by Margaret’s religious extremism, where her body, desires and developing identity are treated as sources of shame. When she enters the outside world, she encounters a different system of judgement, one governed by popularity, appearance, social standing and the fragile currency of acceptance. The rules change, but the demand for conformity remains.

Flanagan’s contemporary setting sharpens this conflict by introducing social media as an extension of the social machinery that has always surrounded Carrie. Humiliation is no longer confined to the school corridor, the gymnasium or the whispered conversation. It can be recorded, circulated, reproduced and revived before an audience that may have no direct connection to the original event. A moment of vulnerability becomes a public identity, while the person at its centre loses control over the meaning of their own experience.

This is where the series demonstrates the strength of its modern perspective. Social media is not merely a technological update, a fashionable detail added to make King’s story more contemporary. It becomes an expression of the facades people construct around themselves and the social structures that sustain them. The online persona, the carefully managed reputation and the performance of belonging all depend upon an audience willing to accept the image being presented. When that image fractures, the consequences can be devastating.

For an adolescent, still negotiating the uncertain process of becoming an individual, the experience can be particularly destructive. Identity is never entirely private, but the pressure to perform it publicly has become an increasingly dominant feature of contemporary life. The individual is expected to present a coherent version of themselves while simultaneously negotiating the judgements, expectations and insecurities of everyone watching.

Carrie occupies the most vulnerable position within this system. She has been sheltered from the outside world, denied the knowledge and experience that might help her navigate it, and then exposed to a social environment in which ignorance and awkwardness become opportunities for humiliation. She is expected to understand rules she has never been taught, to conform to standards she has never been allowed to explore and to accept the judgement of people who have little interest in understanding her.

The series recognises the cruelty inherent in this arrangement. Its strongest moments arise when the social spectacle becomes inseparable from the private damage it inflicts, when the audience’s desire to watch and participate begins to resemble the behaviour of the people carrying out the humiliation itself. Flanagan understands that cruelty does not always require direct physical contact. Sometimes it is enough to make someone an object of public attention, then allow the machinery of social judgement to do the rest.

The horror of Carrie has always rested on the destruction of a fragile identity. Flanagan’s adaptation gives that destruction a contemporary vocabulary, demonstrating how the facades through which we negotiate the world can become instruments of our own vulnerability. The tragedy is that Carrie has so little opportunity to establish an identity of her own before other people begin defining her.

The Body Remembers

Beneath the modernisation lies the bodily horror that made King’s novel so potent. Carrie’s first period remains the essential starting point because it transforms an ordinary biological process into a crisis of identity. Her classmates turn a moment of vulnerability into public entertainment, while her mother’s religious teachings have left her without the knowledge required to understand what is happening. The incident establishes the central pattern of Carrie’s life: what should be an opportunity for care and education becomes an occasion for shame.

Menstruation, religious repression, sexuality and telekinetic violence are not separate concerns in King’s novel. They belong to a single thematic structure in which the developing female body becomes a battleground for competing systems of control. Carrie’s emerging powers give physical expression to feelings she has been taught to suppress. Her anger, fear and desire can no longer be contained within the private boundaries of the body; they become forces capable of transforming the world around her.

Flanagan understands the symbolic relationship between adolescence and the supernatural. Growing up involves discovering that the self is not always as manageable as one might wish. Emotions arrive before we possess the language or experience to understand them, while the desire for acceptance can make rejection feel like a judgement on our very existence. Carrie’s telekinesis literalises these tensions, transforming the ordinary turmoil of adolescence into an extraordinary and increasingly dangerous power.

Yet the series also raises a difficult question about the relationship between suffering and responsibility. Carrie’s anger is understandable, but the consequences of that anger cannot be reduced to the circumstances that produced it. The people who torment her are responsible for their cruelty, and the community that permits that cruelty cannot simply absolve itself when the consequences become visible. But Carrie is also more than a passive instrument of other people’s failures. Her suffering helps explain her actions without necessarily resolving their moral implications.

This distinction is central to the enduring power of the character. Carrie is neither an innocent angel nor an uncomplicated monster. She is a young woman whose suffering is real, whose rage is understandable and whose capacity for destruction remains horrifying. The tragedy emerges from the collision of these truths, not from the discovery of a single explanation that allows one to cancel out the others.

Summer H. Howell: The Vulnerability of Carrie White

Summer H. Howell provides the series with a compelling emotional centre. Her Carrie is curious about the world beyond her home, eager to establish connections and understandably overwhelmed by experiences that other teenagers take for granted. Howell captures the uncertainty of a young woman encountering unfamiliar social rules while carrying the accumulated damage of a childhood in which knowledge, independence and self-expression have been tightly restricted.

There is a sincerity to the performance that makes Carrie’s desire for ordinary experiences genuinely affecting. The prospect of friendship, the possibility of romance and the simple pleasure of being accepted acquire a significance that extends beyond the familiar coming-of-age narrative. For Carrie, these are not merely the expected milestones of adolescence. They represent the possibility of escaping the identity imposed upon her by her mother and the hostile community into which she has been thrust.

Howell also gives the character a recognisable emotional openness. Carrie wants to understand the people around her, even when she lacks the experience to interpret their intentions accurately. Her vulnerability is not simply a consequence of her isolation; it is also part of her willingness to believe that the world might offer something better than what she has known.

The difficulty is that the series sometimes places too much emphasis on preserving this innocence. Carrie’s awkwardness and vulnerability are essential, but her anger, resentment and capacity for cruelty are equally important. She is not simply a sweet, misunderstood girl waiting for the world to recognise her worth. She is a person developing under extraordinary pressure, denied the emotional resources that might otherwise help her understand herself.

Howell is more than capable of conveying this complexity. The limitation lies in the broader characterisation, which occasionally seems reluctant to allow Carrie’s darker impulses to exist without immediately placing them within a framework of victimisation. The more carefully the series establishes her innocence, the harder it becomes for the narrative to accommodate the moral ambiguity that should define her transformation.

A horror protagonist does not need to be morally admirable to be emotionally compelling. Indeed, some of the genre’s most disturbing characters are those whose suffering we understand completely, even as their actions become impossible to excuse. Carrie’s tragedy depends upon our ability to recognise both the girl who has been wronged and the terrifying consequences of what happens to her.

Margaret White: Love as Possession

Samantha Sloyan’s Margaret White is the other essential pillar of the series. Margaret is not merely a domineering parent but the architect of a private theology in which the body is sinful, desire is dangerous and obedience becomes the only acceptable expression of love. Her religious extremism transforms the domestic environment into a prison, sustained by the conviction that cruelty is justified when exercised in the service of moral purity.

The relationship between mother and daughter is horrifying because it confuses protection with possession. Margaret believes she is shielding Carrie from a corrupt world, yet her attempts to preserve her daughter’s innocence ensure that Carrie enters that world dangerously unprepared. The mother’s fear becomes the daughter’s ignorance; the mother’s shame becomes the daughter’s self-loathing.

Flanagan’s instinct for psychological complexity gives this relationship additional texture. He is interested in the histories, fears and destructive patterns that shape people, and he is rarely satisfied with reducing an antagonist to a collection of monstrous traits. That approach can be rewarding, particularly when it reveals the ways in which abuse and repression reproduce themselves across generations.

But understanding the origins of abuse is not the same as diminishing its reality. Margaret’s religious convictions are not simply an eccentric expression of anxiety. They constitute a system of domination through which Carrie is taught to regard her own body and desires as evidence of moral failure. The horror lies in the way Margaret’s need for control becomes inseparable from her understanding of love.

Sloyan brings an imposing intensity to the role, making Margaret a formidable presence within the domestic world of the series. The character’s significance extends beyond her treatment of Carrie, however. She represents a culture of shame in miniature, a figure who has internalised a destructive worldview so completely that she can no longer distinguish care from punishment.

The relationship is most disturbing when love, fear and control become indistinguishable. Margaret believes she is protecting her daughter, but the very methods through which she exercises that protection help create the catastrophe she fears. Her tragedy is not simply that she fails to understand Carrie. It is that her attempts to control her daughter make genuine understanding impossible.

The School as a Machine of Cruelty

Flanagan’s treatment of the school environment is another of the adaptation’s strengths. The students are not merely a collection of bullies waiting to torment Carrie; they inhabit a social ecosystem governed by status, performance and the need to establish one’s position within a group. Cruelty becomes a means of maintaining those hierarchies, while the public humiliation of an outsider reassures everyone else that their own position remains secure.

Alison Thornton’s Chris Hargensen occupies a particularly important place within this structure. Chris is shaped by status and resentment, her identity bound to the power she possesses within the school’s social hierarchy. The series attempts to explore the circumstances surrounding her behaviour without erasing the harm she causes. Siena Agudong’s Sue Snell and Joel Oulette’s Tommy Ross also help establish the social world into which Carrie is suddenly thrust, offering different perspectives on kindness, intervention and the possibility of acceptance.

The expanded cast gives Flanagan room to examine the ways in which ordinary social instincts become destructive when reinforced by a group. Some people actively inflict harm, others encourage it, and still others remain silent because intervention might threaten their own standing. The result is a community in which responsibility becomes conveniently diffuse. Everyone can identify someone more directly responsible, and almost everyone can find a reason why they should not be expected to act.

The online environment intensifies this problem. The person who shares a humiliating image may regard it as entertainment; the person who comments may claim merely to be participating in a conversation; the person who watches may insist that observation is not endorsement. The distinction between perpetrator and audience becomes increasingly unstable when attention itself rewards cruelty.

This is a sharp contemporary interpretation of King’s original social critique. Flanagan recognises that bullying is rarely sustained by a single individual. It depends upon the participation of those who benefit from it, those who tolerate it and those who convince themselves that its consequences are someone else’s responsibility.

At times, however, the series makes its commentary too explicit. Its social observations are most effective when they emerge through behaviour and consequence, allowing the audience to recognise the cruelty without being instructed how to interpret it. Horror loses some of its force when its moral implications are explained before its images have had time to settle.

King’s novel remains powerful partly because it trusts the reader to understand the social world that creates Carrie without requiring every character to articulate its meaning. The same principle applies here. The spectacle of humiliation should be enough to disturb us. Its significance does not always need to be underlined.

The Outsiders and the Shining

The most ambitious element of Flanagan’s adaptation is its expansion of Carrie’s supernatural world. By introducing other individuals with extraordinary abilities, the series connects Carrie to the wider mythology associated with King’s fiction, particularly the psychic phenomenon known as the Shine. The implication is that Carrie is not an isolated anomaly but part of a hidden world in which unusual abilities have long existed beyond public knowledge.

As world-building, the idea is intriguing. It gives Carrie’s powers a history and context beyond her immediate circumstances, while introducing questions about the people who might recognise, monitor or seek to influence those who possess such gifts. The mysterious outsiders create a new source of uncertainty, suggesting that Carrie’s abilities may attract attention from forces whose motivations extend well beyond the immediate conflict in Chamberlain.

For viewers familiar with King’s wider body of work, these connections offer an additional layer of interest. Flanagan has demonstrated a particular affection for the interrelated dimensions of King’s fictional universe, and the possibility of allowing seemingly separate supernatural stories to occupy a shared landscape is an understandable creative temptation. The outsiders provide the series with a larger horizon, opening possibilities that a more contained adaptation would necessarily leave unexplored.

Yet there is a distinction between expanding a fictional universe and expanding a tragedy.

As the series progresses, Carrie’s story becomes increasingly entangled with the interests of those who understand her abilities. The narrative shifts from the intimate relationship between Carrie and her immediate environment towards a broader supernatural framework in which she becomes a figure of interest to a hidden network of gifted individuals. Her powers are no longer simply the terrifying expression of a life shaped by repression and cruelty; they become evidence of a larger phenomenon, something to be investigated, managed or potentially recruited.

This shift is not inherently misguided. King’s fictional universe can accommodate inherited abilities, psychic connections and hidden organisations. The problem is what the series sacrifices to accommodate them. The more attention is devoted to the outsiders, the easier it becomes to imagine a future in which Carrie’s abilities might be explained, controlled or redirected. The supernatural mystery begins to promise a new adventure, while the personal tragedy that originally gave those abilities their meaning becomes less central.

The outsiders are intriguing precisely because they suggest that Carrie’s experience belongs to a much larger world. But the emotional power of Carrie has always depended upon the opposite proposition: that the entire catastrophe can be understood through the terrible intimacy of a young woman’s life. Margaret, the schoolchildren and the wider community do not simply provide the circumstances for a supernatural event. They create the emotional conditions through which that event becomes inevitable.

The expanded mythology offers a future for the franchise. It also threatens to distract from the devastating finality that gives Carrie’s story its meaning.

Eight Episodes and the Weight of Expansion

The eight-episode structure provides Flanagan with the opportunity to explore characters and relationships that a feature-length adaptation can only suggest. It allows the school to acquire a more complicated social texture, gives Carrie’s relationships room to develop and provides space for the supernatural elements to emerge gradually. Some of this expansion is productive, particularly when it deepens our understanding of the pressures surrounding Carrie.

Elsewhere, the narrative feels overextended. Supporting characters and additional mythology compete for attention, while the central trajectory becomes less immediate as the series broadens its scope. The question of how a vulnerable teenager might be driven towards catastrophe is repeatedly displaced by the demands of a larger narrative architecture.

Flanagan is clearly interested in the possibility that Carrie can sustain a mythology beyond the familiar tragedy. But an expanded world must earn its place within the story rather than simply provide a reason for the story to continue. The original narrative derives much of its force from its terrible inevitability. The domestic and social pressures accumulate until the prom becomes the point at which the unresolved tensions converge. As the narrative approaches that catastrophe, the audience should feel that the outcome has become both horrifying and unavoidable.

The series sometimes weakens that pressure by directing our attention elsewhere. The world grows larger, but Carrie herself risks becoming less central to it. What should be the culmination of her personal tragedy increasingly becomes the gateway to a wider supernatural conflict.

This is the underlying tension in Flanagan’s approach. His instinct for expansion allows him to explore the wider implications of King’s fictional world, but his desire to preserve Carrie’s future begins to alter the meaning of the narrative that brings her there. The problem is not simply that the series takes liberties with the source material. Adaptation requires such liberties. The problem is that the changes ultimately undermine the emotional logic of the story they are intended to expand.

The following section discusses major spoilers for the finale of Mike Flanagan’s Carrie.

Spoilers: The Tragedy That Never Arrives

The decisive departure comes at the end, when Flanagan refuses to allow Carrie’s story to conclude as the tragedy it has been building towards. In King’s novel, Carrie returns home after the destruction at the prom and confronts Margaret. Their final encounter culminates in Margaret’s death at Carrie’s own hands, before Carrie succumbs to her injuries. The conclusion offers no comforting escape from the accumulated consequences of the violence that has shaped her life. Carrie’s revenge cannot restore what has been taken from her, and her death denies the possibility that the catastrophe might become the beginning of a new life.

Flanagan changes the equation. Carrie survives the destruction and is taken away by Emaline, while Margaret also survives the collapse of the White household. Margaret is subsequently killed by Adelaide and the mysterious organisation surrounding her. The decisive act that ends the mother-daughter relationship is therefore removed from Carrie and transferred to an external force, while Carrie herself is allowed to escape the world that has tormented her.

I understand the narrative logic behind this decision. Flanagan is developing a larger supernatural mythology, and Carrie’s survival allows the series to move into that territory. The outsiders and their connection to the Shine become more than an intriguing subplot; they offer a possible future for the character and the fictional universe surrounding her. Carrie’s abilities become the beginning of a new journey rather than the force that ultimately consumes her.

There is also an evident desire to preserve Carrie as a person capable of moving beyond the circumstances that have defined her life. After the suffering she has endured, the possibility of escape can seem like an act of mercy. The series invites us to imagine that Carrie might finally discover a world in which she is understood rather than persecuted.

But this is where my admiration for Flanagan’s storytelling collides with my disappointment in his interpretation.

By allowing Carrie to survive, the series does more than change the ending. It changes the meaning of the story.

Carrie’s tragedy has never rested solely on the fact that she is bullied, abused or misunderstood. It lies in the terrible convergence of those experiences, the way they shape her emerging identity and the catastrophic point at which her suffering becomes inseparable from her capacity for destruction. Her death is not simply a punishment for her actions, nor is it an assertion that the world has defeated her. It is the final expression of a narrative in which the possibility of escape has been systematically destroyed.

The death of Margaret at Carrie’s own hands is equally important. Their relationship is the domestic heart of the nightmare, a bond in which love has been corrupted by fear, religious fanaticism and control. When Carrie kills her mother, the act becomes the ultimate rupture of that relationship. The daughter who has spent her life subjected to Margaret’s authority finally possesses the power to end it, but the liberation comes at an appalling cost. Carrie cannot simply step outside the system that has formed her. By the time she confronts Margaret, the violence that has shaped their relationship has become the language through which it is concluded.

Flanagan removes that finality. By transferring Margaret’s death to the outsiders, the series relocates the decisive act of destruction from the intimate relationship between mother and daughter to the machinery of its expanded mythology. Carrie no longer bears the same direct responsibility for the end of that relationship, while Emaline offers her a route out of the world that has defined her.

The effect is to fracture the narrative at precisely the moment when its accumulated tensions should converge.

This is not simply a question of fidelity to King’s plot. It concerns the relationship between cause and consequence that makes Carrie so disturbing. The series has spent eight episodes demonstrating how the people around Carrie contribute to her destruction, only to offer her an escape from the final consequences of that destruction. The narrative wants us to understand the horror of what has happened without requiring Carrie to remain inside it.

In doing so, the adaptation appears to preserve Carrie’s innocence at the expense of her agency. Her suffering is explained, her rage contextualised and her destructive potential increasingly mediated through the intervention of others. The final catastrophe becomes less a culmination of Carrie’s own tragic trajectory than a conflict in which she is caught between competing supernatural forces.

The irony is that Flanagan has already done the difficult work of making us understand her. Summer H. Howell gives Carrie a vulnerability and emotional sincerity that make her suffering immediate. The contemporary setting lends that suffering renewed relevance. The expanded cast and supernatural mythology provide intriguing possibilities. None of these elements requires Carrie to survive.

Indeed, her death might have made those elements more powerful. The wider world could remain, the outsiders could continue their work, and the existence of other gifted individuals could still be established. But Carrie herself would remain the centre of the tragedy, a young woman whose extraordinary abilities cannot save her from the consequences of the world that has formed her.

Instead, the series turns her survival into a promise. The nightmare becomes a beginning.

For some viewers, that may be an appealing act of reclamation. For me, it is the point at which the adaptation loses faith in its own tragedy. Carrie does not need to be condemned, and her suffering does not need to be treated as deserved. But neither does she need to be rescued from the ending that gives her story its devastating force.

Empathy should allow us to confront Carrie’s fate, not require the narrative to spare her from it.

The Flanagan Question

It is important to distinguish this criticism from a rejection of Flanagan’s wider approach to horror. I remain an admirer of his work, particularly his ability to combine emotionally intelligent characterisation with strong direction and a collaborative understanding of the medium. His best stories recognise that the supernatural is most compelling when it exposes the damage people inflict upon one another and the histories they carry into their relationships.

His Carrie is frequently successful because of that sensibility. It recognises the cruelty of online humiliation, the destructive power of religious repression and the ways in which a community can participate in violence while denying its own responsibility. It gives the familiar story a contemporary framework without losing sight of its central anxieties.

The difficulty is that empathy and tragedy are not opposing forces, and one does not require the elimination of the other. Understanding why someone becomes destructive does not mean that their actions cease to matter. Recognising the social conditions that produce violence does not absolve individuals of responsibility. Nor does a character’s suffering automatically entitle them to escape the consequences of their own story.

Flanagan’s instinct is to search for the humanity beneath monstrosity, and that instinct has produced some of modern horror’s most affecting work. But Carrie requires a particularly uncomfortable form of empathy. We must understand the girl without being protected from the monster; recognise the cruelty that creates her rage without losing sight of what that rage can become.

The story’s power lies in the absence of a single explanation that can contain it. Margaret’s abuse matters. The schoolchildren’s cruelty matters. The community’s indifference matters. Carrie’s own actions matter. The horror emerges from their convergence, not from the discovery of one definitive cause that allows every other factor to be arranged around it.

By offering Carrie a future, Flanagan introduces a possibility that is emotionally appealing but thematically disruptive. The series seems to suggest that if the circumstances surrounding Carrie can be understood, she might be removed from the tragic consequences those circumstances have produced. Yet the original story’s devastating force depends on the recognition that understanding arrives too late to undo the damage.

This is where a love of Flanagan’s work makes the criticism more meaningful, not less. The series demonstrates how much he understands about Carrie’s world, but its ending suggests a reluctance to accept what that understanding demands. He has created a compelling modern portrait of a girl whose identity is shaped by the facades, expectations and cruelties of others. He has shown us how those structures collapse, and how the people who helped build them attempt to escape responsibility.

What he ultimately seems unwilling to accept is that understanding Carrie does not require saving her.

The Prognosis: A Strong Reimagining, a Fractured Tragedy

Mike Flanagan’s Carrie is an ambitious and often intelligent reimagining of Stephen King’s debut novel. Its contemporary treatment of social media, public humiliation and the fragile facades through which we negotiate our identities gives the story renewed relevance. Summer H. Howell provides a compelling emotional centre, Samantha Sloyan makes Margaret a formidable presence, and the wider ensemble helps illuminate the social machinery that contributes to Carrie’s destruction.

The expanded supernatural mythology is intriguing, too. The outsiders and their connection to the Shine suggest a wider world of extraordinary abilities and hidden agendas, while the eight-episode structure gives Flanagan room to explore relationships and themes that a feature film could only imply. These are not insignificant achievements, and they demonstrate why he remains one of the most interesting storytellers working in horror.

My disappointment lies in the point where those ambitions begin to overwhelm the intimate tragedy at the centre of the material. By allowing Carrie to survive and transferring Margaret’s death to an external force, Flanagan changes the emotional contract of the story. The ending offers Carrie a future, but it weakens the terrible relationship between repression, revenge and consequence that has driven the narrative towards its conclusion.

I do not object to Flanagan reinterpreting King, nor do I believe that an adaptation must reproduce every event in its source material. The strongest adaptations discover something new within a familiar story. This series does precisely that in its examination of social media, public identity and the violence of collective judgement. But creative reinvention must still reckon with the meaning of the story being reinvented. Here, the determination to preserve Carrie’s innocence ultimately fractures the tragedy that should have brought her story to its most devastating conclusion.

The blood on the prom dress has never been the whole story. It is the visible consequence of years of shame, repression and cruelty, the moment when private suffering becomes public catastrophe. Flanagan understands the girl beneath the blood, and his series gives us compelling reasons to care about her. Yet the final act asks us to accept a future for Carrie at the expense of the very finality that makes her story so haunting.

I remain an admirer of Flanagan’s work, and this adaptation provides further evidence of his ability to reinterpret familiar material through a distinctly modern lens. But admiration does not require uncritical acceptance. Sometimes the most productive criticism comes from recognising the distance between what an artist does exceptionally well and the point at which a particular choice undermines those strengths.

The tragedy of Carrie is not simply that a monster must die. It is that a young woman is pushed towards becoming something monstrous, and that by the time the world recognises what it has done, the possibility of redemption has already been lost.

The girl deserves our sympathy. The monster deserves our fear. The tragedy requires us to hold both truths at once.

Flanagan has given us a compelling new Carrie, one that understands the world that creates her. But by refusing to let that tragedy finish, he leaves us with a less devastating conclusion.

The blood is familiar. The question is whether we still have the courage to look at the girl who spills it.

• Saul Muerte