7.9/10
85%
82%
72%
3.7/5
83%
Carietta “Carrie” White has led an insulated life. She’s been kept away from everyone and the only people who know she exists are her neighbours and her parents. She’s never been to school, rarely leaves the house and doesn’t even have a birth certificate.
Her parents kept her away from the “real world” as they were both fearful of the path that civilisation will lead her down. They’re fearful that the government will take away their right to pray, their bibles and then come for their guns. If there was a poster of the ideal prepper couple it would feature Ralph and Margaret White.
This idyllic life is shattered when one day Ralph is killed due to an accident at his construction job and when the police come to investigate no one knows anything about him — they don’t know if he has a family and only know where he lives as a co-worker dropped him off a couple of times when Ralph’s truck was broken down.
The police find the person in charge of Ralph’s rented property who says it was only Ralph living there so the authorities are obviously shocked to find Ralph’s wife and daughter hiding in a closet which is adorned with religious symbols.
After doing some investigating, they agree that Margaret can keep custody of Carrie despite the irregularities surrounding her upbringing. There are conditions though: Margaret must get a job and Carrie must be allowed to go to a mainstream school.
To say that Carrie is a fish-out-of-water when she first arrives at high school is an understatement. She doesn’t know what the metal detectors are or how they work, she has no idea of what a school schedule is, let alone what each of the classes are and she’s never even used a computer before.
Carrie’s naturally open and honest and is trying to be friends with everyone but most of the other kids, being in that “evil” teenager phase, think she’s odd and mock her which she doesn’t pick up on.
To further show how naïve and coddled Carrie is, they have a school shooter drill which completely freaks Carrie out. She’s not been allowed access to news and doesn’t understand the violence that happens in modern day schools.
As the make-believe shooter roams the halls Carrie gets more and more hysterical. The other students try to explain to Carrie that it’s a drill and she’s not in danger but she has no frame of reference as to what they mean. When the “shooter” bursts through the door Carrie loses it completely throwing herself to the floor, crushing Sue in the process.
Things are made even worse for Carrie thanks to her homemade clothes, although Sue tries to make her feel more welcome by complimenting them this just makes Sue’s best friend Chris even more anti-Carrie.
The episode culminates in a volleyball match were Chris keeps aiming the ball at Carrie despite them being on the same team. Then in the changing rooms, a couple of the girls notice blood on the bench where Carrie has been sitting. Not understanding what is happening, Carrie starts to freak out even more thinking she is dying, no one has explained to her what a period is and how it’s a normal part of biology.
Chris take Carrie to the shower under the auspices of helping her clean the blood from her white trousers but when Carrie slips and falls Chris starts laughing. She then goes to her locker to find a tampon and encourages others to do so and they all end up throwing sanitary products at her while Sue looks on silently shocked but not stopping the bullying. She is complicit in her silence.
Worse still, Chris starts to film the whole ordeal leading the girls in chants of “Plug it up! Plug it up!”
If Carrie thought she could just walk into school and start a new chapter of her life without any trials or tribulations she was very mistaken.
But after her mother speaks to the school principle over the school shooting drill and how inappropriate she feels it is, Carrie has no one to talk to about how she’s being treated.
And every time something bad happens to Carrie there seem to be physical affects in the real world. A bad dream about her father cracks a window, the shooting drill causes a TV to fall off the wall and hits the “assailant’s” foot causing the drill to be cancelled, and the “Plug it up” bullying makes the lights flicker and the air crackle with electricity.
But if Carrie thought a few school bullies were all she had to worry about she’s about to have a rude awakening. It appears that there are some people attuned to the strange happenings when Carrie gets emotionally unbalanced. These people seem to know who Carrie is and her approximate location.
We now need to know if these people going to help Carrie or whether they’re a part of the deep state government Carrie’s parents are so afraid of.
Is Carrie even aware of what she’s doing when she gets emotional and will she be able to recover from the “Plug it up!” incident?
Necessary Remake Or Needless Cash Grab?
I will admit that when I heard they were remaking Carrie yet again I did have a bit of an eyeroll moment.
The Brian De Palma 1976 adaptation of the Stephen King book is a classic piece of film making containing some of the most iconic imagery ever put on celluloid. Sissy Spacek was Carrie and Piper Laurie was Margaret.
We then had the 2013 remake with Chloë Grace Moretz as Carrie and as much as it was a decent film, it brought nothing different to the story and didn’t do much to set it apart from the 1976 film making it rather unnecessary in my eyes. Saying that, I am glad it brought more people to the film who then might check out the original and other works by Stephen King.
There’s also a made-for-TV movie that was released in 2002 which I am sure I have seen but I can’t for the life of me remember anything about it (drop a comment below if you want me to review that!)
So coming to the 2026 version I was obviously sceptical about the need for a new iteration of the story, let alone one spread across multiple episodes.
But I tell you what, after I finished the first episode I was sold! I wanted to watch them all — and Amazon has dropped all the episodes at once but as we’ve now got a hole in our weekly schedule thanks to both Lanterns and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds having finished I need something to savour weekly.
So while others may have covered the entire series in one fell swoop, I’m going to review these one episode at a time so we can savour the slow burn towards the prom (pun intended).
Who Is The Real Villain Of This Story?
Carrie is a sad figure and you automatically feel sorry for her. Her mother feels like she was protecting Carrie from the world and keeping her safe from the evil heathens roaming the streets but at some point Carrie would have had to face reality.
Margaret does seem a little less full of religious fervour than the book and Piper Laurie versions of Margaret and I don’t know if that is to tone her down to make her more palatable to a modern audience or if she’s been retooled to match more of the fundamentalist preppers of the current era.
There are indications that Margaret was following her husband’s orders, that he was the driver behind the religious fervour and insulation apart from going to work to earn money. But Margaret still went along with it and seems to be the main force behind putting Carrie in the prayer closet which she didn’t have to do when her husband wasn’t around.
So is the mother the villain in this tale, or is she just as manipulated as Carrie making Margaret another figure that we should feel sorry for?
And then we come to the school kids. We have all (I would assume) been to school and know just how cruel our peers could be at our perceived differences and idiosyncrasies but the way they don’t even try to accommodate Carrie despite her obvious fish-out-of-water status is baffling to me.
She is no threat to Chris and Sue — think how Cady was treated in Mean Girls, she was immediately taken under the wing of two different groups. If anything Sue and Chris would gain even more cachet and it would be great to mention to the Colleges they’re so desperate to get in to.
Sue started off as being nice but fell in to line with her bestie Chris because she didn’t want to rock the boat. Christie is having family issues and it’s always easier to punch down rather than to realise you’re just the same as everyone else even if you are the popular girl.
We all (probably) know how this story ends but it’s interesting to see how modern technology is impacting the bullying Carrie is facing.
In 1976 there was no social media and so the “Plug it up” trauma would soon be replaced by the next scandal, but in 2026 the internet is forever and someone who is just learning to use a computer and doesn’t have a smart phone will have no clue on how to navigate this, let alone how long this will follow her around for.
Everyone is the villain here, including Carrie but the one unknown are this shadowy group that seem to be tracking the psychokinetic events surrounding her.
It will be interesting to see how the dynamics start to shift as the story progresses, especially as we’re already being given flashforwards to the carnage to come.
What do you think? Do you think we needed yet another version of Carrie? Are you impressed with how they’ve brought it up to the modern age or do you think it will date it when the 1976 version seems to be timeless? And who is your biggest villain so far? Drop me a comment with your answers below!
