Remakes usually feel lazy and unoriginal. Looking at you, live-action Disney: zero new ideas, pure copy-and-paste jobs just to keep copyright active.
So I walked into Mike Flanagan’s Carrie on Prime Video with heavy skepticism, but I ended up loving it.
Turns out, Carrie is actually a story tailor-made for the social media age. The entire dynamic of high school bullying and psychological decay hits way differently when applied to teenagers obsessed with clout, likes, and comment sections. It makes a modern retelling feel totally justified instead of forced.
A few quick takeaways on why it works:
The Tone: Flanagan avoids the gratuitous, exploitative route. The opening locker room scene in De Palma's 1976 movie always felt unnecessary, but this series strips away the gratuitous sex and violence to double down on raw, psychological terror. It’s genuinely unsettling.
The Cast: Casting relatively unknown, young actors was a brilliant call. The lead actress who plays Carrie is phenomenal—she sells the tragedy and the danger perfectly.
Expanding the Lore: They added new narrative elements that weren’t in the original book/movie, which gave the world a lot more depth and left a super clear path for a Season 2 if Amazon decides to renew it.
It dropped at the absolute perfect time of year for spooky season viewing. Atmospheric, tense, and incredibly well-crafted.
4.5 / 5 stars from me.
Did anyone else check this out yet? What did you think of the new additions to the story?