Streamin’ King is grave-digging through the myriad Stephen King adaptations available on streaming. This time we’re watching Carrie, the 2013 remake based on the 1974 debut novel.
THE GIST:
Hollywood’s third swing at King’s 1974 debut novel, following Brian De Palma’s 1976 classic and a 2002 TV movie written by Hannibal creator Bryan Fuller. Follows the telekinetic awakening of high school outcast Carrietta White, building to a dance, a tragedy, and a stratospherically high body count.
PEDIGREE:
Directed by Kimberly Peirce (Boys Don’t Cry) with screenplay credits going to the writer of De Palma’s version, Lawrence D. Cohen, and Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, creator/showrunner of Riverdale and Pretty Little Liars. Stars 15-year-old Chloë Grace Moretz the same year Kick-Ass 2 hit. Features Oscar-winner/five-time nominee Julianne Moore as Margaret White, plus Judy Greer and Ansel Elgort. Cinematography by Rian Johnson’s go-to DP Steve Yedlin, score by two-time Oscar nominee Marco Beltrami (The Hurt Locker, five Scream movies).
WORTH WATCHING FOR CONSTANT READERS?
If this column was written before Mike Flanagan’s visionary new Carrie series, the answer would’ve been “please, no — or approach with great caution.” That’s now evolved to “hell no — unless you, like me, just have to see what they’ve done with every take on Carrie.” This is the least important of the four iterations, inferior even to the 2002 TV movie. Both are dispiriting, but I’ve got more respect for the one that translated Carrie to network television a substantial 36 years after the film. Peirce & Co. only let the property breathe for a decade before resurrecting it, and less creatively than in ’02. There’s very little reinvention here, even if we do open on Margaret giving birth and being telekinetically thwarted from stabbing her newborn.
Far too many lines stiltedly come straight from the 1976 script. An embarrassing amount of changes are just cutesy “we changed this to that” winks: Chris Hargensen is brunette, Sue Snell is blonde; the principal mistakes Carrie’s name as Casey instead of Cassie; rather than Carrie mentally flinging an ashtray in his office, she breaks a water cooler. While the Prime Video show deftly makes cyberbullying a focal point, this one’s got a single phone filming the locker room incident. It goes on YouTube and puzzlingly gets projected on screens at prom. I can at least say Margaret’s self-harming tendencies have never been so brutally rendered. But I can also say that, banished to the prayer closet, Carrie actually yells, “God, you suck!”
In Stephen King’s 1983 Playboy interview, he said his debut novel was “often clumsy and artless.” He could’ve been talking about Carrie 2013, which never manages to justify its existence.
WORTH WATCHING FOR KING NEWBIES/AGNOSTICS?
It’s a hard no. It all looks so sleek and tidy, resulting in something hollow and deeply lifeless. Moore, Moretz, and Greer are doing the best they can with what they’re given. The Whites and especially Ansel Elgort’s Tommy have strange, inconsistent accents and speech affectations. Moore is an interesting midpoint between Piper Laurie and 2026’s Samantha Sloyan. (Oscar nominee Patricia Clarkson sleepwalked through the role in ’02.)
The all-important bloodbucket-dump does not look good — not the blood itself, not the way it hits Carrie, especially not the Halloween-costume way it looks after — and yet they comically run it back to show it three times. The entire prom vengeance sequence is dreadful. Even its viciously violent touches don’t do anything to make it worthwhile — close-ups on stampede deaths, faces crushed through glass in slo-mo. Carrie uses her powers like a supervillain, whipping kids with electric cables, throwing giant flaming objects, gesticulating all over the place like she’s auditioning to play Scarlet Witch. She flies; she gets a Cool Guys Don’t Look at Explosions moment. The demolishment of the Whites’ house is good. Vampire Weekend’s “Diane Young” is a wild needle drop, showing a bunch of doomed kids while Ezra Koenig sounds like he’s singing about dyin’ young. And Chloë Grace Moretz’s commitment to unnecessary remakes early in her career was interesting, at least: 2005’s The Amityville Horror, 2010’s Let Me In, 2018’s Suspiria, 2019’s animated Addams Family. She really went for it.
7 STEPHEN KING TIES, REFERENCES, AND MISCELLANY
1. Does this version of Carrie do anything the best? I did a little award show bit for GQ, giving out hardware to all four renditions. Carrie 2013 won Fanciest Prom, Grossest Billy Nolan, Best Volleyball Scene, Hardest Cold-Blooded Prom Murder (the bleachers), and the dubious Goofiest Bucket-Dump trophy. Most Decorated Carrie Actor was a toss-up between Sissy Spacek (six Oscar nominations, one win; seven Golden Globe noms, three wins) and Julianne Moore (five Oscar noms, one win; 11 Globe nods, three wins).
2. Repeat visitors to the Kingverse: Moore starred in 2021’s King-penned Lisey’s Story. Lawrence D. Cohen has eight feature and TV screenwriting credits, and five of them are King things: Carrie (’76 and ’13), 1990’s It miniseries, ’93’s The Tommyknockers miniseries, and the “End of the Whole Mess” segment on 2006’s Nightmares & Dreamscapes anthology show. He’s also credited with writing the book for the Carrie musical. Screenwriter Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa scripted Marvel’s adaptation of The Stand, which ran for 31 issues from 2008-12 and faithfully recreated the pandemicopalypse classic.
3. The tale of Carrie — Tabitha King fishing the first pages out of Stephen’s trash — is known far and wide. I love this particular telling of the results of its publication, from the aforementioned ’83 Playboy interview:
“Even though there’s a lot I still like and stand behind in the book, I’m the first to admit that it is often clumsy and artless. But both creatively and financially, Carrie was a kind of escape hatch for Tabby and me, and we were able to flee through it into a totally different existence. Hell, our lives changed so quickly that for more than a year afterward, we walked around with big, sappy grins on our faces, hardly daring to believe we were out of that trap for good. It was a great feeling of liberation, because at last I was free to quit teaching and fulfill what I believe is my only function in life: to write books. Good, bad or indifferent books, that’s for others to decide; for me, it’s enough just to write. I’d been writing since I was 12, seriously if pretty badly at first, and I sold Carrie when I was 26, so I’d had a relatively long apprenticeship. But that first hardcover sale sure tasted sweet!”
4. Margaret’s self-harm is book canon, even if this film really amped it up. At one point someone in the novel recalls how she started to “hurt herself, scourge herself. She was clawing at her neck and cheeks, making red marks and scratches. She tore her dress.”
5. Every Carrie has her taking a bath after prom, even here in 2013, when a showerhead is right there. There’s a simple reason for that, per King’s text: “Momma said showers were sinful.”
6. De Palma’s Carrie made $33.8 million in the U.S. (only $63,000 abroad); this one earned a frighteningly similar $35.3 million domestically, but climbed to $84.8M worldwide.
7. An alternate ending has Sue delivering Tommy’s baby, except…it’s Carrie’s gory hand reaching up, waking Sue from a nightmare. A pretty craven recreation of the hall-of-fame jumpscare kicker in De Palma’s film.
CRITICAL CONSENSUS:
Matt Zoller Seitz was one of several surprisingly complimentary reviewers, writing for RogerEbert.com that “Peirce’s Carrie does something De Palma’s doesn’t do nearly so well: it describes Carrie’s headspace, so that her telekinesis becomes expressionistic.” His final verdict: “The first Carrie was horror. This is tragedy.” Richard Brody opined in the New Yorker that “Peirce intelligently and gleefully makes much more of telekinesis than De Palma did.” He found that Carrietta becomes “more than a symbol, more than a suffering cipher, and her identity seems denser, her intelligence surer, her sensibility more nuanced than in the earlier film.”
In Time Out, Cath Clarke opined that Moretz “is unnervingly talented, but Carrie is not a role she was born to play. She hasn’t a victim’s bone in her body and fluffs the early scenes when the mean girls pick on her.” Wesley Morris wrote for Grantland that Carrie’s revenge is “the one sequence of the movie that’s worthy of De Palma and King,” concluding, “Peirce wants to make a hit, and, even with source material this strange, it feels as though she has. But if so, that’s all she has made.” In the New York Times, Manohla Dargis said, “Ms. Peirce plays up the story’s religious themes and Carrie’s burgeoning power as she discovers her telekinetic gifts, even as the dread of the female body that deepens Mr. De Palma’s version somehow goes missing.” In one of many vociferous pans, David Edelstein’s Vulture review asserted that “no one who loves De Palma’s landmark will be able to endure it.”
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL CONTEXT FOR CARRIE (1974):
Quite simply, the book that gave us Stephen King. 2024 saw lots of celebratory content surrounding its 50th anniversary, including a new edition with an introduction from Margaret Atwood. SK followed it up with 1975’s ’Salem’s Lot and 1977’s The Shining.
Zach Dionne is a Nashville-based writer who makes Stephen King things on Patreon.