Next weekend at an overly priced neighborhood restaurant in Bayside, Queens a few dozen folks from my high school will reconvene for a milestone reunion. It was supposed to be a mashup of my graduating class and the one preceding it, but as it turned out it became heavily skewed toward the latter and the ones intending to attend weren’t even ones we knew all that well. There were nearly 1000 kids in each grade and no football team to unify us. The most competitive event we got to experience was a Glee-like contest called SING that pitted the different classes against each other for bragging rights and the chance to do battle with neighboring schools. (They actually had football teams so it wasn’t as big a deal to them). The consensus among my classmates was we had better things to do than drop a couple of hundred bucks on mediocre paella to compare pictures of our grandkids with people we once saw as our enemies.
But the planning did get me thinking about those days and one vivid memory I have was the hubbub surrounding the theatrical release of CARRIE. Pretty much everyone had an entry point to justify seeing it. A few horror movie geeks were aware of a rising director named Brian DePalma for whom this would be the first of many seminal works in the space at the outset of an incredibly prolific career. Bookworms had devoured the Stephen King novel for a couple of summers–when I found out he was a huge Red Sox fan during their run for the American League pennant I caved in and bought the paperback version. When I heard that Vinnie Barbarino–John Travolta to those who never experienced WELCOME BACK, KOTTER–was gonna be in it that’s what raised my sense of urgency. And besides, we all heard it was scary as sh-t and that it would be a great place to take a date you might be hoping to get a little action from. Fortunately, I actually had met someone the summer before who actually thought I was cute. I was over the moon when she accepted my invitation to see CARRIE.
As it turned out, while neither one of us were hard-core horror fan I really resonated with the storyline of a troubled, taunted teen with a dysfunctional family who ultimately gets revenge on the source of her traumas by utilizing telekinetic powers she discovers she has. I actually got engrossed in the film enough to not even notice my date rubbing my shoulders during one of the few quieter moments. If a movie could distract that iteration of me to that degree, you’d better believe I thought it was worth revisiting all these years later.
As is so often the case in this generation–particularly when your studio now belongs to a technology company–the theatrical movie experience has been bypassed for the primary goal of online engagement. This version of CARRIE has been fleshed out to an eight episode season, opportunistically released in one binge-intended swoop on Prime Video earlier this week to take advantage of the Halloween season. As such, showrunner Mike Flanagan is aiming for a much more character-driven and detailed back story than DePalma had sought–using much more of the King source material to draw from. By and large, it works. THE GUARDIAN’s Lucy Mangan nailed many of the points that clicked with me:
The new Carrie starts by paying due homage. It opens with the high school gym on fire and frantic 911 calls playing over scenes of the inferno, as it consumes the rest of the school then spreads through the town… We then spool backward and get our introduction to Carrie (Summer H Howell) herself. She is found hiding in the “prayer closet” with her mother Margaret (Samantha Sloyan) as the police enter their home. Carrie’s father has been killed at work. None of his co-workers were aware he had a family. Carrie has been home-schooled and never been allowed to venture past the garden walls but she is not the terrified, damaged figure we expect. She is – heartbreakingly, given what is to come – open, curious and keen to experience whatever this new paterfamilias-free life, in which she must go to school and Margaret to work, has to offer. Howell does a wonderful job of playing an essentially good and optimistic character that could easily have become more Anne-of-Green-Gables-with-PMT than a potential hell-raiser driven beyond endurance.
Nor is Margaret the religious zealot of the film or its source material. Conservative Christianity is definitely her thing, and she has evidently been influenced by her beloved husband’s controlling character and conspiracist bent, but in Flanagan’s version (and the mesmerising Sloyan brings out every note), this is mixed with real and profound love and fear for her daughter’s safety. She is forced out into the world at the same time as Carrie, and the effects it has on her are as carefully and almost tenderly explored by the series as her daughter’s are. It makes the endeavour noticeably richer and more compelling.
Almost everything and everyone is there for a reason, and if the whole plays more like a teen drama with extra bite than a straight up, blood-soaked horror event that is no matter when the former is clearly what it was designed to be…(T)he bullying is the thing. The supernatural powers it unleashes are not quite an afterthought, but they do almost take second place – especially in the early episodes – to the horrors unleashed by Chris and her gang on the new girl. The famous period-in-the-shower scene is of course filmed on mobiles and ends up online via a malevolent Gossip Girl-style account, and countless other cruelties are likewise compounded.
The real drama may ultimately be played out in the boardroom and data center of Culver Studios. The CARRIE series was part of the decision to strip-mine as much of the MGM IP portfolio as possible when Amazon absorbed it four years ago. They knew how well which titles had performed over multiple decades and generations across cable, pay cable and streaming and resolved to use that sustaining awareness to increase the chances that the older ones who are more averse to subscribing and binging might just find their way into their walled garden for a spell. The first example of that to be dropped was this past summer’s attempt to tap into the LEGALLY BLONDE-verse with the prequel series ELLE. We weren’t all that sold on it then, but it apparently resonated with enough of the free world in general to warrant a renewal.
But that management team has since left the building and the team under Peter Freidlander is committed to superservicing the female “YA” demo they believe is a white area in the streaming landscape more than they are committed to slavishly priortizing what they already own. They tasted some of that success this past spring with unexpectedly strong results from OFF CAMPUS, which migrated a substantial amount of attention and demographically desirable viewer from HBO MAX’s zeitgeisty hockey-themed soap HEATED RIVALRIES. ELLE was apparently able to today’s females 15-24 as much as Reese Witherspoon’s version did to their moms. Can CARRIE do the same thing having their grandparents as the baseline?
Overall reviews to date are mixed: the Rotten Tomatoes scores so far are good but not great both with critics (86 Tomatometer) and vox populi (84 Popcornmeter), and for every review along the lines of Mangan’s there are several out there from mass-appeal sites that are nowhere near as positive. Collider calls it “highly addictive” but “imperfect,” noting it’s a “remix” rather than a faithful retelling. IndieWire and Tell Tale TV argue the show is “too gentle” and “more teen drama than horror,” with Carrie’s powers “leaking out in drips and drabs” rather than delivering the original’s shocks.
The real crucible will be when the data from this weekend is added to the typical first-night spikes seen from jazzed first adopters. And because of Friedlander’s demographic pivot more than simply raw numbers will be the barometer for any renewal–especially more than one that could be a pre-determined rubber stamp for production efficiency. It becomes a more complicated question to ask when one has to determine if those favorable Popcornmeter votes and favorable social media posts are really coming from those that see some of themselves in Carrie like I once did. Especially when you can’t really ask them if they recall if their date was coming on to them or not.
Until next time…