Mike Flanagan, the modern horror great, has taken on yet another Stephen King adaptation, this time he turns the King classic into a series for Amazon. After watching the first episode I have thoughts.

This review might be a little biased. I love the book. I love the De Palma film. I have seen every adaptation and reimagining. I will try to separate what I know and love about the story from this series and try to accept this series on its own merits. Also, I have only watched the first episode so far, so I can’t speak to the entire series as a whole.

All that said, I think there’s a lot of good in this first episode and a some things I really didn’t like that derailed the episode for me.

This adaptation begins with the death of Mr. White Carrie’s father. On a construction site, a pile of cinder blocks seem to fall at random and crush him one day. No one knows Mr. White very well except that he was an ultra conservative doomsday prepper who kept to himself. Police and social services are surprised to find that he had a wife and daughter tucked away in his house that no one knew existed. They are Margaret, played by Samantha Sloyan, and Carrie, Played by Summer H. Howell. Margaret is smart, and fierce. She has a sharp temper and is ver protective of Carrie. Carrie is a sweet, caring young girl who is very aware of the feelings of others inspire of having never been around people other than her parents.

Social services enter the picture and force Margaret to go to work and Carrie to go to school. Carrie is thrown into the deep end of modern public schooling. No one has ever shown her how computers work, the fact that schools have metal detectors at the doors, and how active shooter drives work. She walks into the building optimistic and hopeful and leaves overwhelmed and defeated.

I loved Sloyan as Margaret and Howell as Carrie. Margaret is fierce and powerful. She convey’s the short fuse and intelligence of a manipulative abuser. Howell as Carrie is so sweet and gentle and eager to please. The level of naïveté that she has to play in this episode is a difficult thing to pull off, but she nails it. If I keep watching it will be for her.

The tone of Mike Flanagan’s work is so key to how he builds horror, and the creeping sense that something is about to go wrong and explode at any second kept me rapt. I was hooked trying to figure out what was going to happen to cause something or someone to snap. He is a strong storyteller who knows how to build tension and suspense through character.

What didn’t work for me? The story itself. Significant changes have been made to the story that pulled me right out of it. For one, the fact that Carrie has been forced to live at home with her mother makes her naiveté believable, but it also means that Carrie has had nothing but misery her whole life. Knowing where the story is about to go just makes me worried that this is going to be a miserable story about a sad girl whose life has always been sad until it somehow got worse. I don’t need misery porn in my life.

What’s also strange is that Carrie’s mother actually seems to have a tenderness and affection for Carrie in this story. There are a couple of moments where Margaret seems to love and care for her daughter in ways that I wasn’t expecting. This is a major change from the book in which Margaret had a very complicated relationship with her daughter both hating her and trying to do her duty by her. This series seems to take a softer and more positive approach to the character. Not wholly positive, but more positive than I’ve ever seen before. It threw me off balance and pulled me out of the story. Maybe the nuanced portrayal will pay off down the road, but that remains to be seen.

Third, there is an introduction of outside characters in the moments of this episode. Carrie’s telekinetic powers seem to call out to a young woman far, far away. She runs through a massive home to find an authority figure sitting behind a desk. She informs this mysterious person about Carrie’s powers. When this happened, I out loud said, “no! screw this!” Why bring the X-Men into this? This is a small self contained story. This doesn’t need superpowers teenagers from across the country to enter the narrative and complicate matters. This is a story about one character’s bullying and reaction to it. It’s not a superhero show. What worries me more is that the final moments of this episode imply that these outsiders are really the ones responsible for the destruction at prom, not Carrie herself. One of the most fascinating aspects of this story has always been the moral gray area that is Carrie’s revenge. Is she absolved because of her treatment, or is she culpable for her all the death and destruction that is wrought? It’s always been a key part of this story, and one that I have found most compelling. This episode is implying that the destruction is not Carrie’s fault but the fault of these outsiders. The inclusion of these additional characters just took me completely out of the show and made me not want to watch more.

The other thing that took me out of the show was Amazon itself. I have a prime subscription, but in order to watch without ads, I need to pay extra. Will the ads come at clean scene breaks? No. Will they jump in and disrupt important moments in the story? Yes. Will the ads be inane and terrible and last a long time? Yes. Does this story need to be an eight part miniseries in which the X-Men of telekinesis show up to absolve Carrie of her responsibility for her revenge? NO!

I have great affection and respect for Mike Flanagan and his skills as a filmmaker and craft as a story teller, but this one completely hit me the wrong way. Do I want to pay extra for an ad free version of a story that seems to be heading the exact wrong direction? Do I suffer through ads and hope that the story gets better?

I think I’ll skip the rest of the season and go watch the De Palma film again.

Not my cup of tea. C