The new Carrie mini-series arrived on the 50th anniversary of Brian De Palma’s original Sissy Spacek/Amy Irving/William Katt movie released in 1976. But it’s also just 13 years after the earlier remake that featured a 16-year-old Chloe Grace Moretz, Julianne Moore, Ansel Elgort (his first film), and Judy Greer (released in October before Halloween). Spooky!
It’s arriving in a season with a lot of appropriate fare, like CBS’s vampire romcom Eternally Yours, or the Australian first season of the still-running American take on the British original of another romcom, Ghosts, and Carrie-Ann Moss in AMC+’s new Baba Yaga. But in the new Carrie, the demonic forces invading our lives are not witches, vampires, or ghosts. The new Evil is the smart phone.
And Jonathan Haidt gets no screen credit.
There’s a heavy element of Mean Girls in this Carrie, along with precognitions of everything from Lindsay Clancy killing her kids to French high school students rioting. The bible-thumping of Carrie White’s mom in the original (played by the late Piper Laurie in 1976 and Julianne Moore in 2013) has been replaced with MAHA and MAGA “conspiracy theories” about Big Pharma, teacher’s unions, trans ideology and the Deep State. Mom still wants to homeschool Carrie and is only forced to send her to government schools by CPS—but now Mom’s based besides being an ultraconservative evangelical. The Mean Girl’s “Burn Book,” a cut-and-paste scrap book, has been replaced with a website, “Carrie Red,” to which anyone can contribute viciously captioned photos or videos, though Carrie antagonist and wannabee Prom Queen Chris Hargensen starts it off with the video of an un-sex educated Carrie screaming as she begins bleeding in the girl’s locker room shower when she gets her first period.
Besides Mean Girls, the new Carrie also has a hint of Buffy. Carrie’s the innocent Red Riding Hood going to school, and she’s surrounded by monsters, the other students. But they don’t realize she has super powers and can defend herself.
This new Carrie has super powers beyond the telekinesis of her predecessors. She can also see ghosts. In the first few episodes she sees the shade of her recently-deceased father, a construction worker killed by lax safety procedures at his job on a site owned by the father of Carrie nemesis Chris Hargensen. Then she meets a much more talkative ghost, Emmaline, in the library, a peroxided dykey girl not much older than her, who seems to know about Carrie’s psychic gifts and takes her out to junkyards to train her in their use, exploding glass bottles for target practice and levitating and twisting and imploding steel rods and old cars and appliances.
Other new characters appear to fill out this Amazon mini-series’ eight hours, and they manage to do so in an interesting way. Battlestar Galactica’s Katee Sackhoff appears, sans make-up, unless she’s wearing something to make her look older than she is in real life. She’s a witch-hunter and Maggie White (Momma) has found her on the internet. She had a psychic daughter too, a six-year-old who could astrally project. And of course she murdered her daughter… because the bible says not to suffer a witch to live, or to protect the human race. Now she coaches other moms to do the same, and tracks down mutant girls herself. She tells Momma White, over coffee at a diner, that one must nip these girls in the bud, because eventually they find each other and form covens that help each other, and then you can’t get the job done.
In this version of Carrie the slaughter on prom night isn’t the ultimate scene. It’s in episode seven of eight, an hour remaining. Carrie doesn’t just entrap, incinerate, and electrocute most of the senior class and faculty. She takes out several city blocks. But prom night also has several new characters. Sackhoff’s pistol-packing witch-hunter is there to shoot Carrie. And several goth-looking gals turn out to be part of one of the aforementioned covens there to recruit Carrie, even though she’s only a rising junior. Carrie’s such a powerful telekinetic Sackhoff is tossed onto a fiery stage before she shoots Carrie, and the other psychic gals have to flee for their lives.
As Carrie walks home, her crown and gown drenched in blood, she stops in front of the town cinema and looks around at the destruction she has caused. The marquee announces a Brian De Palma retrospective. When Carrie gets home, covered in the pig’s blood the Hargensen girl and her drug-dealer boyfriend have doused her in, Momma White bathes her, prays with her, and then tries to stab her, but doesn’t finish the job. Carrie stabs Momma and then collapses the house on them both, and lies there with her father’s wraith waiting for death. But Emmaline appears. And now she’s solid, and rescues Carrie. Emmaline is another Astral Projector.
A film crew—police? media?—interview survivors in the final episode, the good girl who’d always tried to help Carrie, Carrie’s mom, who managed to live and a few others. The interrogator for this documentary asks people what they remember. And then wipes their memories. Or worse. She’s part of a coven and they don’t want us muggles to know there are powered people out there.
In the final scene Carrie awakes in a car. Emmaline’s driving and doesn’t want to tell Carrie where they are or where they’re going, other than it’s to “safety,” because there could be people out there tracking Carrie by her thoughts.
Maybe there is more than one coven, and they don’t all get along?
Maybe this means there could be a sequel?