After a long wait, Mike Flanagan’s adaptation of Carrie has arrived on Prime Video, and boy, does it open up with a momentous episode.
Carrie begins with a 911 call detailing the destruction of prom night, the main event we know from Stephen King's classic horror novel. It’s a slow zoom-in, showing the destruction of the school and the town. Then we cut to several students, including Sue Snell (Siena Agudong), being asked about Carrie (Summer H. Howell), and she admits she was her friend.
It’s also mentioned that there are 200 deaths that night. Yeouch. We go back in time now, leaving the fated prom night for another time.
We cut to the White home, where a man leaves for work and is then killed in an accident when concrete blocks fall on his head at a construction site. When the realtor and police come to check on his home to see if there’s next of kin, they find Carrie and her mother, Margaret (Samantha Sloyan).
Everyone then discovers that Carrie’s father, Ralph, has kept her a secret and sheltered from the rest of the world.
Carrie’s first day of school
Because Ralph’s passing is murky and kept secret, Carrie must go to school for a bit, and her mother must work, pushing them further into society. On Carrie’s first day, we see her secretly get books from an unknown person, who leaves them in her birdhouse because her mother forbids her from reading anything other than the Bible.
We also meet Sue’s family—where her mother tells her to be nice to Carrie—and Chris (Alison Thornton), whose family is going through a tough time. Her mother and father are separated, and she is staying with her father. She and Sue are friends and drive to school together, where they first interact with Carrie.
After Margaret warns Carrie that not everyone at the school is “awake” like them, Carrie has her first run-in with modern technology and social cues when her crucifix sets off a metal detector. The police officer asks her to show her what’s on her chest, and Carrie, misunderstanding, nearly takes off her whole shirt.
Chris and Sue watch this happen, and Chris automatically makes fun of Carrie, but the cop steps in and things blow over. Carrie finds out she’s in the same homeroom as Sue and Chris and discovers the grades are mixed for homeroom and study hall. Aside from a few awkward moments, the day relatively goes okay. That is, until study hall.
The gun drill
In study hall, once again after a bit of an awkward moment between Carrie and Sue’s friends (because she doesn’t really get social cues at all), a lockdown drill happens that simulates a school shooting, something that we most certainly did not get in the Carrie novel or the 1976 movie.
Carrie, not knowing what’s happening, thinks it's real and starts to freak out, even though Sue and her boyfriend, Tommy (Joel Oulette), tell her it's a drill and everything is okay. But because of her panic, the simulated shooter breaks into their room and aims a gun at them. It’s not loaded, but it still scares Carrie.
She ducks to cover Sue, thinking that it could be real, and her screams of terror cause the lights to flicker and the TV to suddenly fall onto the man’s foot. It’s the first instance we really see her powers and how they’re manifesting.
The principal (Matthew Lillard) is called in afterward, and he talks to Carrie about why they conduct the drills. She immediately feels embarrassed and says it won’t happen again. When she leaves and quotes a line from Anne of Green Gables, the principal recognizes it, and Carrie, for once, feels like someone understands the references she's been making all day.
Who is the neighbor next door?
After that, we cut back to the documentary, where we follow the path of destruction from the school gymnasium through the town and right up to Carrie’s house. There, we meet Stella (Naika Toussaint), her next-door neighbor.
Young Stella met Carrie when she was a child, when Carrie looked over and mistakenly thought the book Stella was reading was a form of the Bible. In the flashback scene, Stella tells her it’s not the Bible, and promises Carrie she'll help her find her favorite book. But before she can say anything else, Margaret comes outside and drags Carrie back into the house, angry at her for stepping out.
Confused, Stella tries to stop her to no avail, and then tries to go inside to tell her mother about what happened. But before she does, stones begin to rain down on the Whites’ house—just the Whites’ house. She tries to look up to see if there are any other strange instances of stones in the area or if a cargo plane has opened up above the house. But there’s nothing.
Stella never understood what was going on, but she began sneaking books into the birdhouse Carrie was allowed to fill, since it was the only time she saw the girl. That's how Carrie got her love of books that weren’t just the Bible—through Stella.
A bloody mess
Back to Carrie and away from the documentary, Carrie tells her mother about the gun incident, and she’s upset. That night, Carrie and her mother pray, but afterward Carrie decides to make new clothes that fit better, much to her mother’s displeasure. That night, Carrie also has a serious nightmare and wakes up, thinking she sees her dead father. The vision scares her so much that she screams, causing a glass to break in her room.
The next day, her mother and Carrie head to school, where Margaret confronts the principal for putting Carrie under stress. He counters that if she knew more about how the world worked, she wouldn’t have freaked out. Margaret snaps and warns him not to mess with her, since parents will always do anything to protect their children, then leaves with a final request: let her know if there's another drill so she can take Carrie out of school that day.
At the same time, Sue and Chris learn they’ve been accepted to the same university, Duke, but Chris can’t attend right away because of her family's financial problems. This leads to a horrendous mood that she takes out on Carrie at school.
While Carrie receives compliments from Sue on her new outfit, Chris looks upset that Sue is being so nice to her. Later on in gym class, Chris continues to antagonize Carrie, cursing her out and even blatantly hitting her with a volleyball, though she claims it was an “accident.”
Afterward, the girls go to the locker room to change, and Chris tries to trick Carrie into showering, but Sue, being kind, tells her those are only for athletes and she doesn’t need to. As Carrie is getting ready to leave, however, she gets her period for the first time in white pants.
Sue tries to point it out, as do Chris and a couple of other girls, but Carrie, seeing the blood, sticks her hand into her pants and pulls her fingers out, bloody.
She doesn’t know what a period is because her mother never taught her, and she believes she is dying. Chris drags her toward the shower so she can wash her hands, but when Carrie slips and falls, distraught. The girls toss tampons at her (except Sue), chanting, “Plug it up!” Chris also records it on her phone.
Carrie screams because no one is explaining anything to her, terrified, and the lights shatter in the locker room.
Then, boom—we’re suddenly meeting a new character we don’t know yet (Delainey Hayles), who seems to have a vision of sorts that is connected to Carrie. She stands and rushes to someone else (whose face we don’t see), telling her what’s happened.
The episode ends with Sue back in the seat for the documentary, eerily telling the interviewer that it wasn’t just Carrie there that night. There were strangers there too, ones she had never seen.
All episodes are available to stream on Prime Video. Continue reading our Carrie recaps here at Show Snob.
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