Why a new TV version of horror classic Carrie is already annoying people

Releasing next week, the latest take on Stephen King's novel has been criticised for its casting. The heroine is a softer, more conventional-looking character than in the book.

Mike Flanagan is the horror auteur behind such hit shows as Midnight Mass and The Haunting of Hill House. A new series from him would normally be a cause for celebration by fans of the genre. But when they were first released, the stills and trailer for his eight-part adaptation of Stephen King's 1974 classic Carrie did not meet with universal approval. Some fans were disappointed, even angered. The reason for their annoyance? As with other screen versions, there seemed to be departures from the novel, which tells the story of a bullied teenager wreaking revenge on her high school – especially with regard to the way Carrie looks and behaves.

Various X users have pointed out that, as one of them put it, "everyone decides to cast her as a skinny, conventionally attractive girl" which is very different to how she is depicted in the book. Another suggested that no adaptation "has ever captured the full extent of Carrie's novel characterisation. She's an incredibly angry girl, and is usually depicted as sad/naïve on screen". A third alleged that "Hollywood would never do the book version [of Carrie] in a million years".

Carrie was King's first novel and centres on a 16-year-old girl who has been tormented for years by her classmates. She finds no comfort at home because her widowed mother is an abusive religious fanatic: breasts and showers are among the many thing she regards as sinful. Carietta "Carrie" White has a latent telekinetic power, typically unleashed when she is stressed, afraid or angry.

The novel begins with her being terrified by her first period, which arrives when she is in the shower after PE class. The other girls mock her ignorance and the stress – or maybe the onset of menstruation – reawakens her telekinetic power. The story then reaches a tragic climax days later when she is humiliated at the school prom.

King describes Carrie in the showers thus: "Carrie stood among them stolidly, a frog among swans. She was a chunky girl with pimples on her neck and back and buttocks". She's clearly meant to be – for want of a better word – "plain".

Yet in the four screen versions to date, she has been played by conventionally good-looking actresses. In Brian De Palma's 1976 classic, Sissy Spacek played Carrie. In a 2002 TV movie, it was Angela Bettis. Chloë Grace Moretz starred in the 2013 film and now, in this new Prime Video drama, it's 22-year-old Canadian newcomer Summer H Howell.

As entertainment writer Kayleigh Donaldson wryly observed in a recent article for Pajiba: "Even in a story of cruelty and bullying, the world thinks having Carrie White be a fat girl is too much…You can imagine a teenage girl setting her school on fire with her magical mind powers but she can't be larger than a size 6 (UK 10) because that's stretching credulity?"

In addition, book Carrie is in some ways an even darker creation than screen Carrie has ever been, both less naive and with greater agency around her destructive powers. She fantasises about the havoc she could wreak if she chose to: "She did not know if her gift had come from the lord of light or of darkness, and now, finally finding that she did not care which, she was overcome with an almost indescribable relief," King writes.

When her prom date is late, she decides that if he doesn't show up, she will use her power to destroy the house. She is smiling and giggling throughout her bloody vengeance at the prom. But on screen, she tends to be sweeter and more innocent. Even in the prom scene she seems to be using her powers reluctantly. 

Flanagan's new version, which is set in the present day and is being promoted with the tag line, "If you think you know her story, you're dead wrong", is likely to upset book purists even further. Without giving away spoilers, it introduces some major departures from, and very significant additions to, the novel.

However, one big change already evident in the trailer is that this Carrie is newly arrived at school, having previously been home-schooled until her father's death. In the book, her father died before her birth and she attends school from the usual age. This is a key difference because it means that when we meet Carrie she is, in Flanagan's words "open to the world, earnest, curious and untraumatised". It has the effect of making the bullying she is subjected to feel even more cruel. 

Do such differences between the book and screen versions matter? Dr Sorcha Ní Fhlainn is a horror expert and reader in film studies at Manchester Metropolitan University, who believes Flanagan's show will work on its own terms, and is smart in how it modernises the story.

"It updates the ongoing horrors of teenage life at school, where Carrie is desperate to fit in," she says, noting how it now centres social media, which offers new modes of ridicule.

Ní Fhlainn agrees that Flanagan's Carrie is not the "frog among swans" that King describes but says "her 'otherness' is absolutely coded in her making of her own clothes and [background of being] home-schooled. Like so many school-set horrors, this Carrie seems to conjure new means of navigating the familiar horrors of teenage life and bullying."

Film-maker Liam Gavin directed the cult horror film A Dark Song and two episodes of Flanagan's The Haunting of Bly Manor, his reimagining of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw. Gavin points out that, of course, deviations from the text and casting decisions are not always made purely for artistic reasons. 

"With any adaptation, there's always going to be a tension between the source material and the needs of the market," he says. "Production funding is frequently dependent on cast, and so there can be external pressures. It's not always fair or just, it unfortunately 'just is'."

In other words, in an industry which often lacks casting imagination, lead roles of all kinds still tend to go to performers that are conventionally good-looking. That's because producers and studios seem to feel that they will have the greatest audience appeal – though whether that really is the case or not is rarely tested.

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In addition, the novel intermittently gives the reader direct access to Carrie's thoughts and feelings to help us understand her. We don't have that in the screen versions – hence, perhaps, the softening of her character, to make her more immediately sympathetic.

However Gavin also says that it is fair that a creative director might not want to be completely faithful to a text. "It can also be just as stifling from the other direction," he says. "It's not always incumbent on a director to be slavish to whatever source material he or she is working from."

Certainly, this version of Carrie really does feel like something new. Flanagan has made an engrossing, surprising, layered show that is very much about the now, while also honouring its 50-year-old source material. It absolutely delivers on both horror and coming-of-age drama and is well served by terrific performances, especially from the lead. No doubt the depiction of Carrie will continue to stimulate debate but even hardcore lovers of the book should find something to enjoy here.

Carrie is released on Prime Video on 7 October.

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