Mike Flanagan's Timely Carrie Is the First Worthwhile Adaptation in 50 Years

Everyone knows what happens in Carrie. Fifty-two years after its publication, the novel that ignited Stephen King’s career has so thoroughly engulfed the culture, you’d have to be almost as sheltered as Carietta White herself not to have absorbed its most indelible images. The locker-room tampon gauntlet and “Plug it up!” chant. Carrie’s smothering holy-roller mom, locking her up in prayer-closet solitary confinement. The eerily unlikely prom date. The swinging bucket that has haunted every coronation of school-dance royalty in film and TV since Brian De Palma first adapted the book in 1976. It’s a tale as old as time: Warped by her mother’s zealotry and scapegoated since childhood by her classmates, 16-year-old Carrie has a late, traumatic menarche that reactivates her latent telekinetic abilities. Then, after accepting a pity date to the prom, she’s crowned queen and immediately gets pig’s blood dumped on her head by a resentful bully. The humiliation causes her to lay waste to the school and then the town, using her powers to exact revenge.Sissy Spacek in Carrie (1976) GettyKing’s book and De Palma’s film became classics of the horror genre. No less venerable a critic than Pauli...