Carrie features a lot of short passages framed as newsclippings or excerpts from broadcast interviews that take place after the prom and Carrie’s death. One that really stuck in my mind was the now-valedictorian at graduation addressing the remaining living graduating seniors and their parents and bursting into tears. But a lot of that kind of thing interspersed in the book that works very effectively.
Hmmmmm. You’re probably right. The people most likely to go see the movie are going to care more about how faithful an adaptation it is, the visuals, the acting, etc. as a movie and somewhat less concerned about the rest of the world that can be put on hold for 2ish hours.
Of course, all of my points will be dragged over in detail by academics and students in various social and film studies courses (Dear FSM, I remember doing that on the Nightmare on Elm Street movies decades ago) but that’s quite a different thing.
Just to be clear (I should have said this above), this will be an 8-part Amazon series. People will tune in for that first episode, and some percentage (50%?) will make up their minds based on that.
It won the audience award at TIFF, a prize which has a pretty good track record for leading to a Best Picture Oscar win.
It was fine but unnecessary. There was also a TV miniseries already, starring Angela Bettis in the title role. I love Flanagan, but going back to the well for a fourth adapatation (fifth, if you count the sequel from the late 90s) seems like overkill. One problem with the Moretz portrayal is that Carrie is portrayed in the book as fat and unattractive, and that actress is anything but. I think that neither Spacek nor Bettis are unattractive by any stretch, but they aren’t traditional knockouts either. I worry that genral H’wood trends will push him to cast an actress who looks like a young Jessica Chastain as Carrie White, and we’ll be expected to take it as a given that she’s an ugly outcast.
I think he did this because the first draft of the novel was kind of an neither-fish-nor-fowl page count, too long for a short story, not long enough for a novel and there wasn’t a market for novellas, so he added the news reports material in to pad it out to publishable novel length.
I think (as a fan of some of King’s works) that would work better for me. More time to build the world, the tensions, the sense of horrible, inevitable dread, the few moments where it looks like it could be turned around, then a drastic building to the carnage, followed by painful individual moments of revenge, and then seeing the consequences.
But the pacing will be hard, and yeah, your comments about not sticking the intro and loosing the viewers are on point.
I hear this, but I do think the ways schools handle “weird kids” has really changed. Im nit suggesting bullying is gone, but in the 70s it seemed like society as a whole, includinf schools, actively encouraged bullying to reinforce conformity. Abuse and trauma were also handled in a profoundly different way. Now we have mandatory reporters and school psychologists. Not enough, but there’s still the ideal.
Finally, theres a lot more information out there. Appalling ignorance doesnt happen in the same way.
A modernization of Carrie would need to really deviate from the source material. Thats not a bad thing, just a thing.
Good point; it will need to be explained how a young woman in 2024 (if it’s set in the present) doesn’t know about her menstrual cycle. Maybe he can say she’d been home schooled her whole life but now she must attend public school for…reasons.
I’m happy to say that I’ve heard things have changed a bit since I was younger. Growing up in the 80s and 90s, I learned that going to the authorities about bullying was just going to lead to more bullying. And if I took matters into my own hands I was just going to get in trouble for fighting. I’m also given to understand PE has changed a bit too.
I wouldn’t mind seeing the series set in the late 60s or early 70s. There’s nothing wrong with a period piece (and I just realized how funny that is as I type it out) and it works well for the 1970s for a variety of reasons. One of which is that we didn’t have as many hangups about kids showering together after gym.
I like Stephen King and the original Carrie, but honestly there’s just nothing new to really mine from the source material, it’s just so played out. I would enjoy it more if he looked at some of King’s short stories, I always thought a mini-series of Insomnia would be cool too.
Actually, heres a great example of how thongs have changed:
My school has a Period Club. They collect hygeine prodicts for poor women, stock the restrooms, and raise awareness.
They had a Halloween spooky movie event. And it wasnt Carrie. Someone pointed out that the movie was rated R, so they couldn’t. [Pre-Pg-13].
So lots and lots of changes in the world.
Cast Milly Shapiro in the lead role!
