Mike Flanagan's Carrie changes the Stephen King book's timeline

So, Prime Video has gone and given us its own swipe at Stephen King's Carrie, and yes — Mike Flanagan is at the helm this time. Given the amount of times Carrie has been dragged back onto screens, you’d think it’d all be a bit paint-by-numbers by now, but Flanagan’s version is very much attempting to prove it’s not just another lazy cover. This one properly retools both the story’s tone and timeline, and some will say it puts proper distance between itself and the earlier versions — particularly if you’ve grown a bit weary of endless nostalgic throwbacks.

Probably the boldest move is to drag the whole thing out of the late 1970s and plant it firmly in today’s world. That’ll definitely wind up a few King purists, but honestly, it gives the show a decent leg up in terms of actually feeling relevant. It’s still set in Chamberlain, Maine — King’s classic stomping ground — but it’s 2020s Chamberlain now, with social media, mobile phone videos, and all the grotesque high school modernity that comes with it. The show doesn’t give a specific year, but you won’t miss the present-day vibes: there are platforms that look suspiciously like Instagram and TikTok, and the kids are stuck doing school-shooting drills instead of duck-and-cover or whatever grim exercise passed for safety back in the day.

Flanagan told Radio Times why he shifted timelines: "The themes we are exploring are relevant to today’s teenagers in such a profound way that wasn’t true when I was that age, much less when Stephen was, and just doing a period piece adaptation would have felt like re-reading."

What does that actually mean for the story? For one thing, Carrie (played by Summer H. Howell this time) comes across a good deal more sympathetic and legible to a modern crowd. As well as updating her world, Flanagan stretches out the side characters, giving everyone a bit more room than they had in the smaller, nastier universe of King’s original novel. Rather than making Carrie a total outcast from some exaggerated dystopian Reagan-era high school, she’s painted as isolated — but much easier to see reflecting back real-world bullying and alienation today, especially with the way social media ramps up every humiliation to public spectacle worldwide. Little surprise the bullying and ostracism in this version feel even sharper; it’s one thing to have a few mean girls whispering, it’s another to have your lowest moment made immortal by video and memes.

The show pulls no punches on the realities of internet-age cruelty — there’s a proper moment where parents and teachers try to intervene, but they’re completely outpaced by the spread of viral postings.

The show also doesn’t just update its setting for the sake of it. It uses the modern backdrop to do proper work: topics like online culture, cyberbullying, and those depressingly routine lockdown drills all get centre stage. One scene in particular stands out, with Carrie being forced into a school-shooting drill, absolutely terrified — and for once, her usually clueless mum, Margaret White (now played by Samantha Sloyan), isn’t wrong when she storms into the school to complain about the trauma being dumped on her daughter. Doesn’t matter how mad Margaret is the rest of the time, this bit hits home; the show nails how casually adults now accept a level of teen anxiety that would have seemed inconceivable in King’s day.

Fundamentally, Flanagan’s Carrie uses its modern timeline for more than window dressing. It argues the story’s themes aren’t stuck in the 1970s, and possibly, they land even harder now. Every version of Carrie acts as a bit of a time capsule, but this one, thanks to Flanagan’s eye for horror and detail, manages to feel starkly present — and for anyone who’s lived through the bleakness of modern secondary school, likely a bit too real at times.

Carrie on Prime Video shifts the story’s world from 1979 to the present day, upgrading all the horrors of American high school for a generation glued to their screens.