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Comments from the crypt
Davey, your host
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I have been waiting for Mike Flanagan’s Carrie for a long time, and I finished all eight episodes faster than I’d like to admit. I loved it. I wrote a full review for the site, but there’s something I couldn’t fit into a review, and I want to share it with you here.
Carrie has always meant more than a horror story to a lot of us. She’s the girl who gets laughed at in the locker room. She’s the girl whose own mother tells her that the thing that makes her different is a sin. For queer kids, and for weird kids who grew up feeling like some part of them had to stay hidden, that story lands very close to home. A lot of us always rooted for Carrie, and a lot of us saw ourselves in her.
What Flanagan does so well is give that feeling room to breathe. With eight hours to work with, Carrie gets to be a whole person, and so does her mother. Samantha Sloyan’s Margaret White is still terrifying, but she has her own history and her own wounds, and you can watch fear and shame get passed down from one generation to the next. Moving the story into a modern high school, with a viral bullying scandal and the cruelty of social media, makes it hit even harder. The kids tormenting Carrie now have phones, and the whole school is watching.
As someone who has spent most of his life writing about witchcraft, I also love that Carrie’s power sits at the center of this story. Margaret sees it as something evil. Carrie slowly learns it belongs to her. There’s something healing about watching a girl everyone tried to make small discover she was powerful all along. That’s the story a lot of us needed growing up, and it’s why Carrie still matters fifty years later.
If you want to go deeper, this week’s Make It Weird Wednesday is all about Carrie at 50: the real girls who inspired Stephen King’s first novel, the pages Tabitha King pulled out of the trash, and why so many horror fans who were bullied as kids still feel like Carrie belongs to them. I also get into George Romero’s final zombie movie, the woman behind Friday the 13th’s real first killer, Sam turning 30, and the weirdest headlines of the week. Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Then go watch Carrie. All eight episodes are on Prime Video now.
Also new on the site this week: my review of Fall 2: Deadpoint, two new Tomes of Terror reviews, and a big batch of horror filming location guides, including the Baltimore spots behind Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2.
Tell me what you want more of. Just hit reply. We are also looking for submissions, so if you want to help grow our graveyard, give us a chant.
Davey
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