Every Carrie Adaptation, Ranked
The debut novel of the most adapted author in Hollywood history, it’s really only fitting that Stephen King’s Carrie has been reinterpreted for the screen so many times.
The first film version of Carrie came in 1976, when a young Brian DePalma adapted King’s bestseller for the screen less than two years after it hit the shelves. The movie was, of course, a massive hit and now—literally hundreds of published King stories, dozens of screen adaptations, and a full half century later—the first ever limited series based on his first book is finally on its way to Prime Video.
Helmed by Mike Flanagan (King’s most prolific custodian since Frank Darabont) and starring Summer H. Howell as the telekinetically gifted teenager, this six-episode series is set to drop on October 7—which leaves more than enough time to brush up on all the Carrie adaptations to date.
In total, there have already been three movies as well as a slightly ill-advised (but no less interesting) sequel; and while they're naturally very different in terms of style and quality, each one has its charms and reflects the time it was made in. No points for guessing what lands on top, but read on for our full ranking—listed below in descending order.
(PS: Check back in October to find out where Flanagan’s series lands!)
It’s probably damning with faint praise to call the lowest-ranked entry on our list “underrated”, but this 2002 TV movie of Carrie has more than a bit going on to recommend it.
Sure, at 132-minutes, it's way too long; it was also originally conceived as a pilot for a TV show and it shows (open-ended climax and all); and it has some of the dodgiest special effects you’ll see this side of the millennium—but the writing and cast (led by scream queen Angela Bettis and the great Patricia Clarkson) are not to be sniffed at.
This was, after all, Brian Fuller’s first horror project after making his name as a writer on Star Trek: Voyager, so if you’re a fan of what he went on to do as the showrunner of Hannibal, you owe it to him to go back and give this early experiment a try.
This 2013 remake, starring a young Chloë Grace Moretz, attempted to make the character into more of a vengeful hero—which doesn’t exactly work for the material. Still, it’s a quality-looking Hollywood horror and a decent effort nonetheless.
For this shift in tone, Boys Don’t Cry filmmaker Kimberley Pierce was brought in to direct— resulting in a more humane approach that also stripped away a lot of the unpredictable thrills of King’s story and of previous adaptations.
Released in the dog days of Hollywood’s half-assed horror remakes era, the critics were understandably unsparing at the time of release, but those qualms aside, it’s still a good bit more fun than you might remember.
The main issue is probably Moretz, who was ten years younger than Spacek was when she played the role. The actress gives it her all, but the Kick-Ass star is just a bit too cool to fully earn your sympathy in quite the same way. Thankfully, Julianne Moore shows up as her unhinged mother and, as usual, steals the show.
The Rage: Carrie 2 tends to come last on these kinds of rankings, but it has a bit more going on than it’s given credit for.
A notably chaotic production, the movie started as an original story called The Curse before being retrofitted into a direct sequel to DePalma's classic. This naturally made the whole thing a hot mess, but it's a weirdly compelling one just the same. What can we say: it's better to be an interesting bad movie sometimes than a boring good one.
One issue was that the movie's director left halfway through and was replaced by Katt Shea (of Poison Ivy fame)—which made the $20M budgeted movie one of the most expensive ever directed by a woman at that time. Through no fault of Shea’s, the movie went on to be a box office disaster. However, it’s more than worth revisiting—for that lore, of course, but also for the slick look of most of the images (the cinematographer, Donald M. Morgan, also shot John Carpenter's Christine). If you’re a fan of Buffy or ‘90s slasher movies like Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer, you’ll probably enjoy the tone.
Amy Irving (already an Oscar nominee at that point) came back to reprise her role as Sue Snell alongside Emily Bergl as Carrie’s younger sister. Bergl thankfully went on to have a decent career in movies and TV, as did some of her co-stars, like future Succession favourite J. Smith Cameron.
Immediate iconic status, Academy Award nominations for its two lead actresses, and a 3000% return at the box office mean that Brian DePalma’s 1976 adaptation of Carrie will surely never be topped on any list like this—or even of King adaptations in general.
The shower scenes make for awkward viewing in 2026, but with its jarring mix of dreamy, soft-focus imagery and visceral thrills, the movie has lost little of its bite 50 years later.
A lot of this is down to Spacek’s otherworldly performance—which is so uniquely strange that it’s probably no surprise that none of the actresses who’ve played Carrie since have come even close to replicating it. You also get to see Travolta be a dick in his last role before skyrocketing to fame with the back-to-back releases of Saturday Night Fever and Grease.
Best of all, you get DePalma in all his pomp—just as he set off on a generational run of sultry thrillers that included Blow Out, Body Double, The Fury and Dressed to Kill. We can remain quietly confident that whatever happens with Flanagan's show, it won't be topping this one.
