★★★ (3 out of 4)
In 1976, it took only 97 minutes for director Brian De Palma to carve a horror film classic out of Stephen King’s first novel, “Carrie” and win Oscar nominations for Sissy Spacek in the telekinetic title role and Piper Laurie as her monstrous religious fanatic mother.
This week on Prime Video, it takes director and showrunner Mike Flanagan eight, count ‘em eight, one-hour episodes to produce a streaming TV series of King’s shortest book that I was ready to dismiss as bloated, sight unseen. But then I saw it and realized that Flanagan—a King collaborator on three acclaimed versions of the maestro’s novels, “Gerald’s Game,” “Doctor Sleep” and “The Life of Chuck”—had something completely different up his sleeve. There’d be no monsters in this series, just humans bedeviled by a modern world where bullies rise out of the muck of cellphones, social media and the normalized violence of right-now America. Now that is scary. And for the most part, Flanagan uses his time well to show how we got that way.