Carrie (2002)

Every few years, someone decides the culture needs another Carrie, and in 2002 that someone was NBC, which commissioned a two-hour remake as a backdoor pilot and then, once the ratings arrived respectable, quietly declined to order the series. What we have instead is a strange artifact in Bryan Fuller's filmography, a mood board for the sharper work he would later produce. Angela Bettis plays the telekinetic outcast with a hard, watchful stillness, and Patricia Clarkson renders the mother as a woman who has mistaken the Old Testament for a parenting manual. The prom still happens. The blood still falls. The gym still burns. The revised ending keeps Carrie alive for a sequel that never came, which lends the whole enterprise the melancholy of an unreturned phone call.

On the question of social consciousness, the ledger is nearly empty. Kandyse McClure takes the substantial role of Sue Snell, a piece of casting that would have read as unremarkable in 1976 and registers as quietly progressive here, though the screenplay never once acknowledges it. The narrative is built around a girl's body, her first period, the shame assigned to it, and the rage that follows, which gives the material a female-centric spine. It stops well short of argument. Menstruation is framed as sin and horror, never as anything to celebrate, so no affirmation can be found in it. Race never enters the conversation. Neither does queerness, nor the climate, nor the economy, nor the question of who qualifies as neurotypical. The film has no thesis to press.

This leaves a curiosity: a competent, overlong, bloodless remake that treats its audience as viewers and not as students. In an era when even the prom massacre would be expected to carry a lesson, this one simply kills everyone and drives off into the Florida night. Almost quaint.