In Mike Flanagan’s Carrie series, the new Chris Hargensen (played by Alison Thornton) gets a painful backstory of personal pain, desperation and an absence of positive role models, yet she still owns every bit of her cruelty toward Carrie White. The show explains the person behind the abuse while leaving her responsible for choosing to humiliate Carrie.
The new Chris turns Carrie White’s locker room trauma into an Instagram post. She records Carrie’s breakdown and shares it, giving her bullying an audience beyond the students who were there.
Stephen King’s 1974 novel and the 1976 film build Chris’s cruelty around entitlement and her refusal to accept consequences. After bullying Carrie gets her banned from prom, she plots revenge with her boyfriend, Billy Nolan. Nancy Allen and John Travolta play the pair in the film, where their scheme includes killing a pig to obtain the blood they’ll dump on Carrie.
Flanagan changes the emphasis of that sequence, moving away from the explicit slaughter and toward Chris’s expression and fascination as events unfold. Her response becomes part of the horror: the series follows how far she’s willing to go even as it gives her more psychological depth.
