Carrie (2026): The words “cyberbullying”, “online harassment”, “digital footprints”, “cancel culture” are all over the place. We have been embarrassingly optimistic in the way we talk about them for a while now – as if we have it all figured out; as if putting these as topics of a conventional school debate or corporate discussion somehow means that we have evolved past the basic human instinct to look at somebody vulnerable and decide they would make a very “funny” target.
Carrie (2026)
We have not, but we have simply “upgraded” the medium, and that is what makes Mike Flanagan’s Carrie so uncomfortable in 2026. Stephen King’s Carrie White was not frightening because she was different, never! She was frightening because everyone around her kept teaching her that being different meant she deserved to be punished for simply existing. The 1976 film understood the particular cruelty of a school corridor, a locker room, a classroom, a prom, but it was contained: you leave the room, go home, and you could close the door.
The new Carrie, now streaming on Prime Video from October 7, takes the same cruelty and breaks down the doors. It explores what happens when somebody can take the worst five seconds of your life, upload them, and suddenly your most humiliating moment belongs to even the people you have not really met.
Carrie Used to Be Humiliated in a Room; Now the Room Has No Door
The original horror of Carrie is almost physical; you can feel the whispers, the laughter, the staring, the bucket, the blood. Someone humiliates you, and you know where the humiliation is happening because you can see the faces of the people doing it. Social media has made that uglier in a very specific way: you do not really see the faces; you see usernames, reposts and comments.
The comments are brutal, and with them follow laughing emojis, screenshots, reaction videos. You see somebody you recognise vaguely liking the thing that is eating you up; destroying you. In fact, people who have never spoken to you feel authorised to decide who you are because of a thirty-second clip told them something. Then you put your phone down, but it is still there. That is the difference: physical humiliation has an ending, while online humiliation does not need your physical presence and the audience multiplies while you do not even know the audience.
The Internet Often Makes the Scars Permanent
The most uncomfortable part of Carrie (2026) is perhaps that teenagers are supposed to be “allowed” to make mistakes without having every mistake preserved in a forever case, the possibility of which seems to be disappearing. Young people often record their every action and put it on the internet identifiably, which, when put next to Carrie, feels horrifying because Carrie is a story about adolescence becoming unbearable.
Calling everything bullying can sometimes make the conversation too neat, with bullies being the bad people and victims being the good ones. We identify the bully, condemn them, protect the victim, and everyone goes home feeling like the moral problem has been solved. However, cruelty rarely comes announced; it sometimes arrives as a joke, insecurity, wanting your friends to laugh, wanting to be the funniest in the room. It may even come dressed as “I did not think she would see it”; “everyone was doing it so I did it too”; “I was just trying to have fun”; or even “I was trying to protect myself”.
Yes, there is this uncomfortable closeness between cruelty and self-protection; people can sometimes become cruel because they are trying to protect themselves, which is more interesting than “Teenagers are mean” dialogue.
Perhaps The Scariest Part Is We Are All the Potential Audience
This is one of the parts of Carrie that makes it rather very close to reality. The outsider, the weird girl, the person who did not fit, the person who was laughed at, the one who sat alone: all of that is fine, but what about the people standing around her? What about the person who saw what was happening and decided to keep quiet, or the person who replayed the video multiple times or shared it? What about the person who knew that it was wrong and still decided to laugh anyway because not laughing might make them the “next target”, perhaps?
This is where the social media setting makes Carrie more uncomfortable than a simple modernisation could. The internet has made cruelty feel personal and participatory. One does not have to always hold something to hurt someone; sometimes not speaking up against it or just watching it causes enough damage.
Carrie (2026) Review on X
X (formerly Twitter) is having a lot to say about Carrie, and the reactions are sitting somewhere between “what was THAT reveal?” and “I respect the swing but…?”
X user @oyemnassxo was floored by the Emaline twist, reacting to the reveal that Carrie had been hallucinating her and using that connection to push her telekinetic abilities.
Meanwhile, another review found the series caught between its modern teen-drama instincts and its horror roots, calling it a mixed bag while still admiring how massively it changes the source material. User @ReelTalker was more impressed by the way the series brings the brutality of bullying into the social media era, but felt that stretching the story across eight episodes came with a cost, particularly when it came to one character being overwritten.
Another user, @MovieFilesLive, also landed somewhere in the same complicated centre, pointing to the tone and uneven pacing and more direct social commentary as elements that did not always work, while they still praised Mike Flanagan for taking bigger swings and singling the final stretch as the strongest part along with the actors’ performances.
Carrie has arrived on X, and nobody seems entirely sure whether they love what Flanagan did with King’s story or desperately want to know if we needed all of it. X does not seem to have decided sides.
We Have Not Outgrown Carrie; We Have Filled Her Notification Panel
Perhaps that is why bringing Carrie into 2026 works, not because bullying is some new social problem; it is not, and we know that. Teenagers did not become cruel because smartphones arrived. Carrie was being destroyed long before Wi-Fi, but what has changed is the reach.
Cruelty can now leave the room: it can cross cities, enter homes, appear in the midnight when you are already awfully vulnerable, reach people you have not met, and it can remain long after the person who caused it has forgotten what they did. It is a particularly ugly truth resting under the new Carrie movie.
We like to believe technology has made us more connected, more aware, more socially conscious, and perhaps it has, no denying it, but it has also made it much easier to be cruel without having to look directly at the person you are hurting. Perhaps that is why Carrie still works because behind all the telekinesis, blood and Stephen King horror, there is a simple question: what happens when you keep hurting someone when you do not think that the hurt belongs to you?
Read our Substack article on how “The Internet Does Not Let the “Weird Girl” Sit“.
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