You Totally Would Have Bullied Carrie White

Why We Can’t Stop Gentrifying Stephen King’s High School Horror Heroine

In the entertainment industry’s endless quest to wring every last penny out of pre-existing IP, they remade Carrie. Again. This time it’s by Mike Flanagan, who force-feeds coziness into every beloved horror property he gets his grubby little hands on (except for his genuinely great, mean, nasty segment in V/H/S Beyond). Flanagan’s Carrie is cuter, softer, more charismatic than Brian De Palma’s 1976 Carrie, who was, in turn, thinner and prettier than King’s original 1974 Carrie.

With every incarnation, Carrie gets cleaned up a little more so that the audience will like her, identify with her, root for her. But that misses the reason King’s Carrie scared us in the first place: the truth is, if you’d gone to high school with Carrie White you probably would bullied the shit out of her.

“Never!” you cry. “I would have been nice to Carrie White! I would have been spared!” The conventionally attractive, socially awkward screen adapted Carrie White, sure. The weird, socially maladjusted, fat girl from the book who glowers at people and doesn’t know what a uterus is and probably smells pretty bad? Absolutely not. You would have thrown tampons at that girl for sure.

“But I understand that an isolated, socially maladjusted girl is probably going through some trauma, and needs help to blossom,” you might say, as an adult. And maybe present-day, mature, adult you might have been friendly to Carrie, taken her under your wing like that nice gym teacher did. But teenage you? Immature, hormonal, feral, teenage you, who hadn’t yet gone through years of therapy? Absolutely not. Teenagers are monsters. You were too. So was I.

“But I was an outcast in high school,” you say. “I would have identified with Carrie White. I would have gotten along with her. She would have spared me, at least.” Nope! Your high school loneliness doesn’t mean you would have allied with Carrie White. If anything, that means you’d have bullied her even worse, because finally, a dork-ass loser like you found someone even lower than you to dump your adolescent frustrations on. If the age of social media has taught us anything, it’s that lonely nerds are just as shitty as conventionally-attractive jocks. Worse, even.

Have you ever taken part in an internet dogpile? Of course you have. Think about the last Main Character you roasted on Twitter. Did you stop to consider that they might have a history of trauma? That they might be going through something real bad? Probably not. You flamed them, because they were a designated target, and it felt good. Did you think about the consequences? Fuck no.

Imagine a Christian homeschooled girl posted a TikTok in which she showed that she didn’t know what periods are. You wouldn’t make fun of her in the comments section? You wouldn’t share it with your friends to gawk at it? You wouldn’t post memes about it? You wouldn’t laugh? Bullshit. Of course you would! And I would too.

Contemporary Carrie White, as she exists in pop culture—not as she existed in the novel, or even the 1976 movie—is a loveable, angelic, aggrieved victim, blameless and morally pure even as she murders all of her classmates in a psychic school shooting. We like to put ourselves in her shoes, because people have been mean to us, or scorned us, or disliked us, especially in high school, and we like to believe there was no reason, and we like to fantasize about punishing them for it. We are all, somehow, underdogs, punching up in all directions. We are all victims, always, everywhere.

But the truth is, most of us are a goddamn mess. Sometimes we’re mean and shitty for no good reason. Sometimes we’re weird and off-putting.

You’re not Pop Culture Carrie White. If you’re active on Bluesky, you were probably more like Liz Lemon from 30 Rock, who realized decades too late that her friendlessness in high school wasn’t because she was an aggrieved nerd, but because she was an annoying bitch.

Or maybe you were more like Dawn Wiener in Welcome to the Dollhouse—lonely, neglected, bullied for being different, but also kind of an asshole when the opportunity presented itself.

Most likely, you’re one of the characters in Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion, which reminds us that everybody made somebody else’s life hell in high school. I did. And so did you.

But if you were one of Carrie’s classmates, be real: you would have made fun of her. She would have set you on fire. That’s why it’s scary. Stop gentrifying her and be honest with yourself.