Dread Central (and personal) favorite Mike Flanagan is developing a limited series adaptation of Carrie for Prime Video. This marks the fifth major interpretation of Stephen King’s 1974 debut novel, behind two theatrical features, a television film and a Broadway musical. Reports indicate that Summer H. Howell is in talks to play the title role. Howell, a talented young actor known for Curse of Chucky and Cult of Chucky, has worked hard to earn her horror stripes. But her casting also continues a deeply familiar trend: once again, the character of Carrie White—famously described in the novel as overweight and acne-prone—is portrayed by someone of conventional weight and appearance.
Stephen King’s Carrie (1974) is not a story that treats its protagonist’s physicality as incidental. Carrie’s body is central to her social rejection, to the violence she experiences, and to her inner world. Her difference isn’t just psychological or religious—it’s visual and bodily. In one passage (which would become the iconic shower scene that opens Brian De Palma’s 1976 Carrie), King writes, “Carrie stood among [the girls] stolidly, a frog among swans. She was a chunky girl with pimples on her neck and back and buttocks, her wet hair completely without color.”
But it’s not just the students who look at her physical body with repulsion. Even her teachers regard her with disgust. King writes, “[Miss Desjardin] hardly would have admitted the pleasure the act [of slapping Carrie] gave her, and she certainly would have denied that she regarded Carrie as a fat, whiny bag of lard.” Instructors tasked with teaching and protecting their students still find themselves hating Carrie just based on her appearance.
To complete this hellish trifecta, Carrie internalizes all of this and is brimming with self-loathing. In one poignant passage, King writes, “[Carrie] hated her face, her dull, stupid, bovine face, and vapid eyes, the red, shiny pimples, the nests of blackheads. She hated her face most of all. The reflection was suddenly split by a jagged, silvery crack.” Her rage isn’t just pointed at those who’ve hurt her; it’s also aimed right at her own reflection.
Carrie’s fatness and acne are an essential part of the cruelty she endures and part of why her eventual eruption of rage feels both earned and tragic. This element, however, has been systematically erased in every significant adaptation of the novel to date as conventionally thin young women continue to embody Carrie. From Sissy Spacek to Chloe Grace Moretz, filmmakers have reimagined Carrie as looking just like the popular girls: skinny, blonde, and gorgeous. That then begs the question, does having a fat protagonist disrupt the chances of a film or series from succeeding?
These questions are not just about surface-level accuracy. I ask them not just as a critic but as a fat person myself. I know how edifying it can be to see one’s own experience reflected in horror—and I also know how hard it can be to see the woods for the trees when you’ve spent your entire life internalizing which bodies are allowed to be placed front and center. We all operate within a culture that has conditioned us to associate fatness with failure, disgust, or comic relief. Hollywood codifies that bias with its casting practices. I don’t believe individual creators have bad will harboring towards fat people, but are there some dark statistics studios have that prove a fat lead will alienate and dissipate their audiences? And if not, then what’s going on?
Carrie’s continual thin-ification feels especially regressive because the horror genre should be making space for the abject, the othered, the uncomfortable. Yet, when it comes to fat bodies—particularly fat female bodies—it too often falls into the same tired tropes or, more commonly, chooses not to show them at all.
What makes this all the more complex is that Carrie is a Stephen King novel, and while he is a personal hero of mine, King still has a long and often troubling history with how he writes fat characters. He has admitted to associating fatness with grotesquerie and gluttony, directly addressing this fact in his 1981 nonfiction book Danse Macabre, where he dedicates an entire section to fatness as grotesque. It’s a motif that runs throughout his fiction, too. From the terrifying “blob-like” bodies in It to cruel caricatures like Reggie Delmore in Thinner, fatness is frequently used as a visual shorthand for excess, moral weakness, or decay.
So when King writes about a fat character with empathy—as he arguably did with Carrie—it’s worth paying attention to. And when every single adaptation of that story removes her fatness entirely, it sends a clear message: Even in a horror story about rage, shame, and social violence, fatness is still considered too unsightly and grotesque to depict.
There are exceptions—though not many. Carlota Pereda’s Piggy (2022), a Spanish horror film about a fat teen girl publicly humiliated and violently underestimated, offers a rare and refreshing counterexample. While the film isn’t perfect, it’s emotionally honest and physically unflinching. It lets its protagonist exist without apology. Plus, it proves that a fat lead doesn’t dilute a horror story’s power—it heightens it.
This brings us back to Flanagan, a filmmaker who has built an incredible career on thoughtful, character-driven horror. From The Haunting of Hill House to Midnight Mass, he has shown a consistent interest in the emotional and psychological lives of the marginalized. His work is often about shame, grief, and addiction—themes that Carrie White embodies in spades. That’s why this choice feels like a missed opportunity. If Flanagan isn’t willing (or permitted) to push against these casting norms, who will?
These thoughts and questions are not meant to be about attacking any one actor or filmmaker. It’s about addressing a system that still refuses to see fatness as deserving of narrative complexity, even in a landscape that celebrates outsider perspectives, as is the case with horror. Representation isn’t about checking boxes—it’s about asking why certain stories are constantly reshaped to exclude certain bodies. What are we so afraid of? That audiences won’t connect? That it won’t sell? Or is it simply that we’ve never seriously tried?
Carrie White’s story has always been about the violent demand for visibility—and also about the horror of being seen and shamed and the power of being seen too late. Her story resonates precisely because it centers on someone who was ignored, mocked, and erased until she couldn’t take it anymore.
It’s long past time to stop erasing her all over again.
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