10 Worst Stephen King Film Adaptations
6. Carrie 2013
This one really should have worked. Chloe Grace Moretz and Jullianne Moore are terrific actors, both with many examples of brilliant films. Together, they should have been a great pairing, bringing the tragic story of Carrie to life. Instead, what audiences were given in 2013 was a poor and lazy update of Brian De Palma's 1976 version.
You know the plot. Bullied girl gets own back at prom. And that's it. There's absolutely nothing new to offer in this film. When adapting a work for the screen, care should be taken to honour the source material and deliver enough difference to make the adaptation worth undertaking. De Palma succeeded in this by turning the novel, an almost epistolary novel, into a straight narrative of one girl's descent.
Kimberly Pierce offers nothing new in her version, opting instead to swap out paper notes in class to mean text messages and videos uploaded online. If a viewer were approaching this film with no knowledge of any previous work, unfortunately even then they would be offered a dull and by the numbers teen angst film, with telekinesis thrown in for the heck of it.
The one thing that the film does right is to correct the fate of Miss Desjardin (Miss Collins in the 1976 version). She is a sympathetic character was cruelly murdered in that film, while she is spared in this version. That aside, this is not a film that brings anything worth checking out to the ouevre.