Mike Flanagan’s 10-Episode Netflix Thriller Masterpiece Is Everything ‘Carrie’ Should Have Been

Mike Flanagan’s 2018 Netflix series *The Haunting of Hill House* is presented as a stronger example of his horror craft than his recent adaptation of *Carrie*. The article argues that *Hill House* builds fear through sustained dread and ghosts hidden in plain sight, while *Carrie* weakens its central horror by shifting much of the responsibility for the prom massacre away from Carrie.

Flanagan reworked Shirley Jackson’s novel by making its haunted-house residents siblings and turning the house into their childhood home. He said each episode contains around eight to 10 concealed ghosts, some inspired by the writers’ own fears. In *Hill House*, Nell’s story makes the horror intimate; in *Carrie*, the series keeps much of the book’s structure but has Emaline take over Carrie’s body for much of the massacre, a choice the article says complicates the story’s defining moment.