The Most Faithful Adaptation of King's Carrie is The One You've Never Seen
Carrie, Stephen King's first published novel was adapted on the screen several times. Its best-known adaptation still is the first one, 1976's film starring Sissy Spacek as the titular character – that version became a horror classic.
2013's Carrie remake suffered the common fate of remakes and got a relatively poor reception, condemned for being a near-exact but inferior copy of the original film.
But there was another Carrie film – though relatively few people saw it or still remember about it – and that film was the one most faithful to the original novel. In 2002, a straight-to-TV Carrie film, written by Hannibal 's Bryan Fuller and directed by David Carson, with Angela Bettis starring as Carrie, was made, and it follows Stephen King 's script much more closely.
This means it adopts the story structure of the novel.
The two theatrical Carrie adaptations take the core story of Carrie from the book and throw away nearly everything else, using Carrie as the point-of-view character. The book, however, does not tell its story from Carrie's perspective – it is framed as a collection of newspaper clippings, articles, and interview excerpts of the events leading up to and of the iconic prom night. Bryan Fuller's film adaptation translates this literary choice into a visual format to the best of the creators' ability.
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The opening of the film brings us directly to Sue Snell, the character who was trying to help Carrie after realizing how wrong bullying her was, in an interrogation room. The movie is told through flashbacks of first Sue and then other survivors, as they are brought in to be questioned by Detective John Mulchaey.
While an interesting artistic choice, this caused a number of problems, particularly with pacing – the film was made in an age when two-hour films were still considered too long – and with failing to maintain the overall atmosphere of horror and suspense. The film got good ratings, and even some award nominations, but was generally disliked by critics.
And there is also one really big departure from the book in 2002's version that might be considered more severe than mere restructuring of the story, but saying what it is would be a huge spoiler for those who might be interested in watching the film!