With recent news surrounding Mike Flanagan’s adaptation of Stephen King’s “Carrie,” many fans have begun clutching their pearls in anxious anticipation. “Carrie” is King’s most adapted novel—also his most misinterpreted one. Fans can rest assured Flanagan’s interpretation will be nothing short of perfection given his previous King adaptations, “Gerald’s Game,” (2017) “Doctor Sleep” (2019) and “The Life of Chuck” (2024).
Fans consider King’s “Gerald’s Game,” published in 1992, one of his most feminist works. It tackles themes of domestic violence, sexism and sexual assault with a negative light—unlike some works, which try to provide an equal argument for and against the topic.
The novel begins with characters Jessie and Gerald trying to reignite the spark in their relationship. Gerald, a lawyer with little free time, books the couple a remote getaway to escape outside stress and reconnect. For Gerald, this meant experimenting with their bedroom life.
The horror begins not with the typical “alone in a remote area with no service, someone is going to kill them,” but with domestic violence and assault. Gerald handcuffs Jessie to the bed, the keys above her head on a shelf, and requests she “pretend” to be assaulted—he cannot get it up otherwise. She reluctantly agrees, but her fake cries do not amuse him. She asks him to stop, that it makes her uncomfortable, but he does not relent. Those fake cries turn real for a moment, until Jessie kicks him. Hard. He falls to the floor, has a heart attack and dies. Jessie lies naked, spread eagle on the bed with no way to move her upper body.
Flanagan largely follows the novel beat-for-beat but adds a modern twist. A Viagra overdose triggers Gerald’s heart attack because his porn-addicted self could not perform in bed without it.
For the next 70 minutes, Jessie struggles through every stage of grief—denial (no way that just happened, this could not be happening to her): anger (this is so stupid, he was such an idiot, how could he do that): bargaining (if she could get out of this situation, she would be the best person she could be, help everyone that needs help, she just needs to get out): depression (maybe she deserves this, of course this would happen to her, life is cruel): and acceptance (she is going to die like that.)
She begins hallucinating voices—Gerald yelling snarky remarks about her situation, her father calling her a failure—but also her mother, talking Jessie through the situation and trying to find any comfort she can at the time. How do you comfort yourself through that? You do not. You lose sanity trying.
After a day or so, a dog makes its way into the house, drawn in by the smell of rotting flesh, and begins to eat Gerald’s corpse. Jessie panics, kicking and yelling and screaming. This frightens the dog enough for it to leave for a while. The full weight of her situation sets in. Jessie’s discussions with her mother turn bleak and desperate. Another figure joins her narrative, though not for comfort—at 7 ft tall with enlarged limbs and a creepily pale complexion, she deems him the “Moonlight Man.” He lurks in the doorway, cloaked in moonlight. He clinks together a small box of jewelry and limbs, showing them off to Jessie, patiently waiting to add her own to his collection.
She refuses.
Jessie breaks her wrist and degloves her hand to break out of the handcuffs, but she is exhausted. Her extremities have gone numb from restricted blood flow and with no food or water, she is running out of time.
As she attempts to escape the unfamiliar house, the Moonlight Man appears in the doorway, implicitly requesting some sort of toll from her. She provides him her wedding ring with little thought behind itbefore escaping.
She gets to the car, speeding out of the forest while trying to stay awake—falling asleep at this point is certain death.
Jessie crashes the car into a tree, but she does not notice for a moment. Exhaustion sets in, and she begins to drift off, not noticing the house several feet away with homeowners investigating the noise.
We then cut to several weeks later, with a fully recovered Jessie writing a letter to her younger self. Turns out, only a few figures she saw during that experience were imaginary. Moonlight Man was actually Ramond Joubert, 100% real necrophiliac serial killer suffering from acromegaly—a condition causing abnormal growth of the limbs and face.
Jessie decides to confront him at the courthouse, where he tries to get in her head by holding his hands in the same position she was stuck in for days, mimicking her trauma.
As she testifies against him, she is not only speaking about the Moonlight Man, but against all the men who wronged her throughout her life—her husband, her father, everyone. She speaks to more than Raymond when she says “you are so much smaller than I remember.”
As officers lead him away, Jessie finally makes peace with her trauma.
Flanagan’s interpretation of Jessie’s character and the spectacular casting transformed what he considered an “unfilmable” novel into one of the greatest adaptations, rivalling Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining.”Flanagan has clearly proven himself not only with his own independent works, creating one of the greatest pieces of horror media with “The Haunting of Hill House,” but with his ability to interpret the writer’s messages and provide the reader the same emotional experience as reading the book.
As a proud Mike Flanagan supporter, I look forward to his interpretation and adaption of “Carrie.” It will be an eight-episode limited series through Amazon Prime. Filming began in the summer of 2025, with ananticipated release date of October 2026.
