Carrie

Geek Punditry #198: Carrie White and the Flanaganverse

blakemp Geek Punditry , , ,

When Amazon announced that Prime Video was going to make a miniseries based on Stephen King’s novel Carrie, I had the same reaction as pretty much every other sentient lifeform: I added a package of Fruit Rollups to my cart and ignored it. After all, what possible reason could there be for adapting Carrie yet AGAIN?

Then someone gave me a perfectly reasonable answer to that question: Mike Flanagan.

“Who the HELL thought it would be a good idea to — oh, him? Okay, then.”

There seems to be a rule that in any given era, one filmmaker is allowed to make the truly great adaptations of Stephen King’s work. For a while there, that was Frank Darabont. After he finished The Mist, he decided it was time to take a breather and passed the torch on to Flanagan. Flanagan’s original movies, like Hush and Oculus, have all been entertaining. When he started doing long-form miniseries for Netflix, we got some amazing television based on classic horror: things like The Haunting of Hill House and The Fall of the House of Usher. But most pertinently, he’s done three previous Stephen King movies; every one of them is a film that was an unconventional choice at best, and every one has been a triumph.

Gerald’s Game is a novel about a woman who is handcuffed to a bed when her husband has a fatal heart attack during a little…well…game. (No points for guessing the husband’s name.) Almost the entire novel is the wife, Jessie, trying to escape, having flashbacks to different portions of her life that give context to the predicament she finds herself in, or fearing a strange phantom that may or may not be real. Because of the very nature of the story and the fact that at least 50 percent of it all takes place in Jessie’s head, it spent decades as one of those books that the unimaginative declare “unfilmable.” But in 2017 Flanagan filmed it, Carla Guigno delivered a knockout performance as Jessie, and Flanagan was on the map.

“He made a movie out of WHAT?”

In 2019 he tackled Doctor Sleep, a novel that was problematic for a totally different reason. The book is a sequel to Stephen King’s classic The Shining, which of course was made into an iconic movie by Stanley Kubrick in 1980. Kubrick’s film took some wild swings with the novel, though, and despite being considered one of the must-watch films in the canon of American horror, Stephen King himself was not a fan. At the very least, most people will agree that while the film is effective in its own right, it does a poor job of actually adapting the novel. Doctor Sleep is a sequel to the book, not the movie, and as such it went in directions that were faithful to the original story but flat-out contradicted Kubrick’s film. Making Doctor Sleep into a sequel to Kubrick’s movie while still satisfying fans of the novel seemed an insurmountable task. But somehow, Flanagan pulled it off.

“He made a movie out of what AGAIN?”

Then just two years ago, he adapted King’s novella The Life of Chuck, one of those books King writes periodically to remind people that he does not only, in fact, write horror. Chuck is a tender, bittersweet, beautiful tale, but for reasons that are hard to discuss without giving away some of the best twists of the story, it didn’t seem like a likely candidate for adaptation. But Flanagan rounded up Tom Hiddleston and several members of his usual repertory of actors and turned out one of the most powerful, lovely, and heartfelt films based on a King work since the era of The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile (both Darabont films).

“He made a — who IS this guy?”

All that said, Carrie is a different matter than any of those. To make an eight-hour miniseries based on Carrie seemed like a wild idea at the outset. It’s already been adapted three previous times (not counting the stage musical), and the first of those adaptations is considered a seminal classic of the horror genre. What’s more – eight hours? The original novel is pretty slim, especially by Stephen King standards. The only way to stretch a story out that much is to add things that aren’t in the original. The good news is that Flanagan has proven himself to be adept at that time and again. After I watched his Fall of the House of Usher, I described it as him taking all of his Edgar Allan Poe LEGO sets, dumping them into a pile, and building something totally new out of the familiar pieces. Similarly, his Haunting of Hill House uses the original Shirley Jackson novel less as source material and more as a general suggestion. What Flanagan has done with these stories in the past is take the elements that we already know and use them as the context for new, gripping stories. And although the changes weren’t as dramatic as those other examples, he did the same thing when he adapted Carrie.

Flanagan’s series dropped a few weeks ago, and it’s really buzzing amongst fans of Stephen King and Flanagan himself. The talk is mostly positive, although there do seem to be people upset about the ending. (I am not one of them.) I’m going to get into some spoilers today so if you haven’t watched it yet, you may want to skip the rest of this column until you do, but be assured that I was very satisfied both in the show itself and its potential implications for King/Flanagan collaborations in the future.

The new Queen of King…

The basic framework of the story is more or less the same as what we already know: Carrie White (played wonderfully by Summer H. Howell) is a young girl who is bullied at school and smothered by her overbearing mother (Samantha Sloyan, one of Flanagan’s regular collaborators, delivering a phenomenal performance). After a traumatic episode surrounding her first period, Carrie discovers she has telekinetic powers. The bullying continues until a bloody climax at the prom leaves hundreds of people dead and sends Carrie off for a fateful confrontation with her own mother. Those elements are all still there. But that story has been told very adroitly in less than two hours in the past. To expand it to eight episodes, Flanagan added a lot of stuff that isn’t in the King original or any of the previous films.

Much of the additive elements are spent enhancing the characters’ backstories. Chris Hargensen, for instance, is a fairly static character in the original. Carrie’s primary tormentor is an uber-example of a high school “Mean Girl” decades before that term was even coined. In Flanagan’s version, we spend almost as much time with Chris (played with delightful nastiness by Alison Thornton) as we do with Carrie herself, and we see the circumstances that shaped her into who she is. She’s got parents who are neglectful and narcissistic, and her father (Michael Trucco, another Flanagan regular) in particular is an unfeeling jerk who seems to see his daughter more as an annoyance than an actual child. And as bad as those parents are, it’s even worse for Chris when she finds out that they’re going through a divorce.

You may remember, a few weeks ago, when I wrote a column (GP #194: Can We Just Let Bad Guys Be Bad?) about the fact that I find the trend of “humanizing” villains to be tedious, and my praise for Carrie may seem contradictory. I’m here to tell you, that’s not the case. While it’s true that the TV series explores the reasons behind Chris’s behavior, it doesn’t try to justify that behavior like the recent East of Eden or to reshape the story so she’s not really a villain as in Wicked or Maleficent. Yeah, Chris’s life sucks, and we see that, but at no point does the show attempt to EXCUSE her behavior. Do you feel bad for a kid whose parents barely seem to recognize that she exists? Sure. Does that sympathy disappear when she creates the “@CarrieRed” Instagram account to terrorize not only Carrie, but the entire student body and faculty of Ewan High School? So, so much. The show demonstrates that Chris’s parents are terrible people, but that does not make anything that she does okay. Over and over again, she makes the choices of a sadistic, heartless monster. Over and over again she is presented with an opportunity to recant that behavior, and instead she chooses to double down. Chris Hargensen is a villain, and her villainy is not excused.

I’m sure Alison Thornton is a lovely person, but when she looks at you like that it’s obvious why she was cast as the nastiest 12th grader in literary history.

Carrie’s mother Margaret White is similarly expanded upon by the adaptation, and like Chris that exploration gives context without attempting to give justification. In the original, and in most adaptations, Margaret’s violent religious fundamentalism and paranoia are the fuel that feeds Carrie’s rampage. This adaptation shaves some of those edges off: while the fundamentalism is still an element of the character, Flanagan doesn’t lean on it as much as usual. Instead, we see a Margaret that, like Chris, could potentially be an object of sympathy: as the series begins she is recently widowed and forced to take a job and send her teenage daughter to school for the first time. She’s been largely isolated and sees the world as attacking her child, a child who needs protection. There’s a particularly emotional scene in episode four when Carrie comes home covered in mud and heartbroken because she’s learned that Chris has been orchestrating her torment while pretending to be her friend. The audience – and Carrie – expect Margaret to explode and punish her for the crime of going out late and lying about her whereabouts, but the instant she sees Carrie standing there, filthy and sobbing, Margaret’s anger evaporates and she takes Carrie into a sincere, comforting embrace, behaving more like a mother than we’ve ever seen.

But again, none of this is ever used to justify the dark parts of her character. Margaret IS overbearing, smothering, and even abusive (the famous “prayer closet” from other iterations of the story remains as the most prominent symbol of her crippling fundamentalist nature). She’s also petty, getting her manager at work fired when it is clear to the audience that the woman is doing everything she can to HELP Margaret, a new widow she recognizes is desperately struggling. We see Margaret’s invasive nature, hiding cameras around the house to spy on Carrie when she has to be at work. I mentioned earlier that Chris has opportunities to pull back from her own behavior – in the last such instance it seems as though she is about to do so, until Margaret (displaying an utter lack of mercy) goads her until she again doubles down. We see how she has isolated Carrie from the world for her entire life and would have continued to do so had her circumstances not changed in such a tragic fashion. Margaret is a mother who sincerely believes she’s doing the best thing for her child, but at the same time, has been strangling that child from the moment she emerged from the womb. Margaret White is a villain, and her villainy is not excused.

Similarly, Samantha Sloyan looks like she’s offended by the very fact that you’re even having a day, so she’s here to ruin it.

As for Carrie…well, Carrie’s villainy doesn’t need to be tempered, because Carrie White is not a villain, and never has been. Carrie is a victim. She’s a victim of Chris and a victim of her mother. She’s a victim of a world that is structured in a way that is terribly unkind to anybody that is different. She’s a victim of her own genetics, having an incredible and terrible power that she does not understand and ultimately cannot control. Carrie is never really given the chance that Chris had, to pull back from her mistakes. Once she breaks, there is no opportunity to rectify anything. Carrie White is not a villain, but rather an example of the fact that you don’t HAVE to be a villain to be responsible for horrifying things.

There are, I should point out, some people who disagree with me about this – they feel that Flanagan DID go too far, that he DID try too hard to make Chris and Margaret into sympathetic figures. To these people I will say that I respect your right to your opinion, but go get your own dang column.

The other major changes to the story, which again are all additive, are perhaps even more intriguing than the character work Flanagan did – and again, I caution you, I’m about to get spoileriffic up in this piece. The miniseries brings in a framing sequence that exists in the novel but was left out of the classic Brian DePalma movie: it’s set after the cataclysmic prom night, and some of the survivors of the massacre are being interviewed, telling their versions of the story. The end of episode one, however, drops a bombshell that has not existed in any other version of Carrie, namely that our titular character was not acting alone that night.

“Surprise!”

As the series progresses, we learn that there are other people like Carrie, people with various psychic powers. Some of them want her to join them, other people are trying to actively destroy the psychics. In the climactic prom scene, in fact, after Chris and her boyfriend have doused poor Carrie in pig’s blood, Flanagan’s version has Carrie’s psychic friend Emaline (Thalia Dudek) “take the wheel” and use Carrie’s body and powers to lash out. This is the one contention people have with the series that I can kind of agree with. Usually, Carrie is the one that carries out the Prom Night massacre, having lost control of herself. In this version, Emaline is the primary aggressor and Carrie is mostly a weapon. I suspect that in large part, Flanagan made this change so that the character wouldn’t be too psychologically damaged to continue the story. Normally, if this were the end, that wouldn’t be an issue, but just yesterday (as I post this) Amazon has announced that they’ve given a green light to a second season of this show.

At the end of Flanagan’s series, Carrie survives and escapes with Emaline, fleeing into an unknown future. Although Carrie was announced as a miniseries, Flanagan has said that he’s got plans for a three-season story arc, and as the first season pretty much covers the entire novel, there are a LOT of questions about where he’s planning to take it. But fans of Flanagan and King probably already have at least an inkling.

Get your hiking boots — you cannot believe how long this walk is gonna be.

Carrie was Stephen King’s first published novel, but he has come back to the well of people with different kinds of psychic powers over and over again in the decades since. The way the different factions are presented in Carrie even evokes – quite deliberately, I’m certain – different groups and organizations that exist in stories such as Firestarter, The Institute, and even Doctor Sleep, which you should remember, was also adapted by Mike Flanagan. It seems more than likely that Flanagan is planning to draw on some of this mythology in future seasons.

But that’s not all. One of the most prominent uses for psychics in the work of Stephen King comes from his magnum opus The Dark Tower. One of the many (many, MAAAANY) subplots in this series involves the Big Bad, the Crimson King, forcing different psychics to work as “Breakers,” using their powers to literally “break” the beams of force that hold up the Dark Tower itself, which is a sort of nexus of all creation. If the Tower falls, so does the entire multiverse. It’s kind of a big deal.

There have been plans for years to try to adapt The Dark Tower to screen, and one movie version that made a horrifically misguided attempt to condense eight novels (many of which are the size of phone books) into a film of less than two hours. Let’s not talk about that. What’s important is who currently holds the rights to try a new adaptation of the saga: Mike Flanagan. I’ve written before (in Geek Punditry #160: The Difficulty of a Kingamatic Universe) about how tough it’s going to be to do justice to this property, but Flanagan is determined. He’s been highly vocal about his desire to bring this series to the screen in as faithful an adaptation as possible. His plan, he says, is to make a TV series that would run for five seasons, then two feature films to complete the epic. And unlike Carrie, his goal is to simply film the books and try NOT to change things up too much.

However, anyone who knows anything about storytelling can tell you that SOME changes are inevitable. Cinema and books are different mediums, and things that work in one don’t always work in another. Most fans, I think, can accept this as long as the adaptation is done well. But there’s a bigger issue involved in The Dark Tower than your standard adaptation pitfalls: the eight books in the series are not wholly self-contained. They contain references to and characters from numerous other works of Stephen King’s, and a great many of his other books return the favor, containing references (sometimes blatant, sometimes oblique) to The Dark Tower itself. This causes a totally different problem when it comes to adapting the series: licensing rights. Over the five decades of his career, almost every story King has ever written has had the rights sold to one studio or filmmaker or another, and many of them are still held by those other companies. ‘Salem’s Lot and It, two novels that have quite important ties to the series, are both owned by Warner Bros. Another significant novel, The Stand, was the property of Paramount last time I checked. I don’t have a comprehensive list of where the rest of his works currently lie, but be confident in knowing that they’re all the heck over the place.

This guy is just WAITING for another go.

What this means is that, in order to adapt The Dark Tower, Flanagan is going to have to do one of two things: either negotiate the rights with all the other companies that own bits and pieces of King’s multiverse, or make changes to work around those properties he can’t get his hands on.

The good news is that probably the three MOST significant connections, from the three books I mentioned previously, are tied up in two companies that have merged into one; Warner Bros and Paramount are now both part of Skydance. That might make ironing out those wrinkles slightly easier…then again it might not. It depends largely on the attitude of the executives involved. But Flanagan worked with Warner Bros for Doctor Sleep, so presumably, there are already some inroads there.

Flanagan seems quite optimistic. It’s taking time to get this project started, but it IS moving forward. And if you look back at his previous work, he’s been aiming for this all along. As far back as his Gerald’s Game adaptation he was dropping Dark Tower references. He continued that in Doctor Sleep and Carrie, even though none of those properties are among the ones that are more directly connected to the Tower. It is entirely conceivable that Flanagan has already begun laying the groundwork for a Stephen King cinematic universe, the likes of which fans have long thought impossible, and that some of the plans he has for Carrie’s future include establishing elements he can use in his Dark Tower – such as characters he has the rights to that may take the place of characters he can’t get. (I’ve got no idea who owns the rights to Insomnia, for example, but it would be relatively simple to swap out the significant psychic who came from that novel with somebody else, and I doubt most fans would be terribly upset about it.)

If you’ve followed me for any length of time, you know how important The Dark Tower is to me. It’s one of my favorite series ever written. I met my wife on a long-defunct Dark Tower message board. It is entirely conceivable that, were it not for this series of novels, my son would not exist.

It kinda means something to me, is what I’m saying.

So I want to see justice done to these books as much as anybody alive. And after watching Carrie, I am more confident than ever that if we’re EVER going to get a successful version of The Dark Tower, it’s going to be thanks to Mike Flanagan. In the meantime, I’m looking at every King project he makes (and the next one is going to be a new version of The Mist – another highly linkable story) as one more brick in the long, long road to the Tower.

Because Flanagan knows, if anyone does, that all things serve the Beam.

…and the King of Queens. No, that’s a Kevin James sitcom. Oh, you get the point.

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can view his LitReel videos on TikTok and read his writerly yammerings on his free Substack.

Geek Punditry #84: Playing Favorites With School (Part One)

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It’s August, gang, and across this great fruited plain of ours, Americans are gearing up for that most turbulent of seasons: back to school. Many of us are already back in session, and the rest are getting ready to eke out those last bits of summertime fun before the doors fly open. Stores are stocked with pencils, students are picking out their first day outfits, parents are trying to get them to answer questions for their “Back to School” social media posts, and teachers are doing their best to keep the economy of Columbia solvent by buying all of the coffee. And what better way to commemorate this change of seasons than with another installment of everyone’s favorite Geek Punditry feature-within-a-feature, PLAYING FAVORITES? 

If you’re new, here’s how it works: a couple of weeks before a playing favorites column, I go out on social media and give my peeps a topic, such as SCHOOL, and ask them to suggest different categories for me to talk about. Then I select my favorite categories from your suggestions and tell you all what I think are some of the best of the best in each one of them. It’s a good time for everybody. So let’s see what kind of back to school shenanigans were on your minds this week, shall we?

Dawson Casting

Steven J. Rogers asked for some of my favorite examples of actors who are a little “long in the tooth” for their role as a high school student. The experts in this phenomenon (by which I mean the editors of TV Tropes) call it Dawson Casting, the practice of using actors in their 20s or even 30s to play high school students, named for the TV executive who invented the system, Herringbone Q. Casting.

No, seriously, it’s named for the show Dawson’s Creek, which is one of the most well-known examples of the trope, but it’s by no means the FIRST and certainly not the WORST. The trope goes back hundreds of years. Even Shakespeare is likely to have indulged in it – Hamlet, for instance, is supposed to be a college student, but there are lines in the fifth act that indicate that he used to get piggyback rides from his father’s court jester, who has explicitly been dead and buried for 23 years. Unless ol’ Yorick was playing games with Hamlet as a zygote, the math don’t math. 

There are two ways to look at this question: am I trying to figure out who did it BEST – as in, which older actors were most convincing as teens? Or am I trying to figure out who did it in the most ENTERTAINING fashion, as in making me burst out laughing when a guy who could be doing commercials for Metamucil saunters into homeroom? I’ll answer both.

Most of these kiddos are older than they look. Especially the one in the glasses.

As far as who was the most convincing, I think the crown has to go to the TV version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. When that show launched in 1997, Sarah Michelle Gellar was 20 playing a 15-year-old – and to be fair, that’s a much smaller gap than many Dawsons have had to contend with over the years. But she was the YOUNGEST member of the main cast. Alyson Hannigan was 23 and Nicolas Brendan 26, and all of them were pretty convincing as teenagers. The only one who you couldn’t really buy was Charisma Carpenter (27 at the time). And while you aren’t really shocked to hear that these actors were in their 20s, it’s not nearly as blatant as some of the more hilarious examples of this trope. 

In general, the shows that get away with this the best are the ones that don’t try to get away with as much. The high school students in Cobra Kai were mostly in their early 20s when the show began, and not noticeably too old. On Smallville, I don’t think that Tom Welling was really successful at convincing anybody that he was 14 years old in season one (the actor was 24 at the time), but the rest of the cast was mostly in their early 20s and far more convincing. I suppose the trick with pulling a Dawson is to not press your luck.

You know who DID press their luck? Stranger Things. It wasn’t a problem in the first couple of seasons – with the five main kids played by actual…y’know…KIDS. And even the teenagers were pretty convincing: Joe Keery (Steve) was 24 playing 17, Natalia Dyer (Nancy) was 21 playing 16, Charlie Heaton (Jonathan) was 22 playing 16, and all of them were believable as high school students. But the long gaps between seasons were starting to strain credulity even in season four, and Keery is going to be 32 playing 19 or 20 in the show’s upcoming final season. He may be able to pull it off, but the likes of Gaten Matarazzo (Dustin) and Finn Wolfhard (Mike) playing 15 at the age of 22 are going to be a harder sell, especially since we’re all so familiar with what they looked like AS KIDS. 

No really, it’s just two and a half years later.

But I don’t think any show has ever been as hilariously Dawsoned as the 70s sitcom Welcome Back, Kotter. When the show began in 1975, you had high school students played by John Travolta (then 21), Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs (23), Robert Hegyes (24) and Ron Palillo (26) and frankly, I would have guessed older for each of them. While they were around the same ages as many of the other “teenage” actors we’ve already discussed, they were nowhere near as successful at hiding their age. Alyson Hannigan could pass as a high school student, whereas Ron Palillo looked more like somebody’s podiatrist. Gabe Kaplan was once quoted as saying that the reason the show’s ratings collapsed after three seasons is that the cast was getting too old to convincingly play teenagers, which made me ask the obvious question: at what point DID he think they were convincing? 

“Signed, Epstein’s chiropractor.”

School Sitcoms

Rachel Ricks asked for some of my favorite school sitcoms. This is an interesting subject for me. Like so many of us, I grew up watching shows like Saved By The Bell, and I loved it. And while I never really thought that show was a documentary on the lives of high school students (I must have tried that “Time Out” thing a hundred times before I got hit by that marching snare drummer and decided to call it quits), I at least thought that it would get the SPIRIT of being high school right.

Damn, was that off. It’s almost hard to watch that show now, especially as a teacher myself, not only because of how inaccurate that show is in regards to how a school actually works, but because it casts virtually every adult as a total blithering idiot. Seriously, go back and watch that show sometime – it’s a miracle Mr. Belding can even tie his shoes. 

New drinking game: take a shot every time someone does something that should have gotten a teacher fired.

So when it comes to “school sitcoms,’ showing actual respect for teachers is a high priority for me, and that’s why I can’t stop talking about Abbott Elementary. It’s the rare school show that makes the teachers the stars rather than the students AND treats their characters with respect AND does a pretty accurate job of showing what school life is like. Granted, the teachers on that show have a bit more free time away from their students than a real elementary school teacher ever would, but I’m willing to allow that for the sake of comedy. What’s more, the characters all have real depth and charm, and most of them are very good at what they do. Plus the show deals with real issues such as government funding, parental involvement, and other issues that teachers fight against every single day, but does it in a way that’s entertaining. I can’t say enough good things about this show.

This is honestly my favorite comedy on TV right now.

I mentioned how the adults in Saved By the Bell are all buffoons. This is true, but it’s hardly exclusive to Bayside High. If you look back on the annals of TV shows in a school setting, I would guess 90 percent of the teachers (and parents, for that matter) are portrayed as morons. And for that reason, I have to have a special place in my heart for Boy Meets World. The show traces Ben Savage’s character (Cory Matthews) from elementary school through college, and although there were goofy grownups on occasion, that was by no means the norm. In fact, the show gives us William Daniels as Mr. Feeny, probably the Gold Standard against which all TV teachers should be measured. He’s compassionate, wise, understanding, but firm when necessary. He’s almost as much a parent to Cory as he is a teacher. Is it really realistic that he taught the same group of kids from fifth grade until they’re going for their undergraduate degrees? Absolutely not. But it’s an acceptable break from reality in the name of keeping such a fantastic character front and center in the show.

What Bandit Heeler is to fathering, Mr. Feeny is to teachering.

And although it’s not a television show, I love Archie Comics. I mean CLASSIC Archie Comics, their teenage sitcom romcom years, not the way they were adapted on Riverdale. I’m talking about the eight decades of comic strips about Archie Andrews struggling to choose between Betty and Veronica and going to Riverdale High. As a kid, I loved reading the stories (Jughead was kind of an icon for me) and as an adult I’ve come to appreciate the fact that the faculty of Riverdale High School – Miss Grundy, Professor Flutesnoot, Coach Clayton, Mr. Weatherbee – are usually portrayed as good, caring teachers who are doing their best for their students, even if they’re doing so while trying to avoid whatever catastrophe Archie is pulling along in his wake. 

To date, not a single one of my students has prompted me to write a bestseller. Get your act together, kids.

High School Superheroes

Lew Beitz wants to know who some of my favorite high school superheroes are. It’s an interesting question – in the early days of comic books, there weren’t a lot of teenage superheroes. The kids were relegated to the sidekick role for most of the Golden Age, and it wasn’t until the 60s – specifically with the introduction of Spider-Man – that having a teenager as the main star of a superhero series started to come into vogue. Spidey eventually went off to college and became an adult, but he remains the template for superheroes that are still in their high school years. Everyone from Firestorm to Invincible to Ms. Marvel (the current Kamala Khan version) has drawn inspiration from those early Stan Lee/Steve Ditko comics, and none of them are shy about it.

I’m going to try to limit my response to characters for whom school – or at least their classmates – are a major factor in their stories. Teen Titans, for example, isn’t going to work because the vast majority of those comics don’t include school as a setting at all, instead being the stories of kid superheroes who hang out independently of their own lives. So keeping school in mind, it’s hard to think of anybody who has done it better than Peter Parker’s DAUGHTER (in one corner of the multiverse, anyway), May Parker, the amazing Spider-Girl. Created by Tom DeFalco and Ron Frenz in 1997, this storyline comes from a world where Peter Parker aged more or less in “real time” from the 1960s and, at this point, had a teenage daughter who inherited his powers. Originally intended as a one-off character in an issue of What If?, “Mayday” Parker proved wildly popular and spun off into her own long-running series. And just like her dad, the supporting cast was largely full of her high school contemporaries – friends, rivals, potential love interests and so forth. Few comic books since those early days of Amazing Spider-Man had made such good use of the cast of teenagers, and I think it’s one of the reasons that this series remains a fan favorite, even though these days May herself only pops up once in a while during a “Spider-Verse” thing.

What I love about this cover is that it’s bold enough to ask “Who is she?” and dumb enough to answer the same question at the top.

And although Lew specified HIGH school, I have to give a special shout out to a series about ELEMENTARY school superheroes, Aaron Williams’ PS238. This comic book featured a cast of preteen titans, many of them the children of adult superheroes, who attended a special school deep beneath a “normal” elementary school where they were all ostensibly students. The book is really funny, and does a great job of picking apart many of the tropes and cliches of superhero comics. One student, for example, has the amusingly dull superhero code name “84,” because she is the 84th person registered with the standard FISS (flight, invulnerability, speed, and strength) powerset. Although the book IS very funny, it’s also a solid superhero comic book, creating a rich world with a fascinating history and a lot of secrets to uncover. The comic lasted only 51 issues, which wasn’t nearly long enough, although Williams has continued the adventures of the characters as a webcomic. 

One of the best comic books you’ve never read.

High School Horror

Finally my wife Erin – who absolutely understands her brand – wants me to talk about my favorite high school horror movies. And naturally, there is one that leaps right to the forefront of the mind, a chilling, terrifying tale that will ring out through the annals of academia from now until the end of time.

Project ALF.

Highly educational.

Actually, this might not be as easy as it sounds. Sure, there’s no shortage of horror movies about TEENAGERS, but how many of them actually have SCHOOL as a dominant setting? Friday the 13th, of course, is set at a summer camp. Some of the other stalwarts of the slasher genre like Halloween, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Scream, may incorporate a school into the story (especially in the earlier installments), but the school is largely incidental. If the characters weren’t teenagers, you could have them all going to work and not much else would need to be changed.

So for horror that’s actually ABOUT a school, I’m going to give a shout out to a movie that I really think is underrated – Robert Rodriguez’s sci-fi/horror movie The Faculty. In what is essentially an updated version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Frodo Baggins and a group of high school students start to see signs that the faculty of their high school have become overcome by parasitic alien invaders, conquerors from beyond the stars who are coming to take over the Earth. Of course, it’s only this band of high school misfits that have a hope of stopping them. The Faculty came out in 1998, riding a wave of post-Scream teenage horror movies, and it somewhat got lost in the mix. But it’s a good movie, one that defies the surge of slasher knockoffs that it was swimming amongst, and has its own identity that’s pretty darn entertaining.

And this time it didn’t take Elijah Wood twelve hours of movie time to save the world.

Carrie, of course, is another classic of this particular subgenre. The movie is based on Stephen King’s first published novel, so the story of Carrie White really is what made his name in two different mediums. Sissy Spacek is Carrie – a teenage girl who has lived a sheltered life with a brutal, unforgiving fundamentalist mother. A rather late onset of physical maturation brings with it a telekinetic power of great destructive potential, and when her crueler classmates push Carrie too far, the blood flows. It’s a great movie, although I’ve always felt like Carrie was less a villain than a victim – an innocent who is beaten and berated until she actually breaks, and when someone with her kind of powers break, the consequences will be devastating. 

Finally, as someone who enjoys a good horror/comedy hybrid, I want to give a shout out to the 2020 film Freaky, directed by Christopher Landon and written by Landon and Michael Kennedy. This film is a slasher movie crossed with the body swap comedy of Freaky Friday. Millie Kessler, a bullied high school senior (Kathryn Newton), is attacked by a serial killer called the Blissfield Butcher (Vince Vaughan), who has gotten his hands on a cursed knife. The attack winds up swapping their minds, placing the Butcher’s consciousness in Millie’s body and vice versa (which is another example of a body swap comedy). A lot of the fun of this movie comes from watching Vaughn’s performance as a teenage girl, trying to get Millie’s friends on his side while Newton goes on a killing spree. It’s a really good movie, and helped Newton blow up to a point where she’s showing up in Marvel movies, while still doing indie horror like Lisa Frankenstein.

I’ve watched this trilogy seven times and it still doesn’t make a damned bit of sense.

That’s it for this week, guys. There will be more Playing Favorites next week, and if you’ve got some more suggestions, they’re welcome. In the meantime, a reminder for those parents who have yet to get their kids back-to-school supplies:

There is no excuse for Rose Art crayons. Ever. Just don’t. 

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. Have you ever tried to color an entire page with one of those stupid Rose Art sticks? You may as well be using a candle.