prev I think his problem is that he's a lazy entitled hack, honestly?
Remember those parody horror adaptations from a few years ago, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies?
I think Flanagan is just as lazy but less self-aware. He doesn't really see the problem with taking a Shirley Jackson or Stephen King original concept, tacking his own crappy half-formed idea onto it, and repackaging it as a creative adaptation.
Flanagan isn't really adapting these original works. Adaptations are supposed to use the original material as a springboard into some new creative work.
For example, in A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley adapted the story of King Lear into a new story about a misogynist landowner and the cruelty he inflicts on all three of his daughters.
Smiley's adaptation took the source material into account. She used Lear's pride, his patriarchal entitlement, his alternately callous and grasping behavior towards his daughters, and the sorrow and bitterness that drove them into conflict with each other. She maintained much of the character and plot detail, and where she kept it she made sure to account for its effect on the story.
Smiley also built something new. Her adaptation focuses on the perspectives of Regan and Goneril, who in her version are heroic survivors. She also highlights the consequences of Lear's selfishness for the land itself. This theme was certainly present in King Lear, but she brings it to the foreground, and transforms it from a war of succession into generational environmental depredation. She also opted to change emotional incest into actual explicit incest, because she was interested in exploring patriarchal abuse of women.
Similarly, it would be interesting to see a version of Carrie whose mother is a tradwife influencer attached to a megachurch. Imagine the shower scene as a viral video staged by her mother! Who knows if that would be good, but it would be a creative exploration of the themes from the original: misogyny, shame, exposure, bullying. It would also involve using details from the original - the mother's inability to see her daughter as a person - to explore these themes in a new way.
If you "adapt" original work without acknowledging the source material or connecting it to a fully-realized new idea, you're just appropriating. You're using the reputation and quality of a more famous original work to add luster to your own thin premise.
It's clear that Flanagan doesn't respect the source material. He turned his Shirley Jackson "adaptation" into a paean to the transcendent love of the nuclear family. He doesn't care about what these original works are trying to say. He just likes the vibes. Spooky British Manor! Spooky Vampire Island! Spooky Telekinetic Girl!
It's hard to ignore the source material and use it effectively to build something new (imagine a version of King Lear where he's presented as a good dad), but it doesn't seem like Flanagan is even trying to present a novel idea. His works are atmospheric and competent, but they're just a hash of horror tropes. His Netflix series were more like a collection of vignettes than a cohesive story.
This idea is an interesting one, but it's not Carrie, and it doesn't sound like he really plans to think through the horror implications of "a mother who tries to create a private utopia for a sensitive girl who turns out to have telekinetic powers."
I think Flanagan doesn't see the difference because nobody ever told him that being a horror auteur is about more than gorging on the classics and then huffing your own farts.
