Carrie

De Palma's film is Stephen King's first published novel, made two years after it appeared, and it is the film that established King as adaptable at all. It keeps the shower scene that opens the book, the mother's religious violence, the invitation that looks like mercy and is a trap, and the telekinesis that arrives with puberty. What it drops is the novel's frame: King tells the story through inquest documents and extracts from books written afterwards, so the reader knows from the first pages that the town was destroyed. The film plays it forward instead.

Eleven is assembled from King's telekinetic girls, and the Duffer brothers have named them: Carrie and Firestarter. From Carrie specifically: a girl whose power arrives with adolescence and is treated as an affliction, who is tormented by people who do not understand what she can do, and whose release of it is both triumph and catastrophe. The nose bleeding under strain is King's image. Filed MEDIUM. Firestarter supplies the other half of Eleven, the government laboratory and the numbered subject, so the character carries two King debts at once.