If the embed won’t play, the Carrie trailer is also here on YouTube.
Halloween may have been and gone, but nobody seems to have told America’s sofas. The latest Nielsen streaming chart has two horror series sitting in its top four, and both are reinventions of films that were frightening audiences when flares were still a fashion choice.
At No. 2 is Mike Flanagan’s Carrie for Prime Video, which pulled in about 1.1 billion viewing minutes in its second week. All eight episodes dropped on 7 October, with Summer H. Howell as Carrie White, Samantha Sloyan as her fearsomely devout mother Margaret, and Matthew Lillard as Principal Grayle. Flanagan directs four of the episodes himself. Prime Video has already renewed it for a second season, which raises the delicate question of what you do after the prom. Stephen King’s novel isn’t exactly built for sequels, unless season two is going to be very much about the cleaning bill.
Two places further down, Peacock’s Friday the 13th prequel Crystal Lake has entered the chart at No. 4 in its premiere week, with about 774 million minutes viewed. When we looked at the series last month, the talk was of Linda Cardellini’s excellent Pamela Voorhees and of a twist involving young Jason that sent the canon police reaching for their machetes. Viewers evidently didn’t let the lore arguments put them off. There’s no renewal yet, although the showrunners have already been talking about their plans for a second season. Given the franchise’s track record, Pam could be headed for space by season four.
Not every genre launch did as well. Disney+’s VisionQuest failed to make the Nielsen chart at all in its premiere week, despite topping Disney+’s own internal rankings in the US and worldwide. That says less about the show than about the gap between a streamer’s own numbers and everyone else’s minutes.
Put these alongside Dead-End Job at No. 2 on Netflix’s global chart and Clayface becoming the highest-grossing body-horror film ever, and it’s hard to avoid the obvious conclusion. Horror has eaten the autumn. The genre that used to sit on the bottom shelf of the video shop, next to the karate films, is now how the streaming giants keep their subscribers from cancelling. Carrie White, the girl nobody would sit next to, has turned out to be the most popular kid in school after all. It only took fifty-two years and a bucket of something red.
Source: Nielsen figures via Cancelled Sci Fi.
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