It terrified and confused me and, like so much of King's work, felt like it was giving me an unflinching, unfiltered glimpse into how adults think and live. In a world of half-truths and deception, King's fiction always told me the truth about humanity.
But my access point for that book was the 1990 It TV miniseries. I recorded it (on my Betamax VCR!) and watched it over and over and over again.
The It miniseries was a pop-culture juggernaut, too. 30 million people watched it. (The novel was the best-selling book of 1986, too.)
Quick plot summary, in case you don't know It. (Me? I'm sexy and I know It.) An inhuman force lives in the sewers of small-town Derry, Maine and has a feeding cycle every 27 years. The "it" of the title mostly manifests as a malignant clown, but it can appear as whatever scares you most. It feeds on children and the fear it instills in them adds flavor. As the story goes along, we learn how truly cosmic and epic this force is, along with how it has haunted the town of Derry for centuries. Seven kids stand tall, take It on, then come back to confront It once and for all as adults.
It's not an unpopular work. It needs no defense. I was gonna write a lengthy, wistful reminiscence about my experience re-reading It over the past couple months now that I happen to be the age of its adult characters, compared to reading It for the first time when I was the age of its childhood characters. But this article already says almost word-for-word what I was gonna say. So, never mind.
Instead, let's jump right to the new movie...
In no particular order (SOME SPOILERS FOLLOW!):
I have no problem with the new movie playing fast-and-loose with the book. This adaptation is as close to the novel as Stanley Kubrick's The Shining was to that King novel. And that's fine. Movies are movies. Books are books. If I want the book, I can read that.
Funny thing: the movie feels like an R-rated Stranger Things, even though Stranger Things was basically a PG-13 Stephen King pastiche.
This movie is FREAKING TERRIFYING! Saw it with three pretty jaded horror-loving friends and we were all screaming and jumping along with the rest of the enthusiastic crowd. There are some soul-wreckingly great spooky images in here.
Couple cute throwaway references to the reality-spawning Turtle, but I get why that was too wack a concept to really address in the movie.
The 1990 miniseries is not a masterpiece, but I love it for sentimental reasons and the kids and clown in there will always be my kids and clown. But the new Pennywise gives the role a run for its money. He destroys in every scene he's in. Now, I still feel Tim Curry did a better job appearing initially benign and then going psycho-maniacal-clown. This new Pennywise looks terrifying right from the start, there's no alluringly safe fun-clown baseline. To the movie's credit, they ramp it up and make Pennywise look really REALLY inhumanly scary to pump up the fear factor, especially during the neat slideshow scene.
And the kids are all lovable and fun. Great performances, lots of good offhand humor and trenchant emotional moments. Mike Hanlon is short-changed, and as a librarian, I felt slighted there. In the book, he's passionate about the evil town's evil history and researches and catalogs it and grows up to be a librarian. In the movie, they made the new kid, Ben, the history buff instead and just made Mike a sort of farmer-warrior. Meh. MIKE HANLON IS MY LIBRARIAN! DON'T MESS WITH MY LIBRARIAN!
A kid dies right off the bat and it's ugly and drawn-out. I'm guessing they went so hard with that scene because the same scene in the 1990 version copped-out and faded to black.
Speaking of cop-outs, that ending...I am not upset that they throttled the underage sewer gang-bang, nor did I feel shortchanged by (almost) no giant spider action and zero Ritual of Chud. BUT...the floating kids...Uh...
The famous tagline for the film/book delivered tauntingly by Pennywise to his victims is, "Come with me! You'll float!" Now in the book, the floating is abstract. It devours the children's souls and their spiritual forms proceed to kind of float in a nether-dimension. It's disturbing and scary. In this movie...they walk into Pennywise's lair and there are kids up in the air...floating. The kids are still alive. Which means Pennywise is just taking the kids down below and making them magically float, rather than devouring them.
Now, I get that depicting/implying hundreds of child murders is a pretty tough thing to pull off in a corporately-funded motion picture, but that's what Pennywise does. It is an incredibly, mind-bogglingly evil monster. But at the end of the movie, our heroes save the bulk of those "floating" kids.
I dunno. The image of the kids floating in Pennywise's lair is kind of cool, but that was the only change that really took me out of the narrative. It weakened the impact substantially, but I imagine if you hadn't read the book, it wouldn't bother you as much.
On that note, the kids in the movie defeat the monster because they're together and not afraid. They bypassed the book's notion that they won because they believed in magic. Fair enough, but that hamstrings the adult narrative to come, because the biggest challenge the adults face in fighting Pennywise is that they don't believe in magic anymore.
I suspect they'll retcon it with a throwaway line in the sequel like, "Oh! We REALLY beat Pennywise as kids because we all believed in magic!" Nah. Not fooling me. That's a thematic ball-drop.
(SPOILERS END HERE!)
A neat feature King built into his book It that makes it sublimely re-readable (I revisit It about once a decade and it feels fresh every time) is that it begins with the adult characters not remembering any of their nightmarish childhood experiences. So along the way, you're re-remembering everything as the adults re-remember it. A great device for drawing you in, as it builds mounting terror and resonance along the way.
The new movie doesn't quite have the same repeat value. It's very effective with the jump scares and soul-shatteringly freakish imagery. I've seen hundreds (probably thousands) of horror movies, and this one had some scenes and ideas that I have not encountered before. Very well-executed with the relentless terror bits.
So it'll shake up the audience, all well and good, but that doesn't usually work on multiple viewings. It is probably a hot movie for the moment, but not a lasting classic. Time will tell.
Overall, the movie deserves its massive accolades (Stephen King himself liked It and saw the film twice), as well as historic financial success. Worth seeing in a theater, preferably a crowded one full of people being scared out of their pants.
Good for It. I look forward to the sequel.
-Phony McFakename
Excellent use of It puns.
ReplyDeleteThanks. It was hard to resist.
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