The fears of a clown
Pennywise’s scare tactics get tired and repetitive
The latest adaptation of Stephen King’s 1986 novel about Pennywise, the creepy clown who feeds on children by inducing them to hallucinate their worst fears, was not an easy movie to make. The novel interlaces two narratives set in different time periods; its setting, the town of Derry, is awash in deep geographical lore, and infamously, its monster is a clown.
That’s an archetype difficult to render scary instead of silly, but Bill Skarsgård and his loony, lilting voice do a pretty decent job of following up Tim Curry’s exceptionally creepy interpretation of Pennywise in the 1990 TV adaptation.
While most King fans have been preoccupied with the film’s treatment of Pennywise, few have raised concerns about the representation of Beverly Marsh (Sophia Lillis), the sole girl among the 11-year-old protagonists. The sweet-faced tomboy is the most courageous character in the self-proclaimed Losers Club. The book wasn’t particularly kind to Beverly, though that’s emblematic of King’s treatment of women characters (which he changed to some success in the 1990s).
It splits the cross-cutting narrative into two separate chapters (the second film comes out next year). The kids’ respective fears have also been altered to be loosely based on some aspect of their marginalization.
Half of the audience will immediately recognize Beverly’s fear: burgeoning womanhood. Her first encounter with the clown’s dark magic is in the bathroom, when large tentacle strings of hair and muck and grossness grab her before spewing and drenching the bathroom with blood. It’s one of the film’s most shocking scenes, and becomes creepy when Beverly’s lecherous, bewildered father Alvin (Stephen Bogaert) claims he doesn’t see blood (her friends do, and help clean up).
This is one of the few good Beverly scenes in the book and movie. Her fear grows as her own body changes, and in the face of increasingly lewd and overprotective comments made by her father.
The movie hints if Alvin isn’t already sexually abusive, he soon will be. But the 2017 adaptation of It struggles to make sense of Beverly’s particularly gendered fears in one near-rape scene. She successfully thwarts her dad’s attack — it’s an important moment to champion, given the graveness of the situation.
But instead of being empowering or cathartic, the movie then inserts a sudden appearance of Pennywise to scare Beverly some more.
The rest of the film’s scary scenes might not be as problematic but they are increasingly less effective over the course of the film. It opens with the muchpromoted scene of a young boy lured by Pennywise into a sewer entrance. It’s a well-crafted introduction, atmospheric in its use of rain, and memorable in the use of childhood iconography (a yellow raincoat and paper boat). You can feel the writers’ strain to make Pennywise’s subsequent turns as effective.
The variety of the kids’ scary hallucinations — wooden doll clowns, burning hands, a zombielike leper — isn’t enough to keep multiple scare scenes in a row from feeling arduously repetitive. It works best exploring the comedic, playful and tightly knit dynamic between the boys — Finn Wolfhard and Jaeden Lieberher are especially notable in their respective roles as Richie and Bill — proving that King’s strength really lies in depicting boys’ clubs.