IT or miss?
Stephen King’s killer clown is back
Of all the grimly iconic images Stephen King can be credited with thinking up – those slaughtered sisters in The Shining, that pig’s-blood deluge in Carrie – there’s one that stands out as so evilly nightmarish, it’s hard to watch. It’s the sight of an innocent young boy, Georgie, being dragged into a storm drain by a child-eating clown – the name’s Pennywise – and never seen, or at least not in living form, again.
Whatever warped part of King’s imagination poor Georgie’s fate in the 1986 novel It sprang from, the horror of the idea is hideous enough to have powered two separate adaptations: first the Warner miniseries in 1990, starring an unforgettable Tim Curry, and now a two-part film version. The biggest change is what’s been done to the period, which has jumped forward three decades. Instead of beginning with Georgie’s disappearance in 1960, we’re in the summer of 1988, which is roughly when the present-day, all-adults-now second half of King’s story originally took place.
This lets the new It buy into the current vogue for Eighties teen-flick nostalgia. Expect much tootling around the fictional Maine village of Derry on bikes, as Georgie’s older brother Bill (Jaeden Lieberher) and six friends try to get to the bottom of the nameless evil afflicting their community, which has suffered a spate of unexplained child abductions ever since Georgie got sucked into that sewer.
Andy Muschietti’s film has a lot to whip through in just over two hours, even though this one is only tackling half the book – a gruelling 1,138 pages. Every one of the “Losers’ Club” – that’s Bill and his cohort – is separately menaced by the thing they most fear, as well as being more straightforwardly persecuted, in classic Stand By Me style, by a group of older school bullies. As a vision of violence and depravity in small-town America, King’s book hardly pulled its punches: there’s a subplot about domestic child abuse, letters being carved into a fat boy’s stomach, racial assaults against the lone black kid (Chosen Jacobs), and so on.
But this is very much a ring-thechanges update, with state-of-the-art grisliness to match. Muschietti, who made his debut with Mama (2013), makes the most of every new apparition at his disposal, unleashing them all to do their bit with stadiumrock swagger. Differing from the more Fiftes-themed ghouls in the book or miniseries, they lunge at their victims with deranged Modigliani faces, or rotting ones, or none at all.
Every one of them is just an alter ego for the shape-shifting Pennywise, an insatiable, inter-dimensional predator whose practically motiveless evil remains every bit as unnerving as it was when Curry played him. This time, the role falls to Bill Skarsgård – son of Stellan, brother of True Blood’s Alexander – speaking with a rogue Swedish accent that only adds to the skilful grotesquery of his performance.
He’s helped by a more extreme make-up job – childishly malign and goofy in the mouth, where Curry chilled the marrow with just a bland smile over razor-sharp yellow teeth. Working with a far bigger budget, the effects team allow this Pennywise to contort himself impossibly as he unfurls his bulk from a disused fridge, or emerges twitching from the puppet-like body of a dead boy. He’s a very successful reinvention of a classic villain, not quite doing all the film’s work as commandingly as Curry, but absolutely stoking your dread of his next appearance.
The gut-grabbing intensity of the film’s attack scenes, if anything, causes a problem: it creates a devil of a time building flow. These episodes are so individually frightening that the chirpier interstitial parts don’t gel – it’s as if these terrorised kids keep forgetting the nerve-shredding sights they’ve seen moments before. Tying their adventures into a potent whole is slightly beyond Muschietti’s powers.
Lieberher, though, and Sophia Lillis as the lone girl, invest their parts with a nuance and sympathy that pull us through in the long run. As a rattling ghost-train ride through sewers and derelict houses that even David Lynch would think twice before exploring, the film toot-toots its way around, but settles for doing only partial justice to King’s epic ambitions.
Perhaps Muschietti has more of these stored up for the sequel, once an audience has gained faith that the scary stuff – petrifying, when it peaks – is well and truly in hand.
‘The effects team allow this Pennywise to contort himself impossibly as he unfurls his bulk from a disused fridge’