IT happens
Stephen King’s fear-soaked masterpiece hits the big screen at last. Joseph McCabe discovers its filmmakers aren’t clowning around...
It’s a beautiful story of friendship and loss
FEW WrITErS hAvE tapped so deeply into the trauma and fears of childhood as Stephen King. From his first published novel, the quintessential coming-ofage fable Carrie, to his novella “The Body”, the basis for Stand By Me, King’s stories have cut to the heart of growing up; often using terror as a metaphor. None of King’s tales, however, tackle the theme so thoroughly as IT.
First published in 1986, the bug-crushing book (at 1,138 pages, the author’s longest up until that time) chronicles the adventures of “The Losers Club”, a gang of seven social misfits living in the small town of Derry, Maine in 1958. Suffering abuse at the hands of the local bullies and their own parents, the gang runs afoul of the quintessential bogeyman – an immortal demon preying for centuries on the town’s children, while controlling the minds of Derry’s adult citizens. “IT” most often takes the form of Pennywise, a clown creepy enough to give the Joker nightmares. half the book focuses on the gang as kids, the other half as full-grown adults scarred by their experiences.
A 1990 television miniseries adaptation saw Pennywise played by actor Tim Curry, but left many King fans unsatisfied due its budget and commercial Tv limitations. A remake was in the works for the best part of a decade, with True Detective’s Cary Fukunaga attached to direct before departing the project over creative differences with studio New Line Cinema. Thankfully, Fukunaga’s replacement, Andrés Muschietti, is no newcomer to big-screen horror. The writer-director of the 2013 blockbuster Mama, the filmmaker and his producer/sister Bárbara Muschietti (Mama’s co-writer) are lifelong fans of the genre, with a special love of 1980s horror classics.
“Clive Barker left a big imprint on me,” says Muschietti. “John Carpenter – The Thing is one of my favourite movies. Joe Dante – The Howling was one of my favorite movies ever.” Unsurprisingly, the Muschiettis also fell in love with King growing up in ’80s Argentina.
“We grew up with his books,” Bárbara tells SFX when we chat with the duo in their offices at Warner Bros Studios in Burbank. After a three-month shoot, they’ve toiled in postproduction for six weeks. Buoyed by positive feedback from test screenings and the online reaction to the film’s teaser trailer, they now have ten weeks left to fine-tune the frights in their take on the novel’s kid-centric half. A second film, centred on its adult protagonists, is expected to start filming in 2018.
king’s court
A big devotee of King’s novel, Andrés points out that IT offers much more than mere scares.
“There’s a really emotional build through the group. It’s a beautiful story of friendship and loss and love. There’s a lot of different emotions happening. If you’ve read the story of IT, you know the big moments that are there. But there’s also a love triangle, a struggle to stay alive, not only from the threat of the monster but also from the families, because there’s all kinds of abuse and neglect. So it’s a full drama.
“The approach to the movie,” explains the filmmaker, “was an exercise in staying true to the emotional experience I had reading Stephen King’s original work. Even though the transport to film is such a different thing, that emotional attachment is something that I wanted to preserve. Then, of course, [I had to] make a movie that I would enjoy as an adult. So that was the balancing act.”
To that end, Andrés explains that the film deviates from the novel in some of the forms IT takes while terrorizing the young heroes.
“That was something that has to do with my experiences,” says the director. “Because the