‘It: Chapter Two’ — In Praise of Pennywise
Stephen King’s most terrifying character is at his nightmare-inducing, all-time best
In a nutshell, It: Chapter Two is a better movie than the first one. The upgrade to the adult version of the “Losers Club” — now played by Jessica Chastain, Bill Hader, James McAvoy, and others — makes the story feel less like a faded copy of other films and TV shows that have cannibalized Stephen King’s work in the name of homage (looking at you, Stranger Things). It’s as much about trauma, healing, and making peace with your past as it is about jump scares. The ending is . . . well, it’s the book’s ending, which, yeesh. And the clown? The clown is even more terrifying this time around. Seriously.
When King conceived It, he admitted that the idea was to write an epic book featuring, in his words, “all of the monsters.” The vampire, the werewolf, the mummy — the entire stable of vintage-horror, bump-in-thenight fodder. But he needed one character outside this old creature-feature canon, something that would inspire a sense of fear and revulsion on sight. “What scares kids the most?” he asked himself. Thus was born Pennywise, circus-centric chomper of children, destroyer of innocence, the most name-recognizable King creation this side of Cujo, and the single most horrifying nightmare the author ever dreamed up. The monster-mash idea quickly went away. Who needs
Frankenstein’s monster when you have a fucked-up clown?
And with all due respect to Tim Curry, whose portrayal of Pennywise in the 1990 TV miniseries scarred a generation, it’s Swedish actor Bill Skarsgård’s interpretation of this fright-haired bogeyman that has made the character iconic. His introduction as a voice and a pair of glowing eyes beckoning a little boy to come closer, closer, closer to a sewer grate channeled the book’s mix of Grimm’s Fairy Tale and gross-out horror flick. Now, in Chapter Two, we get an even more off-the-leash Pennywise from him, one that ups the drooling and the singsong voice and the rancid, perverse giggling. When he lures a little girl into his trap under the bleachers, you see Skarsgård go from dopey to dreamlike to slightly demented, before finding the predatory sweet spot of sympathetic vulnerability. Then out spring the fangs, and you see every childhood nightmare come to life.
King’s greatest works have always revolved around finding a primal-fear button and brutally mashing it, and Pennywise was his phobic masterpiece in pancake makeup. On the page, he read like a precisely pitched blend of Freddie Krueger and Ronald McDonald. Onscreen, he feels like he’s burrowing into your psyche. “There were points where I felt like I was going insane,” Skarsgård said after playing the role the first time. For Round Two, he succeeds in making viewers feel they’re going insane — which makes him the perfect King nightmare for 2019. Accept no psycho-clown substitutes.