Movie Review - IT

My grandmother is a big Stephen King fan. In the 1980s she was the kind of fan who would get each new Stephen King book the day it came out, no questions asked. So growing up, I would often see a long shelf of hardback books, all written by Stephen King. Obviously, looking down that long shelf It was the book that really stood out. Such a huge book. And with such a small title, it was able to appear, giant, on the spine. Two letters that caught your eye at once staring at the bookshelf. “IT.”

It, the book is huge. The last time it was adapted it had to be done as a mini-series to try and get enough screen time to adapt the story. This is one of the books that often appears on lists of “unfilmable” works just because of how massive it is. The new It movie approaches this issue by only attempting to adapt half of the book.

It is the story of a group of kids who have to face off against an unspeakable evil that inhabits their town, and their return to the town as adults to finish off the evil for good when it comes back. While the two stories are intertwined in the novel, the movie breaks them apart, focusing only on the kinds portion of the story with the idea that the second part would be told in a potential sequel. (A sequel that seems like a guarantee after the massive box office success of the first movie.)

It is flat out an incredible movie. It’s tricky to have a movie like this where your main characters are a cast of seven child actors but there’s honestly not a bad one in the lot of them. Jaeden Lieberher who plays Bill, the default leader of the group, carries the emotional weight of the story as it’s his brother that’s gone missing. There are a few standout moments where Bill is faced with the absence of his brother that are incredible. Of the group Finn Wolfhard who plays Richie will probably be the most recognizable as he is best known for playing Mike on Netflix’s Stranger Things. The comparisons between the movie and Stranger Things are probably inevitable at this point as so much of the DNA from the original novel was used in creating the formula that is Stranger Things, but It is it’s own unique thing that is able to command your attention.

Despite its popularity, horror can be a tricky genre to get right. Trying to get people invested enough in a story and group of characters to scare them can be a difficult thing to do, and more often than not, a movie will just default to the cheap jump scare to try and replicate that feeling. That’s not to say that jump scares are inherently bad. It is a near masterclass on how to effectively scare your audience. There are so many scenes where the scary thing happens only to get topped seconds later in the time frame that supposed to serve as a calming down moment. There are a few scenes in particular that have appeared in the trailer. Scenes that you think you know where they're going if you’ve read the book or seen the trailer, only to have the rug pulled out from under you. The truly scary sequences are the ones that do not let up. It has the perfect blend of jump scares that startle you in the moment, and that existential dread that is going to make you walk to your car just a little bit faster when the movie is done.

But we have to talk about Bill Skarsgard’s portrayal of Pennywise the clown. Pennywise is one of the more iconic roles that Tim Curry performed, and is the part of the original mini-series that is most fondly remembered today. (In fact the performance is probably more fondly remembered than the mini-series itself) So it’s no small feat to try and slip into those clown shoes and create a performance that can stand alongside, but still separate from Curry’s interpretation. And Skarsgard nails it. Pennywise is scary, funny, creepy, silly, and the perfect blend of a unsettling nightmare and a goofy antagonist of a children’s movie. If you’ll forgive my nerding out on you for a moment, the titular character of It, isn’t  a clown exactly. Rather the clown is a form that is sometimes taken by an ancient trans-dimensional evil being that lurks in the darkness and is able to feed off of the fear of others. It’s an evil beyond the description that words can give it and one of the most Lovecraftian creatures that King has created. That being said, most of the Lovecraft style creature will probably come to the surface in the second movie (we do get a brief glimpse of the deadlights which will cause King fanatics to freak out) so for all intents and purposes, the villain in this movie is a clown. Skarsgard is given a fairly difficult task here, but he’s able to come up with one of the most unsettling monsters in recent memory.

Clearly this movie has struck a chord with the movie going public. It’s smashed through all kinds of records, highest grossing September release ever, this movie has made back more than ten times its budget in one week. When things like that happen, Hollywood scrambles to try and figured out what happened and how they can replicate that success. But I hope in all the meetings about how September is the new month for horror, and we need to cash in on 80s nostalgia, and rated R is in vogue again, we don’t forget that one of the biggest contributing factors to the movie’s success is how good of a movie it is.