Although the general consensus as to why Stephen King movies are often so dejectedly terrible — while their source material is so beloved — is that King’s fast-and-loose approach to his own film rights usually leaves them in the possession of the first film studio to deposit a bag of unmarked bills in his P.O. Box, that’s not the whole story. Sure, his indifference as to the kind of filmmaker gains custody over his stories doesn’t help matters, but the true reason for all the terrible Stephen King movies is a little more complicated than that.
Despite his books’ omnipresence on the Best Seller lists, he is actually something of an acquired taste: always writing in a circumlocutory, meandering style that makes every novel last at least twice as long as it strictly speaking had to in order to convey the basics of its plot and characters. He’s the author equivalent of It’s a Wonderful Life: the best way to approach his stories is evidently also the longest, saturating every chapter with a depth and sense of lived-in realism that other contemporary authors — certainly other popular contemporary authors — simply can’t compete with.
And of his vast library of material, none is more Steven King than It: a sprawling, generational epic about a group of friends’ lifelong fight against the vague, Lovecraftian horror nesting menacingly in their hometown of Derry, Maine. Clocking in at over one thousand pages long and spanning nearly three decades, it has long been considered his most unfillable story outside of The Dark Tower series, and we all know how that movie turned out in the end.
They even tried — and, by most accounts, failed — to adapt the novel back in 1990. Instead of a single film, they made it into a miniseries, hoping that the increased length would account for its unwieldly length. Aside from what is arguably Tim Curry’s most iconic performance, they failed to balance the story’s intimate character moments with its darkly idealistic setting. Although it terrified a generation of impressionable horror fans that didn’t know any better, it is viewed today as a sad misrepresentation of what might just be King’s best novel.
The genius of It, though — the 2017 remake, that is — is that it understands the limitations of the novel and the medium that they’re trying to adapt it for. There was never any chance that they could fit its entire, sprawling story into a 90-odd minute runtime, so they didn’t try. They worked around it, trimming the fat to give us a single, stand-alone chapter in the battle between good and evil.
When Bill’s little brother Georgie disappears on a stormy afternoon — happily chasing his paper boat as it cuts along the overflowing gutters — he becomes obsessed with discovering what happened to him, long after everybody else, including his grieving parents, write him off as dead. But when his investigation leads him into the cryptic sewer system winding beneath their seemingly normal town, they discover a creature of unfathomable evil. They discover It.
Waking like a locust every 27 years, It feeds off of the fears and flesh of the citizens of the town above: especially those of its children. It took Georgie into the sewers, and now It has set its sights on the so-called Loser’s Club: Bill and his group of outcast friends, who come together in a desperate bid to save themselves from It’s insatiable appetite.
Although It is not without the its problems — notably, that far too many of its nightmarish scenes end with the clown running manically toward the kid he’s terrorizing (and, subsequently, towards the camera) in an increasingly repetitive jump scare — what does work about it works really, really well. The almost entirely kid cast works incredibly well together, and proves to be more likeable than most adults working in this particular genre. While the scares all seem to end the same way, each plays out incredibly differently in the moment: treating us to different veins of horror that affect us in very different ways. And director Andy Muschietti ably balanced the dramatic, character-building moments with ones of genuine terror: to a degree that one would never guess that this was only the second film under the man’s belt.
Then, of course, there’s Pennywise: the titular It. Or, rather, there’s Bill Skarsgard, the man who plays him. While it was never going to be hard to surpass the old miniseries, Tim Curry’s dark and iconic take on the monster that It is named after seemed safe from anything the remake could throw at it. After all, it was the role that Curry was born to play and the only reason why the miniseries is remembered in any capacity today.
After watching him in action, however, it’s safe to say that Tim Curry no longer holds the distinction of “best evil clown.” There’s something innately inhuman about his approach the character. Beyond how unsettling clowns are as a simple matter of fact, there’s a certain discomforting tilt to his grin and pitch to his voice that betrays his seemingly friendly exterior. He is every too-friendly face you crossed the street to avoid and every unsettling smile that instinctively made your cackles rise. He’s an alien force draped in ill-fitting flesh, barely pretending to be Human.
I doubt that It will be the best movie released in September. Hell, I doubt that it will even be the best horror movie released in September (I’m looking at you, Mother!). But this is most certainly one of the best horror movies to come along this year, and the best Stephen King adaptation in the last decade. If you have even a passing interest in the genre, the author or the premise, you owe it to yourself to see it in theaters.
Rating: 4/5
Buy on BluRay: Yes!
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