The only thing that really disappoints me about the movie adaptation of It is that the other would-be major Stephen King adaptation this summer, The Dark Tower, was such a disappointment in comparison. I've said before how the Dark Tower series (a seven-book epic of immense proportions that should never have been boiled down into a 90-minute movie) was one of my biggest artistic influences, but while The Dark Tower is King's magnum opus, It is probably the quintessential Stephen King story.
How do we define that?
Well, King is a fan of Lovecraft's, but he's also got a humanistic appreciation for actual people. The strength of his stories is that he has relatable people with their own idiosyncrasies dealing with the kind of cosmic horror threats that he assails them with. Putting things on that human level might seem to lessen the scale of the threat, but the fundamentally unexplained aspects of his monsters opens the door to the Lovecraftian horror that is such an influence on him.
But while Lovecraft was going for a kind of pure horror, King also thematically ties his horror to the human experience, and It is about how being a kid is fucking scary.
If you'll forgive a dive into the mythos surrounding It - something that the movie only references without saying anything explicit about it - the entity that most commonly manifests as Pennywise the Dancing Clown is really an incomprehensible monster from the Todash darkness - the primeval void that exists between universes and was pushed back by the rise of the Dark Tower and the beginning of the universe as we know it. At one point in the movie, we see the "deadlights" within Pennywise, which I understand to be the kind of origin within the Todash that It comes from.
But the exact rules surrounding It - when and where It can strike, and what it means to truly defeat It - are not really explained, and so a bunch of Junior High students are forced to figure it out on their own.
This adaptation, which comes out twenty-seven years after the book, moves the action one rung up in the cycle - rather than kids in the 1950s coming back to deal with It again in the '80s, here we have kids in the 80s who will, presumably, come back in the teens to deal with It as adults.
It's an interesting choice, because while King was clearly thinking of his own childhood, his horror shaped the childhoods of a later generation (as someone born in the 80s, I can't really count myself as one of that generation, though the lingering pop culture of the 80s certainly informed my 90s upbringing.) So even though this is technically a big change to the setting, it still feels fundamentally Kingsian.
The movie, which is already fairly long, is really only half the story, dealing with the childhood crisis of its "Losers Gang." Presumably we'll see a bunch of 40-year-old actors in a sequel I'm almost certain will happen. In a way that's a shame, as the child actors here are quite good. But as a friend remarked, often horror films are somewhat lazy in their production, but this movie really seems to have put the effort into making its many monstrous scenarios feel uniquely terrifying and gives at least some of its characters strong arcs and personalities.
Fundamentally, while the monster is the center-stage threat, It is largely about the way that children have to deal with darkness in their lives. Parents can be abusive - either by physically (and it's strongly implied, sexually) assaulting them, or through possessive over-protectiveness. Adults can ignore children in need, and bullies don't necessarily draw the line at merely punching and stealing lunch money.
I honestly think a big part of growing up is learning to tune out fears - not to fully rid yourself of them, but to kind of grow numb to them. There's a kind of callus that builds up that kids have not yet developed. And that makes them more sensitive - both in the good way, in that they might actually care about problems adults don't want to deal with, but also in the bad way, which makes them more susceptible to a monster that preys on fear (and that could be a true monster or a human monster.)
I'm kind of meandering at this point, but if you want my quick review: It is a well-made horror film that is definitely scary. If you're not into seeing children in peril, well, you might want to sit this one out. This movie gets that Stephen King tone down very well - a mix of horror, nostalgia, and ultimately faith in humanity to stand up to evil.
