Freakishly effective jump-scares fan fears in Stephen King's 'IT'
The preposterous premise behind the horror film “IT” would have us believe that an extremely old clown with orange hair spreads lies, chaos and confusion to feed off the fears of unaware residents in an average American town.
Wait a minute! You don't suppose ... No!
Yet, there “IT” is, a cautionary horror film surfing the zeitgeist of its time like “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” seized upon the Red Scare of the 1950s and “The Exorcist” tapped into the generational alienation of the early 1970s.
“It wants to divide us!” young Bill Denbrough (Jaeden Lieberher) tells his friends. They must unite and work together if they want to survive, he tells them.
Bill couldn't have said it better than if he'd quoted Aesop's attributed saying “united we stand, divided we fall.”
“IT,” directed with visual panache and emotional punch by Andy Muschietti, distills King's 1,100-page novel into a nightmarishly freakish series of effective but increasingly repetitive jump-scares built around the novelist's signature themes of kids banding together to save themselves from horrific threats in the absence of responsible adults.
The thriller begins with an adorable little boy named Georgie (Jackson Robert Scott) discovering a pair of glowing eyes in the darkness of a neighborhood storm drain in Derry, Maine.
The eyes belong to a seductively sinister clown (Bill Skarsgard, channeling Jack Nicholson's Joker on speed) who identifies himself as Pennywise. The clown encourages the boy to come closer ... closer ... then BITES off Georgie's arm. It's a horrifying opening scene that the rest of “IT” struggles to match.
Georgie becomes a photo on a missing person's poster, one of many in a town where parents and other authority figures appear to be oblivious to the mass disappearances.
Guilt-striken Bill, Georgie's older brother, continuously searches for his sibling. and eventually gathers a group of misfit school friends to investigate the disappearances while steering clear of a sadistic local bully named Henry Bowers (Nicholas Hamilton).
Bill's new pals include a hypochondriac named Eddie (Jack Dylan Grazer), a nerdy motormouth named Richie (Finn Wolfhard), a skeptical Jewish kid named Stan (Wyatt Oleff), an 11-year-old book lover Ben (Jeremy Ray Taylor) and, apparently, the only black kid in Derry, named Mike (Chosen Jacobs).
They also accept a smart, savvy redheaded tomboy named Beverly (Sophia Lillis, who could easily play a young Amy Adams), anxious for any reason to stay away from her creepy, sexually abusive dad.
These exceptionally well-selected actors expand their characters far beyond their types. They react as real kids might, and come loaded with humorous, crass dialogue appropriate to their youth.
These kids stand up to “Stand By Me,” based on King's story “The Body.”
Creepy, killer clowns have been around for a long time, and Skarsgard's Pennywise is one of the nastier incarnations, expressing joyous schadenfreude in the fear of the children he takes.
A lot of King's novel wisely doesn't make it into this movie, including the origin of Pennywise, the ancient turtle god Mataurin and the mystical ritual of Chud.
Maybe they will be explored - along with the adult main characters 27 years later - in Chapter 2, promised at the end of “IT,” now officially the scariest pronoun ever created.
“It”
★ ★ ★
Starring: Bill Skarsgard, Jaeden Lieberher, Sophia Lillis, Jeremy Ray Taylor, Finn Wolfhard
Directed by: Andy Muschietti
Other: A Warner Bros. release. Rated R for language, violence. 135 minutes