Image source: Merlina McGovern
What is the thing that scares you the most? What fills your nightmares? For me, the things that scare me the most are intangible. They are the things that I can’t see. It’s the thing that hides under my bed, waiting to grab my foot if I let it dangle over the side. It’s that breath of cool air I feel on my neck as I walk up the stairs from my basement. I don’t dare look back, but that small whisper of air is enough to make me race up the stairs to the safety of my well-lit kitchen. It’s those two pinpricks of light floating just beyond my second-floor office window at night. We’re two floors up; there’s no way that there could be eyes staring right back at me as I look out my window, right?
*Shiver*
I was thinking about these things as I started to rewatch two adaptations of Stephen King’s 1986 novel, It. I didn’t read the book when it first came out (I was too young!), but I do remember reading it a few years later before the 1990 TV miniseries came out. Stephen King’s books always scared the crap out of me, and they contained rotten characters that made me feel dirty after reading about them. In fact, a lot of the times, the things that scared me the most in his books were the childhood traumas and the abusers and bullies that he wrote about so vividly. The gore and monsters did scare me, but not as much as those awful people that I knew could actually exist in the real world.
He also had a way of making Derry, Maine, feel real and scary and full of dark and rotten things.
Did the TV and movie remake accomplish the same things as the book? Well, yes and no.
The 1990 TV miniseries was chock full of TV star wattage (of the time), including John Ritter of “Three’s Company” fame, Tim Reid from “WKRP in Cincinnati,” Harry Anderson from “Night Court,” a very young Seth Green (Oz from Buffy!), and of course, the one and only Tim Curry. I loved Tim Curry’s manic butler in the movie “Clue,” though I was too young to have seen him in “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.” His menacing clown from “It” was an entirely different beast from his butler outing. Curry’s bugged out eyes, flexible smile, and curdling voice (“We all float down here”) instilled a deep and abiding fear of clowns in me that has never really left.
We all float down here.
I was 15 when I first saw this TV version, and I distinctly remember certain scenes: the spooky fortune cookies all with unimaginable “goodies” inside, a red balloon filled with blood slowly inflating out of a white porcelain sink, blood languidly seeping out of a photo album and onto the floor. I read about how the television format imposed limits on the series (children, like me, could be watching, after all), including an inability to show blood flowing from any bodily orifices. For me, that made for a more unexpected horror, one that seeped slowly but surely into you over the course of the show. When they did eventually show the true “it,” it was a stop-motion disjointed disappointment.
In 2017, a new version of the story was released as a motion picture film, starring Bill Skarsgard as Pennywise. The movie was broken up into two movies, Chapter One, focusing on the kids’ childhood, including their traumas and introductions to Pennywise, and Chapter 2, focusing on the adult children coming back for a final showdown with It. This was a bit of a change from the TV miniseries, which had compressed the story from the children’s and the adults’ point of view, leading to a heavy reliance on the flash-back narrative storytelling format. There were flashbacks used in the Chapter Two movie, but less so. This, for me, really highlighted the weakness in the movie version. Separating the children from the adults emphasized the distances between the adult characters, who had not seen each other for 27 years. This device made it far harder for me to feel any connection between them, a connection that is imperative to defeating this monster.
The other downside to the movie version for me was the overabundance of special effects and gore. There were fantastic actors in this reboot, including the aforementioned Bill Skarsgård who does an admirable job of stepping into Tim Curry’s clown shoes. His eyes are not only round and full of horror, they are also askew, causing a frisson of terror to slide down my spine every time one of them drifted off to the side.
The adult children are played by James McAvoy, Jessica Chastain, Bill Hader (who is fantastic as an adult Richie), Isaiah Mustafa, Jay Ryan (a lackluster Ben), James Ransone (also wonderful as an adult Eddie), and Andy Bean. There was simply too little chemistry between the characters for me to care very much about them. I also did not like how they changed Mike, the only black character in the show, from being the character obsessed with history. It downgraded his importance in the first film, and I found the Tim Reid version of the character to be much more engaging. The feel of the movie veered between the comic and the horrific, and it really didn't find a balance between the too because of that lack of character connection.
Of course, the biggest difference in the new movie is that, no longer shackled by television's constraints, it bathed itself in an abundance of gore and splattered blood. All done in high definition, of course.
It’s likely that my tolerance for gore has gone down as I’ve gotten older, but the original story of It was a tale of childhood trauma and how that left an imprint on you that never left as you got older. The evil monster was so scary because it had no set form, it could take on any form of your own personal fears, and so whatever was the most frightening thing for you was sure to be terrifying imagined versus visualized. It’s why I’ve found that the most recent movie to scare the crap out of me was “Smile.” It’s a movie where the fearful thing went unseen and was in your own mind (until the end, where it seems that every horror movie always fails by visualizing that fear -- something that will always be subpar to what your imagination paints for you.)
What are the things that go bump in the night for you? Share them in the comments below.
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