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Stephen King's IT

TenfoldShields

TenfoldShields

Lounging on a Hoard of Words
Pronouns
He/Him
Which is apparently no shit getting a remake!



...I'm not sure how I feel about this honestly. On the one hand horror like this (creepy, rainy towns, haunted houses, the whole concept of a monster like Pennywise) is my jam. And it's great to put another foot on the face of Paranormal Activity style shit. On the other it's hard to match Tim Curry's performance as Pennywise, who was kinda weird and slapstick as much as he was horrifying, who played with his food before he ate it. And it doesn't seem like they're going that route exactly, this IT seems to be obviously inhuman and everything. It doesn't seem like there's an adult portion in the trailer where the gang returns to Derry later in life. Plus this seems like it's a lot more action-heavy than either the book or the first film. Which is a big divergence and worries me some.

Which isn't to say that the book is some holy text or anything (there are at least a few parts I think most everyone would agree "what the actual fuck king" is the appropriate response) but...ng. It's been awhile since I read it but the thing that I remember most about King's Derry was the frank ugliness that underlay it all. The pettiness. The small town decay, washed out by rain and sun. The injustices that slipped by. It all created this oppressive sort of horror. This atmosphere of slow, creeping dread that was almost exhausting (or maybe that was just the page count dohoho I'm naughty).

I guess what I'm saying that as long as they nail that I think I'm sold. I'm tentatively on the hook already as it is.

But then I sometimes buy concessions at the theater so my judgement is demonstrably impaired. Idk.

Edit: ...I will say that I really appreciate that they're leaving it set in the 70's. And not trying to update it to the twenty-teens. That just

Ick.
 
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As far as I was told by King experts, IT was written during his Coked/Drunk out of his mind phase of his career.

As with all artists this seems to have produced great things but it's bad for your personal life. But I would imagine this is why we got the WTF parts you mention in the OP.

Still, I'm not sure how well you can adapt something like IT to the big screen. It is simply a fact that not every piece of literature can work as a movie.
 
Nikkolas said:
As far as I was told by King experts, IT was written during his Coked/Drunk out of his mind phase of his career.

As with all artists this seems to have produced great things but it's bad for your personal life. But I would imagine this is why we got the WTF parts you mention in the OP.

Still, I'm not sure how well you can adapt something like IT to the big screen. It is simply a fact that not every piece of literature can work as a movie.
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It worked as a made for TV movie a couple decades ago.
 
Nikkolas said:
Ehhhhh, I completely disagree. The book was infinitely better in every conceivable way.
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It might be because I saw the movie years before I read the book, but I'm of the opposite opinion. For one, the movie had Tim Curry. I cannot think of Pennywise and not give it his voice. Hopefully the new guy will hold up, but that's a high standard to be judged by. And two, the movie shed a lot of the excess baggage that the book had. Like introducing entirely new characters and explaining their back story as Derry is falling down around them. So many wasted pages at that point. Or the child sex scene, which really served no purpose, other than invoking many a WTF.
 
I really hope we have scenes of Pennywise talking to the kids to mess with them and not just his clown form being one of the monsters and things like the little brother being used to scare them.
 
to be fair, that IS something that would happen if you rain during a storm
 
Oh, It... I mean, I read it and enjoyed it on the whole, but man, I'm pretty sure you'd eat a well-deserved ban if you posted it here.
 
tzar1990 said:
Oh, It... I mean, I read it and enjoyed it on the whole, but man, I'm pretty sure you'd eat a well-deserved ban if you posted it here.
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For one, it's still copyrighted, so that would be copyright violations. However, as long as you weren't discussing it for, ahem, prurient reasons, I am reasonably certain you could have a discussion about it and certain scenes.
 
chibipoe said:
For one, it's still copyrighted, so that would be copyright violations. However, as long as you weren't discussing it for, ahem, prurient reasons, I am reasonably certain you could have a discussion about it and certain scenes.
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Oh, I'm certainly are that one can discuss it - I'm posting in this thread, after all! What I meant was that certain parts of it are sufficiently gross/creepy (from a moral point of view) that, had Mr. King originally published it chapter-by-chapter here rather than as a book, he would have been banned before he finished posting.

It's like, I like the book overall. But I feel obligated to add the caveat that it does have some parts that are unacceptably gross, sufficiently so that I wouldn't actually feel comfortable recommending it to anyone else.
 
The book is most certainly not a gold standard by which any adaptations should be judged. The miniseries, despite its numerous flaws, rose far above the mess of the original source material and did it without resorting to the bizzare and nauseatingly gross excesses such as the child sex mess. The book was little more than a decent template, and should be treated as such.

If one thing needs to be kept, it should be the general atmosphere of malice and the littler human terrors around Derry. The unsettling father, the bullies, and so on. It is merely taking those attributes and putting them into a single entity.

And to be honest, I can't really see why they're taking the adult part of It and making a sequel with it. The first part was always the better one because of the youth and defenselessness of the children, not just from It but the world around them. There's the adult fear of children in danger being played into, and also begets bonds of friendship being born in adversity. Part Two is literally "same thing, but now they're adults and this time they beat It for realsies"

But that would be in service of a better story, something I see no interest in if this trailer is any indication. It could just be shitty marketing, but actually good horror movies are one in a hundred and almost never the result of an adaptation, much less a reboot/remake, and all this trailer makes me think is "generic." Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street's trailers were more promising, and look how those turned out.
 
The intention of the second half of "It" was to play with memories and exploit the horror of how malleable they really are, especially when we're children. There are few things more chilling than being an adult and having the sudden epiphany that something awful happened to you when you were young, something so awful your brain tried to shield you from it.

You could make the first half into a good standalone story, but it's so much more powerful in conjunction with the second.
 
Tim Curry's Pennywise was terrifying, because the makeup and costume was the same as any other circus clown. That, and Tim Curry really brought Pennywise to life, whereas this Pennywise comes off more as 'Scary Clown' trope #5864. He looks like the 'Killer Clown' hysteria around last Halloween. Part of the Tim Curry character was that, until the teeth came out, anyone may think it was just another clown. Like what happened to Georgie. He had a lure, not 'om nom nom children.'
 
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