My wife has a story about the first time she read Stephen King’s IT. She got her family to rent the movie when she was a kid, I think like 8 or 9, and they agreed cause it was a PG13 movie. It gave her nightmares. Later, she saw the novel at the library and she snuck it home and read it at night with a flashlight. She remembers not understanding any of the parts with sex, but she says everything else in the book had a life changing impact. As an aspiring novelist myself, I dream of one day having one of my books do that to a young reader.
I read IT for the first time last year after hearing my wife analyze it in depth one night while we were drunk and talking horror movies. For my wife, King is probably her favorite author. For me, King is an author I admire and someone I took a lot of craft lessons from when I was just getting started writing. We’d both seen the movie IT as kids, and while for her it created a lifelong coulrophobia, for me it was a scary and iconic movie, but it didn’t have the same weight of fear that it had for her. The book however, on more than a few occasions made me put it down and switch to lighter material.
We were both excited to see the remake. All of the shots in the trailer suggested this version would be an update to the aesthetics of the original, but follow the story of the book more closely.
I’m not necessarily one of those people who believes in slavish devotion to source material. I think movies that aren’t allowed to divorce themselves from the source material never get to explore fully the boundaries of their new medium and ultimately, that stymies the creativity. Plenty of problems arise, narratively, when movies try to emulate too closely their written source material. And the book is ripe for an update. Golden era movie monsters, I don’t think, scare anyone anymore. And the 50’s sensibilities of the Losers Club’s childhoods, would come off to contemporary audiences as unrelatable to the point of being corny. For IT, updating the setting to the 80’s is a smart choice because it speaks to the childhoods of so many contemporary horror fans. It’s a matter not just of aesthetics and iconography, but the fears the movie could speak to. The 80’s was the time of my childhood and so the fears it could speak to from that era would have immediately had more connection and impact.
So ultimately, my problems are not necessarily with the changes — I like the updated look of the movie, the updated look of Pennywise and I’m glad that Skaarsgard had the guts to do his own interpretation of Pennywise rather than trying to rehash Curry’s iconic performance. My problems are with the needless changes. Cowardly changes the new movie opted for.
The changes the movie is comfortable making are largely matters of Hollywood convention and they rob the new version of what could have been real lasting impact. Let’s begin with the decision to make Ben Hanscom the historian of the Losers as opposed to Mike Hanlon. In the book, Mike is always the historian of the group even from childhood. He’s the one who collects the stories of old Derry and he’s the one who presents them as evidence of IT to the group. Ben spends a lot of time in the library, but his reading is entertainment based, interspersed with books on engineering.
See it makes sense that Mike is the historian because he’s black. For people of color, history is always more important. For Black people it has to be. We never get the privilege of seeing history as something in the past and disconnected from us. Black people learn, from very early, that history is not only alive, well, and vital— we learn it as the survival guide. Being Black in America means having an in-depth understanding of a complex set of unspoken rules and history is the guidebook for learning those rules. This isn’t something the book shied away from. The book makes racism an integral part of the narrative. The BlackSpot fire that Mike is so afraid of wasn’t just some tragic accident, it’s the result of a Klan raid that Mike’s father barely escaped. Hell, the book even references Emmett Till in the images of the mutilated children being pulled from the river before an indifferent town.
Source: EW
The new movie takes that out and gives Mike’s role to Ben Hanscom, relegating him to a background role. In doing so it suggests that the 80’s represented some post-racial era. It’s a bullshit notion and one that is not only cowardly—done probably to avoid being labeled as “political,” but one that has the effect of ultimately neutering the book of one its most powerful themes. That racism is present, that racism lives, and that our unwillingness to see it for it what is creates or at least empowers Pennywise.
Then there’s Beverly. There the movie engages in something I despise, adding unnecessary sexual assault. In the book, Beverly’s father is abusive yes, but physically so. It’s a clearly made point that he doesn’t molest his daughter, but he definitely beats her.
Here again, the theme of pretending blindness to obvious evils reemerges. Bev shows up at school sporting bruises and cuts. But it’s overlooked by all the adults. It’s an obvious comment on how abused kids are often overlooked, even when the evidence of abuse is plainly visible. Aside from the sticky issue of whether or not sexual abuse is just as apparent — there really is just no fucking need to change her story in that way. It’s a thing I notice a lot in media, women characters given rape backgrounds and stories for no real reason other than to increase the shock factor. It gets deeper though.
Part of the genius of the book is the theme that the most marginalized among us are ultimately the most powerful. The Losers are all people our world overlooks and views as in the way when they try to speak up. Ben is overweight, Eddie deals with mental health issues in his family, Stan is the only Jewish kid in town, Mike is black, Beverly is a girl etc. This is also why, later, when they’re grown—all of the white kids get to leave Derry. Their whiteness allows them to move on, except for Mike. Mike has to stay behind because he’s never afforded the chance to move beyond his blackness. Beverly, similarly, gets to leave but her problems follow her.
Source: Collider
To that end, when the Losers go to confront It as kids, it’s Bev who’s the crack-shot with Bill’s slingshot. It’s a way of giving her power and agency within the group and the new movie eschews that in favor of a damsel in distress story, complete with the Hollywood trope of having her be rescued by a kiss.
What we get as a result of these changes is conformance to convention — namely that the white guy always has to be the main, the one to find the key to destroying the monster, the one to save the day, the one to always take center stage.
Then of course there’s all the played-out conventions — Pennywise running and screaming, that jerky broken limb effect that practically every horror movie since The Grudge has employed, the reliance on CG effects where practical would have felt more physically grounded.
They’re needless changes. Changes that neither add to the story or showcase the story in a new and interesting light. Take for example, the kids literally floating in the air at the end. I mean, I thought we were all in agreement and understanding that “we all float down here” referred to the dead bodies floating in the water. What, exactly, is gained by changing that to them all literally floating in air? Isn’t the previous understanding far more creepy than having them literally float? What is it actually doing for the story and overall atmosphere?
It’s easy for me to give a blunt review of “the book is better” here. But the book is far from perfect.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWFmPwmW4jg
When I originally made a Facebook post about this, a comrade pointed out the controversial scene in the book where the kids all have sex. It remains the most talked about part of the book. I haven’t fully sorted my feelings out on it — though I agree at least in part with King on this. In a book about child murder, that one sex scene overwhelms a disproportionate amount of the discussion. That said, no shit it does Stephen, you wrote a scene of kids group fucking. Though that characterization may be reductive, you can’t write something like that and then claim surprise at people’s shock.
I get the intent. The Losers felt they needed something to bond them all together — though reading that scene my thought was that it was cringingly executed. And without getting into the fraught topic of whether it’s like even okay to try and tackle the issue of burgeoning sexual exploration in pre-teens, I’ll at least say this — it was a bold choice. So much of my respect for the book and the original movie comes from that, the boldness of it. Racism and sexism are bold topics to tackle from the point of view of kids. That scene is a bold thing to include. Clumsy or cringeworthy or misguided as it may be, it’s fucking bold. And the new movie simply doesn’t have any of that boldness. It’s a safe narrative.
The book and original movie are about racism and sexism and homophobia and how our polite society that sees acknowledging such ugly things as uncomfortable and rude is what creates the monsters that plague us. The book is about how our real values as a society are quietness and everything staying the same and how we use a violent blindness to enforce those values.
The new movie is about a killer clown with some amazingly well acted kids. The new movie is about vulnerability and unity. That’s fine and all but it’s safe. In a movie about fear, the new movie seems to fear taking risks to me, a horror film– an updated retake on a genre and generationally defining movie– that’s afraid to take risks is, mediocrity.
All of this isn’t to say I hated it or even that it’s bad. It’s not, it’s very good as far as contemporary mainstream horror films go. The kid actors are great. The updated take on Pennywise is good. The aesthetics, set design, dialogue, and a number of the scares are good and genuinely unnerving in parts. I mean, taken as a full package completely divorced of its source materials it’s definitely “A” grade for what we usually get. But if the movie stirred you, my recommendation is that you do yourself a favor and read the book — because it really is far better.
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Fear of Controversy: The Sanitizing of IT
My wife has a story about the first time she read Stephen King’s IT. She got her family to rent the movie when she was a kid, I think like 8 or 9, and they agreed cause it was a PG13 movie. It gave her nightmares. Later, she saw the novel at the library and she snuck it home and read it at night with a flashlight. She remembers not understanding any of the parts with sex, but she says everything else in the book had a life changing impact. As an aspiring novelist myself, I dream of one day having one of my books do that to a young reader.
I read IT for the first time last year after hearing my wife analyze it in depth one night while we were drunk and talking horror movies. For my wife, King is probably her favorite author. For me, King is an author I admire and someone I took a lot of craft lessons from when I was just getting started writing. We’d both seen the movie IT as kids, and while for her it created a lifelong coulrophobia, for me it was a scary and iconic movie, but it didn’t have the same weight of fear that it had for her. The book however, on more than a few occasions made me put it down and switch to lighter material.
We were both excited to see the remake. All of the shots in the trailer suggested this version would be an update to the aesthetics of the original, but follow the story of the book more closely.
I’m not necessarily one of those people who believes in slavish devotion to source material. I think movies that aren’t allowed to divorce themselves from the source material never get to explore fully the boundaries of their new medium and ultimately, that stymies the creativity. Plenty of problems arise, narratively, when movies try to emulate too closely their written source material. And the book is ripe for an update. Golden era movie monsters, I don’t think, scare anyone anymore. And the 50’s sensibilities of the Losers Club’s childhoods, would come off to contemporary audiences as unrelatable to the point of being corny. For IT, updating the setting to the 80’s is a smart choice because it speaks to the childhoods of so many contemporary horror fans. It’s a matter not just of aesthetics and iconography, but the fears the movie could speak to. The 80’s was the time of my childhood and so the fears it could speak to from that era would have immediately had more connection and impact.
So ultimately, my problems are not necessarily with the changes — I like the updated look of the movie, the updated look of Pennywise and I’m glad that Skaarsgard had the guts to do his own interpretation of Pennywise rather than trying to rehash Curry’s iconic performance. My problems are with the needless changes. Cowardly changes the new movie opted for.
The changes the movie is comfortable making are largely matters of Hollywood convention and they rob the new version of what could have been real lasting impact. Let’s begin with the decision to make Ben Hanscom the historian of the Losers as opposed to Mike Hanlon. In the book, Mike is always the historian of the group even from childhood. He’s the one who collects the stories of old Derry and he’s the one who presents them as evidence of IT to the group. Ben spends a lot of time in the library, but his reading is entertainment based, interspersed with books on engineering.
See it makes sense that Mike is the historian because he’s black. For people of color, history is always more important. For Black people it has to be. We never get the privilege of seeing history as something in the past and disconnected from us. Black people learn, from very early, that history is not only alive, well, and vital— we learn it as the survival guide. Being Black in America means having an in-depth understanding of a complex set of unspoken rules and history is the guidebook for learning those rules. This isn’t something the book shied away from. The book makes racism an integral part of the narrative. The BlackSpot fire that Mike is so afraid of wasn’t just some tragic accident, it’s the result of a Klan raid that Mike’s father barely escaped. Hell, the book even references Emmett Till in the images of the mutilated children being pulled from the river before an indifferent town.
The new movie takes that out and gives Mike’s role to Ben Hanscom, relegating him to a background role. In doing so it suggests that the 80’s represented some post-racial era. It’s a bullshit notion and one that is not only cowardly—done probably to avoid being labeled as “political,” but one that has the effect of ultimately neutering the book of one its most powerful themes. That racism is present, that racism lives, and that our unwillingness to see it for it what is creates or at least empowers Pennywise.
Then there’s Beverly. There the movie engages in something I despise, adding unnecessary sexual assault. In the book, Beverly’s father is abusive yes, but physically so. It’s a clearly made point that he doesn’t molest his daughter, but he definitely beats her.
Here again, the theme of pretending blindness to obvious evils reemerges. Bev shows up at school sporting bruises and cuts. But it’s overlooked by all the adults. It’s an obvious comment on how abused kids are often overlooked, even when the evidence of abuse is plainly visible. Aside from the sticky issue of whether or not sexual abuse is just as apparent — there really is just no fucking need to change her story in that way. It’s a thing I notice a lot in media, women characters given rape backgrounds and stories for no real reason other than to increase the shock factor. It gets deeper though.
Part of the genius of the book is the theme that the most marginalized among us are ultimately the most powerful. The Losers are all people our world overlooks and views as in the way when they try to speak up. Ben is overweight, Eddie deals with mental health issues in his family, Stan is the only Jewish kid in town, Mike is black, Beverly is a girl etc. This is also why, later, when they’re grown—all of the white kids get to leave Derry. Their whiteness allows them to move on, except for Mike. Mike has to stay behind because he’s never afforded the chance to move beyond his blackness. Beverly, similarly, gets to leave but her problems follow her.
To that end, when the Losers go to confront It as kids, it’s Bev who’s the crack-shot with Bill’s slingshot. It’s a way of giving her power and agency within the group and the new movie eschews that in favor of a damsel in distress story, complete with the Hollywood trope of having her be rescued by a kiss.
What we get as a result of these changes is conformance to convention — namely that the white guy always has to be the main, the one to find the key to destroying the monster, the one to save the day, the one to always take center stage.
Then of course there’s all the played-out conventions — Pennywise running and screaming, that jerky broken limb effect that practically every horror movie since The Grudge has employed, the reliance on CG effects where practical would have felt more physically grounded.
They’re needless changes. Changes that neither add to the story or showcase the story in a new and interesting light. Take for example, the kids literally floating in the air at the end. I mean, I thought we were all in agreement and understanding that “we all float down here” referred to the dead bodies floating in the water. What, exactly, is gained by changing that to them all literally floating in air? Isn’t the previous understanding far more creepy than having them literally float? What is it actually doing for the story and overall atmosphere?
It’s easy for me to give a blunt review of “the book is better” here. But the book is far from perfect.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWFmPwmW4jg
When I originally made a Facebook post about this, a comrade pointed out the controversial scene in the book where the kids all have sex. It remains the most talked about part of the book. I haven’t fully sorted my feelings out on it — though I agree at least in part with King on this. In a book about child murder, that one sex scene overwhelms a disproportionate amount of the discussion. That said, no shit it does Stephen, you wrote a scene of kids group fucking. Though that characterization may be reductive, you can’t write something like that and then claim surprise at people’s shock.
I get the intent. The Losers felt they needed something to bond them all together — though reading that scene my thought was that it was cringingly executed. And without getting into the fraught topic of whether it’s like even okay to try and tackle the issue of burgeoning sexual exploration in pre-teens, I’ll at least say this — it was a bold choice. So much of my respect for the book and the original movie comes from that, the boldness of it. Racism and sexism are bold topics to tackle from the point of view of kids. That scene is a bold thing to include. Clumsy or cringeworthy or misguided as it may be, it’s fucking bold. And the new movie simply doesn’t have any of that boldness. It’s a safe narrative.
The book and original movie are about racism and sexism and homophobia and how our polite society that sees acknowledging such ugly things as uncomfortable and rude is what creates the monsters that plague us. The book is about how our real values as a society are quietness and everything staying the same and how we use a violent blindness to enforce those values.
The new movie is about a killer clown with some amazingly well acted kids. The new movie is about vulnerability and unity. That’s fine and all but it’s safe. In a movie about fear, the new movie seems to fear taking risks to me, a horror film– an updated retake on a genre and generationally defining movie– that’s afraid to take risks is, mediocrity.
All of this isn’t to say I hated it or even that it’s bad. It’s not, it’s very good as far as contemporary mainstream horror films go. The kid actors are great. The updated take on Pennywise is good. The aesthetics, set design, dialogue, and a number of the scares are good and genuinely unnerving in parts. I mean, taken as a full package completely divorced of its source materials it’s definitely “A” grade for what we usually get. But if the movie stirred you, my recommendation is that you do yourself a favor and read the book — because it really is far better.
Some of the coverage you find on Cultured Vultures contains affiliate links, which provide us with small commissions based on purchases made from visiting our site. We cover gaming news, movie reviews, wrestling and much more.