It review, Fear=Clowns+Anything else you’re vaguely afraid of

As someone who doesn’t tend to watch horror films I was expecting the absolute worst when sitting down to watch It. (don’t worry I’ll be putting It in italics to avoid confusion) It gives me great pleasure to report not only did I really enjoy this film for how scary it was, but for how brilliant the story is and funny the characters are. Having not seen the original I cannot judge if it is better than the first adaptation nor can I properly judge this new version on its faith to the book, but if it’s good enough for Stephen King to see it twice and love it, that’s probably a good indicator to know if it’s a good film.

Don't know if I should be staring at his teeth
or his eyes...

It opens on a very rainy October day in the town of Derry, Maine and all little Georgie wants to do is go out and play in the rain. His older brother Billy is unfortunately too sick to play out in the rain, so instead he makes him a little paper boat to have fun with. The boat soon gets away from Georgie and falls down a drain and is found by Pennywise the dancing clown. Needless to say, this encounter does not end well for little Georgie. Cutting to Derry in the summer time, the rate of missing persons has been increasing at a dramatic rate. It isn’t until members of the Losers Club begin to encounter Pennywise’s different forms, these being whatever each child fears most, that they come together and start an investigation into why these children are disappearing and, more importantly, what is the cause. After considering the history of Derry and the previous cases of missing children, and being terrorised by the world’s scariest clown as well as the most mentally deranged bullies, they conclude that they know how to find this entity responsible for the missing peoples. But it’s never that straight forward when hunting a killer clown that feeds off fear. The Losers must come together, fight their fears and defeat Pennywise if they stand a chance at saving their town.

To clear things up before I begin discussing my thoughts of this movie, I’ll quickly outline the members of the Losers Club to minimise confusion with names and such:

Billy: The lead with a stutter (Jaeden Lieberher)

Ben: The new kid who assumes the role of historian (Jeremy Ray Taylor)

Beverly: The only girl in the club (Sophia Lillis)

Richie: The wisecracking lad in glasses, also in Stranger Things (Finn Wolfhard)

Mike: The black home schooled child (Chosen Jacobs)

Eddie: “THESE PILLS AREN’T REAL. THEY’RE FUCKING GAZEBOS” (Eddie Kaspbrak)

Stanley: The Jewish kid (Wyatt Oleff)

"We all float down here"

It goes as no surprise that this is a scary film. The scares come in two ways, and each of them brilliant. The first, obviously, is through Bill Skarsgård’s interpretation of Pennywise. How he manages being able to maintain the scariest persona possible and at the same time make the audience laugh through some of his dialogue and body language is phenomenal. Being one of King’s scariest villains, both physically and mentally, Pennywise is innately scary due to the fact that he embodies everlasting fear. Clowns should inspire laughter and happiness but the Uncanny twist on that stereotype incites fear. This is why Skarsgård’s baby headed, bucktoothed Pennywise is so terrifying. He is both things funny and scary, which then evokes both a sense of comedy and yet the strongest sense of false security. In short, he looks, sounds and behaves in a manner most terrifying.

The second way this movie makes scares is through the way it develops its characters, most notably the children on which Pennywise preys upon. Each child fears something different and their fears, to

"Welcome to the Losers Club"

an extent, define who they are: Billy fears he is partly responsible for Georgie’s death, Eddie fears germs and illness, Beverly fears growing up, Richie fears clowns, Stanley fears the woman in the painting (arguably the scariest fear), Mike is haunted by the death of his parents and Ben is afraid of macabre parts of history. Each of these fears is a dark reflection of their personality and through the course of the film they must fight what they know to be irrational fears and grow up: Billy must learn he isn’t responsible for Georgie’s death, Eddie discovers he must break away from his smothering mother and stop relying on fake medication, Beverly realises she must ignore what others say or think about her to understand it’s ok to be a woman, Richie is the clown of the group and learns he can work with them without making jokes at their expense, Mike comes to terms with his parents death and is no longer alone thanks to his new friends, Ben is also no longer alone so he feels like he can express himself for who he is and Stanley fears the woman in the painting because it hangs in the office of his father so by discovering he is more than his father’s son he fight it. Each child plays their character so well it makes you think if they were born for these roles. If these are the actors that are heading up the next generation, we have a lot to look forward to as an audience.

Other parts of the film that cannot be ignored are those that include Henry Bowers. Where his character’s writing given plenty of depth, Nicholas Hamilton gives so much power to his performance that in a film where the villain is immortal and eats children to live, you fear a boy with no moral compass almost as much as Pennywise.

It is so much more than a horror film, it’s a coming of age story for all the characters and allows for the audience to relate to fears of the characters. This relation is then transferred to the way our losers beat their fears as we have all conquered fears on multiple occasions. Also, with too many films trying desperately trying to force sequels and cinematic universes, It is that rare example where it works as a standalone film but everyone knows that a sequel is in the works. I wait with eager anticipation for the 6^th September 2019 so we can see who is cast as the adult members as the Losers Club, how Bill Skarsgård is going to use Pennywise differently to combat the grown-up losers and how each character has evolved in 30 years.

9/10