Terrifying Horror or Fun Coming of Age? Neither

Rating: 5/10 (17 August 2018)

It was a movie with a lot of potential. Stephen King's enormous (and enormously creepy) book had the perfect makings for a modern horror thriller. A shapeshifting, killer, demonic clown terrorizing a town and targeting a ragtag group of "losers" who feel abandoned by adults? Yeah, that plot sets up a Hollywood triumph on a silver platter. Horror movies that have originality and avoid falling back on old tropes and gimmicks everyone has seen a million times before are getting harder to come by. It had an amazing opportunity in its grasp, but sadly failed to make it a reality.
The biggest issue in this film was the tone they were trying to set. Before its release, it seemed like it would be horror all the way. This movie could have followed easily in the footsteps of past King adaptations, joining the ranks of now infamous films like The Shining and Children of the Corn, or even the previous mini-series version of It. The marketing seemed strategized well; people who had never touched a King book were still lining up to see It, simply for its potential as a horror movie alone. The teasers and trailers were all objectively horrifying, and the R rating only added to the impression that it was for an audience of adult scary movie fans.
This would all be great, if only the movie had delivered. But instead of focusing on the horror aspects, the film turned the whole story into a wacky coming-of-age plot with a few scary parts. After acting like it would be the next great horror phenomenon, the movie turned into a Stranger Things wannabe (complete with Finn Wolfhard as Richie Tozier and changing the time period to the 80s from the 50s, opting for trends and nostalgia instead of originality and reasonable adherence to the book). The movie ultimately tried to be more Goonies and Stand By Me than total King terror, which left many in the audience confused and disappointed.
The book, being over 1000 pages, has more development and background than could possibly fit into a feature film. The novel always maintains an eerie tone that spirals into fear frequently, but it was also able to explore the relationships between the growing kids as they try to figure out how to deal with the monster. While the book could fully blend both these directions, it's a much harder balancing act for a movie. It tried to do both, and the resulting jumble of killer clown pop out scenes with preteen adventure only served to make the scary sections, well...not scary, and the human interactions underdeveloped, stereotyped, and all around lacking.
Let's start with the horror. After the opening scene of Georgie's death that let the audience glimpse Skarsgard's bone-chilling performance as Pennywise, the titular character is given nothing else to do that is in any way compelling. Reduced to mere jump scares for the duration of the film, the clown falls into a predictable, boring pattern. When set up well, jump scares can be extremely effective, (the moving picture in the garage scene was a pretty good part) but when used over and over again as the only main way of scaring the audience, it's a cheap cop out to actual cinematic techniques. Furthermore, since the protagonists were all kids, the movie decided to portray the clown in its various forms, as well as other intense parts, as not realistic. The message of the book was that despite the fact that they were kids, and the adults couldn't see nor help them, everything that was happening to them was real. Instead, whenever Pennywise took on a different persona that was supposed to be one of the kid's worst fears (Eddie's leper, Stan's painting, etc.) the grotesque use of CGI made it look like something you should laugh at, not run screaming from (Ben's decapitated person being a prime example), effectively killing any kind of pervasive fear they were trying to instill. It only worsened as the movie progressed, and the climax featured the kids attacking the clown as its head changed shape to fit each kid- the ultimate effect was stupid. The scariest form of It by far is the clown, and trying to put a new face on It completely backfired again and again. And yet this is far from the only example where the horror was toned down. The rock fight scene-so intense and heart-pounding in the book- was made to look tame (and some terrible slow-motion effects were thrown in for some reason). You could've swapped the rocks with water balloons and it still would've made sense. Another instance, the aftermath of the blood eruption in Bev's bathroom was treated as an upbeat bonding moment for them all to clean up, undermining the seriousness of the situation completely. And the list could go on.
Apart from the horror, the focus of the movie was the kids becoming friends and growing up. For this to work well as a premise, the characters would all ideally need to be diverse, and complete a kind of arc from beginning to end. With seven main characters, it's a little difficult to pull off. It worked okay for Bill- the audience connected with him at the start and could sympathize with his struggle to cope with his brother's death. The others, however, were reduced to simple caricatures of actual people. Eddie the asthmatic hypochondriac, Ben the fat nerd, Richie the one who swears a lot, and ...Stan and Mike? If those were even their names. Bev started off as one of the strongest characters, the only girl in the group, before having all her glory ripped away as she is kidnapped and put into a trance by Pennywise, turning her into a damsel in distress archetype that the boys had to go rescue. (A completely unnecessary deviation from the book, they didn't need any extra motivation to go hunt down the monster, and it seemed like an odd way of imitating Audra's storyline from the adult half of the book). It only worsens for Bev when Ben manages to wake her from her sleep by kissing her (like a princess in a fairy tale), which was a move that may have been slightly less absurd if the movie hadn't ended with Bev kissing one of the other guys (because there was a desperate need for a preteen love triangle).
This isn't to say the movie was all bad. It had some surprisingly clever moments that made it more intriguing. The child/adult dichotomy, so agonizing in the book, played out very well on screen (Eddie's mother and the pharmacist in particular), with actors who ended up being just as creepy as Pennywise, without any special effects or pop-outs needed. Other moments include the red balloon appearing in the car that drove by Ben without stopping, and the scene in the library of Ben reading with the librarian far in the background, staring at the camera, and coming closer and closer in each shot. These brief moments of genius only make the weaker parts seem so much worse in comparison. If only the movie had relied more on subtler, deeper forms of terror instead of predictable cliches again and again. It didn't follow the book very closely at all, and even though the novel has areas that would never translate well cinematically, the movie still differed in lots of small parts for no apparent reason. With another chapter coming, focusing on the characters as adults, (already promised to be more scary and intense), we can only hope that the style of the sequel is more focused and carefully crafted. With the "coming of age" part of the story out of the way, there's nothing to undermine the elements of terror, and hopefully, we will all get the insane horror movie we were promised in the first place.