How Did “IT” Win the Internet and Break Records?
When it was announced that “IT” was being remade — this time for the silver screen — it was met with a neglectful shrug. IT had already found some form of success as a small screen treatment in the form of Tim Curry’s version back in 1990 — becoming something of a cult classic — which many still cite as their reason for suffering from Coulrophobia: the unofficially recognized phobia or fear of clowns.
It didn’t help that IT is based off of a novel by Stephen King, a person whose books have had a notoriously bad track record of being spun off into television or cinema in the past.
Then there was the hoopla that hit the interwebs when Warner Bros. and New Line Cinema released the first official image from the movie, featuring Pennywise the clown popping his head out of a sewer pipe. It was widely ridiculed and spawned a slew of memes and photoshopped images mocking it mercilessly.
This must have given the filmmakers and marketing team pause, because things weren’t looking good for IT.
IT was practically all but forgotten when the teaser trailer was released.
Now with well over 197 million views, IT handily shattered The Fate of the Furious’ previous record-breaking teaser that had been released just a few weeks before.
Wait, what!?
I was as perplexed as anyone else when I heard the news. How exactly did a small horror film based off a Stephen King novel outperform an established franchise like Fast and the Furious in the marketing game?
Here are my thoughts on how and why this happened, and it all has to do with one key idea: simplicity.
Simplicity is the key to many things in life, and yet it seems to be an elusive concept to grasp and implement, especially in marketing. Just look at The Fate of the Furious for contrast. Is there anything simple about Fate? I don’t know about you, but I don’t consider a car chase involving a submarine in the Arctic simple.
It’s bombastic incarnate.
Back to IT…
One of the pleasant things about the teaser was that it utilized jump scares sparingly. I’m not a huge horror fan, but I do enjoy well crafted horror movies that know how to build up a feeling of genuine dread. But you look at so many horror films that are being churned out these days and not only do the films themselves over-utilize jump scares to the max, their marketing campaigns are either just as bad or worse. IT utilizes jump scares sparingly, only using them as bookend capstones at the beginning and end of the teaser.
The first jump scare is when Georgie loses his paper boat down the sewer drain, and lo and behold, Pennywise himself pops up for just a split second. This jump scare is obvious but not overplayed. It could have gone downhill from there, but luckily, they saved their last and best jump scare for the end, when we see Pennywise freak out and rush towards the camera in a screaming fit of rage in all his clownish glory. Even for such a simple shot, it still manages to be creepy and jolting.
Had the teaser been full of these type of jump scares, it wouldn’t have worked, but since they didn’t overstuff it, it worked extremely well. The lack of jump scares gave the rest of the teaser time to let the unsettling nature of the story boil over.
Another thing that seemed to work were the performances by the child actors. While I am as of yet unfamiliar with these actors, just the little glimpses we get of them in the teaser shows that they may very well be some of the best parts of IT. Much like Netflix’s Stranger Things, the movie is going to hinge on the child actors, and hopefully they’ll excel.
For example, take the scene when the boys are standing in the middle of the street with their bikes, talking.
“I saw something. There was this…”
“A clown.” A beat. “Yeah, I saw him too.”
Even though it’s just a couple lines, the way they are delivered is downright chilling. Kudos for the child actors for bringing such a strong presence to a film such as this.
The last thing I want to bring up is something that on a personal level, I appreciate very much and I think gives the teaser its foundation. It’s all about the brotherly bond between Georgie and Bill which the teaser does an excellent job of portraying.
The teaser starts with Bill folding a paper into a boat — the SS Georgie — that Georgie loses down the drain later on. We see Bill making the boat before giving it to Georgie, saying, “Here you go. She’s all ready, captain.”
George replies, “Thanks, Bill,” before giving his brother a hug.
It’s a beautiful moment and juxtaposes starkly against the horror we see at the end.
I’m a sucker for brotherly relationships in stories. While any familial relationship is special and dynamic, there is something unique about brothers and the way they interact with each other, whether they love or hate each other.
It gets us invested in these characters from the get-go without having to do much in the way of dialogue. We don’t want anything to happen to Georgie because we know that Bill loves his brother and will do anything to protect him. That is why the final jump scare is so unsettling. We see Bill finding Georgie in the sewer as Georgie says, “Bill, if you come with me, you’ll float too.” And then he begins to get louder and louder. “You’ll float too. You’ll float too… You’ll float too!”
The teaser begins with the brothers, and it ends with the brothers. That is what all good stories do, especially the good horror ones. They aren’t content to tell a horror story, they’re more interested in telling a human story.
All these things together form a great teaser. It was…simple.
