30 in 30: A MONTH OF HORROR. IT
DAY 9
IT (2017)
The adaptation of a horror classic.
This film is much a horror movie as much as an adventure film. And I love it for it. It’s part GOONIES and part ALIEN, the perfect hybrid.
Every horror movie has to put the characters under threat. What are we going to be afraid of if nothing is chasing our main protagonist? This can become a problem when horror happens to a bunch of kids, because we usually don’t like to kill little kids. Not even in movies. Kids are protected, much like dogs and other small mammals, from death in a lot of fiction. But not in this film.
What is IT about? Let’s take a look at what our old friend google has to say.
“Seven young outcasts in Derry, Maine, are about to face their worst nightmare — an ancient, shape-shifting evil that emerges from the sewer every 27 years to prey on the town’s children. Banding together over the course of one horrifying summer, the friends must overcome their own personal fears to battle the murderous, bloodthirsty clown known as Pennywise.”
But what makes IT scary?
Easy. Every character could die even though they are innocent little kids. The opening scene where Georgie, the kid in the iconic yellow raincoat gets eaten by the clown sets the mood for the rest of the film. The characters are in real danger. Anyone can become clown food.
George R. R. Martin also employs this screenwriting “trick” when he kills off Ned Stark in GAME OF THRONES. The stakes become way higher for the characters and the audience. Who’s going to be the next one to die?
This sense of real danger mixed with the kids dealing with real-life problems makes us connect a whole more with the characters. They are all dealing with dramas of their own besides being hunted by an intergalactic alien clown. The audience can empathize with their “real-life” problems; they remember being young and dealing with similar issues, but then there’s that damn clown. Is like the audience is remembering something that might have happened to them.
The iconography of the clown makes everything come together; it is a symbol of childhood that is associated with fear. I never met any kid who liked clowns, yet there they are, dancing to those ill-conceived carnival tunes.
But IT is also an adventure movie. The kids have to come together and face the challenges the evil clown poses. The story is at its roots a coming of age film dipped in a pool of nightmares. The scary clown makes the kids come together; it makes them stronger, not only to face it but the problem in their regular lives too.
IT is scary because it reminds us what was like to be a kid. When everything unknown was a threat, where the only ones you could rely on where your friends, when a clown was much much more than a guy in white paint. But when fear was more present, so was the overcoming of it, and maybe that’s what the story is about. Bad things happen, they can be terrifying, but they can also make us stronger.
Horror can be about many things, it can take us to the worst parts of human imagination, but it can also be uplifting in a strange way. It can teach us to face fear, to overcome tragedy.
Horror sometimes can be, maybe not a friend, but a great teacher.
Tomorrow: ROSEMARY’S BABY (1968)
Yesterday: DON’T BREATHE (2016)
