It
You’ll float too… but only a little bit.
+: characters, storyline premise
-: the actual horror elements
The first Stephen King novel I read was The Gunslinger, the first part of the Dark Tower series. A strange, bare horror-Western-fantasy, it was good enough to make me read the rest of the original run (The Wind Through the Keyhole can, for the time being, suck it), and then to begin the quest to read all the remainder of Stephen King, in chronological order.
Carrie proved to be a typical debut — great ideas, somewhat shonky execution. Salem’s Lot and The Shining were fine enough, although the latter felt like a baroque and not-necessarily better alternative to the film.
What, in the end, stopped me from pushing through all sixty-odd King novels was two compelling reasons: one, the space and time commitment, and two, The Stand.
The Stand is, on balance, OK. The problem is that it steadily loses steam as the page number approaches four figures. There is, for example, a wonderfully creepy montage once the virus has taken hold, detailing the ways the virus indirectly kills those who never contract it — the survivors, abandoned to their fate, the isolated children and others who can’t cope with the new, post-apocalyptic world.
It’s utterly realistic and one of the creepiest things I’ve ever read, but it gives way, in the end, to Randall Flag and the old black woman whose name escapes me. And this is the weakness I found with King: that Flagg and the woman could happen to be charismatic, inspiring leaders at odds was compelling enough, but he made one the actual devil, or something like it, and the other something akin to an angel of God. King couldn’t let realism be; he had the literalise the metaphors, at the expense of nuance or ambiguity.
I’ve never read It, but the film appears to show the same weakness. It’s possible for there to be a cosmic being, shaped like a monster clown, which kidnaps kids — or they might be descending into collective insanity. Both are frightening possibilities, heightened by not knowing which, but there’s this urge in the script to tap the thing and yell: “SEE?! Monster! Definitely.”
Which is sad, because so much else of It is great. Bill Skarsgard loses himself in Pennywise, reduced to manic hopping and deranged gurning. Casting directors also managed to find a bottomless pit of great child actors. The film makes some smart narrative choices — dropping the scene-everyone-talks-about from the book, and pushing this, the kid-half of the book, to a 1989 setting — but also some slightly stupid ones too (why is Mike such a spare part, especially when he’s been set up to be otherwise?).
Really, the parts involving the wider town of Derry are fantastic, too. Derry feels real — if a little Amblin — but the sheer creepiness of the place soaks through, too. In the end, every interaction between Beverly and her father is far, far creepier than anything the supernatural realm has. It’s just a slight pity the film only half-realises this.
