Near the end of Stephen King’s novel “It,” from 1986, Bill Denbrough, one of the heroes tasked with killing the shapeshifting eponymous monster, goes on a psychedelic journey beyond the limits of the universe. He and his friends Stan, Eddie, Richie, Mike, Ben, and Beverly—together, they’re the “Losers Club”—have spelunked deep beneath Derry, Maine, and found their way to It’s primordial lair. Once cornered, It can’t be defeated with physical force alone; It must be confronted through the “ritual of chüd,” an obscure contest of spiritual and imaginative stamina. Locked in mentalist combat, Bill and It leave the physical plane entirely. Using metaphysical powers, It tries to drag Bill’s mind toward an alternate death-dimension illuminated not by stars but “deadlights”; on the way there, Bill meets a giant turtle, who says he created our universe. Eventually, Bill drags It back to the physical world, where It dies. Twenty-seven years earlier, when the members of the Losers Club were eleven, they had almost, but not quite, killed It; afterward, they got lost in the sewers beneath Derry, finding their way out only by means of the psychic energy generated through group sex. Now that the adult Bill has killed It for good, however, the ground itself opens, showing the way out.
All of which is to say that “It” is a stranger novel than most people remember. The new film version, directed by Andy Muschietti, which premièred this week, is, by comparison, more wholesome and sane. It’s a likable but slight movie. Bill Skarsgård brings a pair of crazy eyes and a feral physicality to the role of the evil clown, Pennywise, which is It’s favorite disguise—he is captivating in his first scene, in which he convinces a small boy to reach down a storm drain. The young actors are lively, particularly Finn Wolfhard, as Richie Tozier, the group’s loudmouth, and Sophia Lillis, as the swaggering, fearless Beverly Marsh (her tomboy outfits—olive-drab overalls, oversized belts—are one of the best parts of the movie). The film has its hallucinatory moments—instances when its kid heroes seem to be on drugs—and, in that sense, it captures some of the book’s fun-house vibe. What’s missing is a sense of dramatic scale. In King’s “It,” the universe is out of joint. The monster is the product of a cosmic evil. The new “It” is an oddly quotidian film in which ordinary kids fight a random clown who’s haunting their town. (Last year’s “Stranger Things,” which borrowed liberally from “It,” got closer to the original’s atmosphere of vastness—its wintry, desolate “Upside Down” suggested that all of existence might be in danger.) Muschietti’s “It,” moreover, isn’t very scary. The most frightening moment at my screening, at a movie theatre in midtown Manhattan, came afterward, when I walked into the men’s room to find a fan dressed in a clown outfit at the sink.
In truth, King’s “It” is not a particularly scary book, either. The kids are haunted by the cheesy monsters they remember from fright-night double features: the Wolf Man, the Mummy, Frankenstein’s creation, and, at one point, a giant, unblinking Crawling Eye. There’s something absurd about this nineteen-fifties monster horror, and the kids defeat the creatures by recognizing their absurdity: instead of being paralyzed with fear by the nightmares It projects into the waking world, they participate, seizing control of their own fantasies, in the manner of Neo in “The Matrix.” When Eddie is terrified by the Crawling Eye, for example, he pretends that his aspirator, which contains asthma medication, is actually full of battery acid; screaming “Battery acid, fucknuts!,” he squirts it at the Eye, which makes “a hurt, surprised sound” and retreats. Later, these monsters inspire Bill Denbrough to become a successful horror novelist. “It,” in short, is a little metafictional—not so much a frightening book as a book about being frightened.
The novel has weight not because of its monsters but because it tells a larger story about the discovery of evil. As the kids become adults, they learn more and more about the history of Derry, Maine. They find that it once had an active chapter of the “Maine Legion of White Decency”—a version of the Ku Klux Klan—which murdered more than a hundred African-Americans by burning down a night club. They hear about the killing of a gay man down by the canal and about the gleeful vigilante execution of a group of fugitives by the town’s bloodthirsty men. Mike, who is black, is tormented by racist bullies; Beverly is horrified by the sexual advances of her father. All of these disparate evils would have existed anyway, but they are exacerbated by It—a creature that, in addition to eating children, “feeds” by fanning the flames of violence, hatred, lawlessness, racism, misogyny, and sexual predation while disguised as a clown. (Sound familiar?) It’s this evil—historical, unacknowledged, and pervasive—that is truly disgusting; the Losers Club defeats it by feeling disgusted, rather than afraid. Together, the club’s members judge It, and, animated by moral clarity, call It to account. In the final, psychic confrontation, It tries to pull their minds to a zone of mindless nihilism—that is, into an adult mindset of acceptance or repression; they refuse, dragging It into the metaphorical sunlight.
Scary clowns are just scary. They’re not morally repulsive; they aren’t metaphors for our collective sins. Because Muschietti’s “It” is almost entirely about monsters—it doesn’t take the time to make Derry feel like a real place with a dark, hidden, unsettlingly American history—the movie lacks the novel’s sense of ethical, even political, purpose. The one exception is its treatment of Mr. Marsh, Beverly’s creepy, abusive dad, played by Stephen Bogaert. Toward the end of the movie, Pennywise assumes his shape and asks Beverly, “Are you still my little girl?” The holy rage with which she screams and rebels—she rams what looks like a piece of rebar down his throat—expresses the novel’s cathartic, indignant ire. Even so, something feels like it’s missing. King’s novel ends on a psychedelic note because bravery and rage aren’t enough to defeat It; what’s really needed is imagination. The acceptance of evil is a trap from which we must dream ourselves free.
