It, Chapter Two: Second Verse, Same As The First, A Little Bit Louder And A Little Bit Worse

Two-part horror movies are a rarity. I don’t mean a movie and its sequel, in horror those are a dime a dozen, not including prequels, reboots, remakes, “re-imaginings,” and every other dead horse you could beat into the ground, well-assured it would rise from the grave in a fortnight. No, I mean a story so big that it gets told across two movies as an ongoing narrative. That’s far more common in science fiction or superhero films.

And that really is a big part of the problem with It, Chapter Two. It’s got more of the characteristics of those sorts of films than it does horror. I talked about this in my write-up of It, Chapter One, the way that blockbuster elements work against horror’s strengths. But Chapter One had its moments, and Chapter Two is just a mess. It manages to take all of the weaknesses of the first film and turn them up, magnifying them in every direction. And I think a lot of it is due to the requirements of big-budget, major-studio blockbuster films and a need to adhere to the source text even when it doesn’t really serve the film.

Picking up 27 years after the end of It, Chapter One, we return to a Derry that hasn’t changed much in all this time. Same picturesque park in the town center, same annual fair, and the same lurking rot and seething undercurrent of violence that’s been there since the town’s inception. In short order, we’re introduced to a young couple, the intolerant bullies who harass them, and then beatings, and a death. There is still something dark at Derry’s heart, and it’s waking up again. Of the seven kids who stopped its (or Its) predations back in 1989, only one stayed in Derry. Mike Hanlon works at the Derry library, lives upstairs from the library, and has spent the last 27 years researching the town’s history and looking for a way to stop the cycle for good. And when his police radio scanner goes off, reporting the horrible, senseless death that’ s just taken place, Mike goes to check out the scene…

…where he finds a traumatized young man muttering about a clown, and COME HOME scrawled on an underpass in blood.

So yes, the other six people responsible for shutting It down back in the summer of 1989 have to return to Derry to finish things once and for all. All the ones who’ve left Derry have done quite well for themselves. Richie Tozier’s a high-profile stand-up comedian, Eddie Kapsbrak does well for himself as a risk analyst, Bill Dembrough is an author whose books get made into films, Beverly Marsh is a well-known fashion designer, Ben Hanscom is a successful architect, and Stan Uris…well, Stan doesn’t take the news that It’s back up and around very well. He doesn’t make it back to Derry. Their time away has made them forgetful, has put the events of that summer in the rear-view mirror, to the point that Mike has to remind all of them who he is and what happened back then. Mike never left, so Mike never forgot. It’s sort of how adulthood gives us a chance to leave the horrors of our childhood behind. But Mike, as one of the few Black children in Derry, never had that luxury.

But the longer they’re in Derry, the more things come back to them, The things that happened, the terrors they faced, the friendship forged in shared adversity. They wonder how they could have ever forgotten each other. And soon enough there are reminders - dark, terrible reminders - of what brought them back, and so Mike tells them that his research has uncovered a ritual that might end the threat for good. So after establishing the adult versions of all of the characters and getting them all back to Derry, the film sort of shifts into sort of a fetch-quest mode where each of them has to retrieve something for the ritual, along with flashbacks to the rest of that summer throughout. The interposition of the present and past is mostly pulled off skillfully, and there’s potential for some interesting stuff about the things we remember and the things we wished we could forget, especially relevant to people whose childhoods were marked by bullying, trauma and abuse. They pretty much have to go home again and to varyingly literal degrees go right back into those places that held such horror for them then. But it’s just potential because you only get glimpses of it, fitfully, around all of the other stuff the film is trying to do.

And that’s a big problem with the film - it’s trying to do so much in the time it has that none of it gets the attention it needs. Like Chapter One, it’s really long (just shy of three fucking hours) but it still manages to feel cursory. There’s a lot that could be explored here - the idea that Derry was a corrupted place from its very start, something black and rotten at its heart, visible between the lines in the town’s history, the way that many of the protagonists sort of brought their trauma and dysfunction with them into adulthood. Eddie’s wife is just as smothering and encouraging of his hypochondriasis as his mother was, Beverly has an abusive, controlling husband, and Richie has pretty much just turned the humor he used as a defense mechanism into a career. There’s definitely the idea that no matter where you go, there you are, but all of it is just briefly alluded to before moving on to the next set piece. Secondary characters turn up and then are sort of gone with little fanfare in either direction, there’s little character development (except for Richie, who was always the most opaque of the group and here we get some hints at why that might be the case) and there are moments of real dread, but they’re few and far between. The film needs restraint, and there’s certainly evidence dotted throughout that the filmmakers are capable of it, but instead we get lots of slam-bang moments with frenetic scoring and lots of yelling. The climax is especially guilty of this, a drawn-out barrage of special effects and running around and screaming that takes entirely too long to get where it’s going, without any real tension. It’s just loud.

Like the first film, there’s still a good horror story in here somewhere. This film also has its surprisingly vicious moments (the damn film opens with a hate crime, for pity’s sake), but the comic elements are also ratcheted up considerably - the adult Richie wisecracks just as much as he did as a kid (though now it’s more funny than grating) even at what are supposed to be tense moments, and it tends to kill the mood. And again, there’s some nice attention to detail and willingness to let creepy things sort of happen in the background, but even more than the first film these moments ae drowned out by thick layers of CG creature effects which are often more cartoony than anything else, draining any ounce of subtlety out of it. So it’s not just loud, it’s also even more tonally jarring than the first film, and the whole thing isn’t so much paced as it is just one thing after another. It feels much less like a story and much more like an assemblage of scenes.

I think another part of the problem is that with any popular adaptation, there’s going to be the sense that certain things “need” to be included, and so instead of an organically developing story you just get a bunch of “that part where” moments chained together, whether they make sense or not, whether they make for a good narrative flow or not. And on top of that, there are things that work absolutely well in the novel that just look silly on screen, though this and the previous film don’t suffer so much from King’s very specific authorial voice making everything sound stilted. It’s very much a matter of, “you can write this stuff, but I sure can’t say it.” It happens a little here and there, but the much larger problem is that everything that would make this good horror is sacrificed for everything that the film is expected to be, and by the big-budget major-studio tendency to turn horror films into action films played in a different key. 

The director has talked about doing a massive supercut of both chapters, and if it were handled episodically, that would be a good start, but then there’s all the ropy CG and the possibility that no, the interesting, personal stuff wouldn’t actually get explore much, so at this point I think all I can be is disappointed. So far, adaptations of King’s longer epic works have suffered in translation, and this is no exception, unfortunately.

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