It, Chapter One: One Crazy Summer

There’s something about the term “blockbuster horror” that rankles me. I try not to be a film snob and I have enjoyed my share of blockbuster movies, but I just don’t know if multiplex bombast really plays all that well with horror. Mass-appeal horror films tend to play it safe, rely on easy scares and well-worn cliches. It’s less about horror than just startling people.

But here’s the thing - it’s really difficult to adapt the work of Stephen King, perhaps the most monolithic writer in the genre over the last several decades, and not bring blockbuster expectations to the table. He’s easily the most prolific writer in the genre and easily the most successful. He’s pretty much an institution at this point. People who don’t like horror like his stuff. So an adaptation of one of his most popular books is going to be a big production. And on top of that, King is one of those rare writers in horror who writes absolute epics - sprawling stories that cover miles and years. So an adaptation of one of his most popular epic novels is going to be an even bigger production. And honestly, when it comes to film, I think “big” works against horror in a way that it doesn’t for other types of film.

And so this is the primary problem with It, Chapter One. It is a big story, and it covers a lot of ground, and although it definitely is less compromising than I would have expected, it’s also sort of three movies at once, and it suffers in places as a result.

It’s a rainy day in the Maine town of Derry, and Bill Dembrough, laid up in bed sick, is making a paper boat for his little brother George to take out and sail in the streams made by the rainstorm. He writes “SS Georgie” on it, waterproofs it with wax. George goes out into the rain to try out his new boat, and no sooner does it set sail than it gets washed into a storm drain. Despondent, George kneels down to see if he can get it back, but there’s something there in the storm drain. Something that has his boat. And then there is blood, and screaming, and that is the last we see of George Dembrough alive.

There is, and always has been, something very wrong with Derry.

The film really is kind of a mixed bag - like the King adaptation Doctor Sleep, it really falls somewhere between horror and dark fantasy, and where that film had some genuinely unnerving moments early on before ultimately settling into something more of a fantasy adventure story (albeit one set around the location from The Shining, which does add its own undercurrent for fans of that adaptation), this one suffers more from tonal shifts that don’t quite reach jarring, but make it difficult for the film to really settle into a groove. At some points, it’s a coming-of-age story similar to something like Stand By Me, following a group of friends old and new as they try to navigate the perils of pre-adolescence. At others, it’s a reasonably understated examination of the real-life fears that accompany childhood, especially among kids doomed to be outsiders, and then at others it’s a more straightforward supernatural horror film. It doesn’t have the same kind of sprawl that Doctor Sleep did, being set in one place over the course of a single summer, but it does feel like it would have worked better as a more personal, intimate story. It’s not that it does anything really badly, but there’s so much that even with a running time well over two hours, nothing really gets explored in depth. It’s sort of one thing, then on to the next.

At its heart, it’s a story about what it’s like to be a kid in a world where there are dangers of one sort or another all around you. All of the protagonists are outsiders in one way or another. Bill has a stutter, Ben Hanscom is overweight and the new kid in town, Mike Hanlon appears to be one of the only Black people in Derry, Stan Uris is one of the few Jewish kids in Derry. Eddie Kapsbrak has asthma and an extremely overprotective mother, Richie Tozier is scrawny and spectacularly nearsighted, and he compensates for his insecurity by using humor as a defense, and Beverly Marsh is being abused by her father and has somehow garnered a reputation for being “easy.” These are kids with all the usual kid worries, but also all the worries of any kid who’s ever been singled out as a target, or victim, or just as Other. And on top of that, they are witnessing horrors all around them in their hometown, horrors to which the town’s adults seem almost willfully blind. The moments where we see what they have to deal with, how few places they have where they really feel safe, work. The occasional idyllic moments they have, just hanging out and shooting the shit or swimming at the quarry., really do feel like a momentary respite from the dread that follows them around all the time in the form of bullies and the dread facing them at home. 

And they’re all depicted pretty realistically, for better or worse. It’s easy to make child characters into cartoons, but for the most part they feel like regular kids. That said, it does mean that Eddie, with his finely honed hypochondriasis, is kind of defined almost entirely by that at the start of the film, and Richie, easily the most insecure of the bunch, is a nonstop fountain of wisecracks and mom jokes and the kind of desperate overcompensation that you only get when you’re aware of just how awkward you really are. And honestly, he’s pretty grating all the way through. But I also knew kids like this. Fuck, I was a kid like this. It doesn’t make it any easier to sit through (fun drinking game: take a shot anytime someone says “shut up, Richie,” and then die of alcohol poisoning), but it does ring true to life. These are kids who walk through their days like they are minefields, and that comes across very well.

The supernatural stuff is more of a mixed bag, though, mostly in the execution. There are lots of great little details and bits of business happening in the background, content to let you notice them without calling attention to themselves, and there are moments that are genuinely nasty, like Stranger Things with the gloves taken off. For a film that could easily turn into some kind of wistful nostalgia trip with some ghosts, it does not fuck around. But over time it leans a little too much into creature effects and as is often the case, the more the creature is on screen, the less frightening it becomes and the more it just feels like you’re looking at special effects. I think this is endemic to pretty much any big-budget major-studio horror film - it ends up being kind of as much of a spectacle film as something like Jurassic Park or one of the eighteen million Marvel Universe film-type products coming out in any given week. And those aren’t really scary, they’re ultimately just action films using a different vocabulary and the film finally sort of gives in to this in the third act, all hectic yelling and action when a defter touch is needed.

Again, a lot rides on the kids at the center of the film and fortunately, they aren’t saints. They get angry at each other and don’t want to do the right thing and that helps give the film some gravity, but the further away it gets from the very specific, personal horrors of this cursed town, the effects it has on the adults, and the nightmares lurking behind any doorway and the closer it gets to CG effects pieces and big showdowns, the less effective it is. I didn’t feel like my time was wasted by any means, but I do feel like the popularity of the story (and of King as an author) gets in the way - it’s not enough to make a solid scary movie, it has to please the fans (and the author, who has been critical of adaptation in the past the further they stray from his text) and bring in big enough crowds to justify the budget needed to bring the story to life. And that’s not where horror does its best work, in big flashy hero moments. It does its best work in dark corners and behind the door nobody opens and in the house that has been abandoned for decades and the things in the between the lines of a house’s history. There’s still Chapter 2 to go, but honestly, I think this would have probably worked better as a limited-run series.

IMDB entry
Available on Tubi
Available on Amazon