31 Days of Horror: Stephen King's IT is true to the novel
When I was a kid, I was horrified of anything scary. A few scenes had caught my eye in passing, whether they be on a friend's big brother's screen or a parent's friend's tv when we were visiting. The one that was seared into my memory was the scene of Pennywise grabbing adorable little Georgie and opening his expansive mouth, teeth like razors. It kept me up more than a few nights, so it only makes sense that now as an adult, this story is one of my most cherished.
It started as a novel in the late 80s, when Stephen King decided to tackle these entrenching themes of memory, childhood trauma, and losing the innocence of youth. It follows a group of seven misfit kids in small town Maine as they take on an ancient evil shapeshifting entity that feeds off children's life force and mostly appears as a circus clown named Pennywise. The novel was incredibly successful and is still lauded as some of the very best of King's work. in 1990, it was adapted into a two-part drama miniseries that spanned the two time periods from when they were children to when they return as adults to fight Pennywise yet again. Directed by Tommy Lee Wallace, this miniseries had a lot of runway to cover and it absolutely knocked it out of the park.
Overall, I feel like a lot of the decisions made on the miniseries make it feel truer to the ethos of the novel than the modern reboot films. There are these extremely strong undercurrents of friendship and the bonds of childhood that give this story its bedrock and while they are present in both iterations, the miniseries really strikes this chord. Perhaps its the interweaving of the stories, cutting back and forth between memory and real time that make the characters feel more ties together than the separation of the child and adult moments like the modern version. Casting the late great Tim Curry as Pennywise is the single best decision made. He encapsulates the balance between goofy and horrifying perfectly, weaving in and out between evil and laughs while still looking fantastic. The miniseries highlights the adults much more and that's something I always enjoy about this tale. The adults are under some sort of spell and can never recognize what is happening, which is intrinsic to the experience of being a kid, the adults just don't get it.
The miniseries certainly isn't as scary as the reboot, but it does take many of its classic scares directly from it, including Ms. Marsh and her interaction with adult Beverley, the scrapbook photograph scenes, and even a lot of the standoffs in the sewers. There is so much here to love and it's clear that there was so much work and love that went into this rendition. It received its flowers, being nominated for multiple Emmys but I always thought it deserved more. A true pioneer in horror miniseries and the presence of horror on the television set, this series terrified thousands of kids around the world, making them horrified of the most mundane things like sewer grates or garments blowing on a clothesline, and that's what makes it so perfect.
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