I have a memory I can recall vividly, though I’m sure there are added details that never existed. Gone in their place are the calmer notes that made it reality, rather than the nightmare that exists now. So, the following is an event that transpired as well as I can recall it now.
I was on a trip to a carnival of some kind with my extended family which, despite being ten, I don’t think I was all too excited for. Already at that age, I had developed an anxiety that spending time amongst large groups of people could range, depending on the specifics, from unenjoyable to almost painful. Still, I imagine I was there to have a good time, and I may even have. There aren’t any memories carried with me from inside the park though, or on the journeys there and back (and this trip was made in a conversion van). We arrived at the park after dark and made the dirt lot walk to the entrance. There waiting for us was a dunking booth. Seated on the collapsable chair was a clown, his makeup already running down his face in a way that probably wasn’t accounted for in the planning stages. This made him look, as my mind conjures it, terrifying, especially to a ten year old.
I can see myself reaching the booth, the clown staring me down, taunting me and those around to just try and dunk him. This is where, as all nightmarish memories do, the actual events collide with my own neurosis of self-esteem. I remember getting the oversized baseball and flinging it in the target’s direction. I played a little baseball growing up, but was never great and felt worse. I missed and the clown cackled at me. I can see the people around me cackling too at my ball, high and outside. I try again. High and outside. The cackling intensifies all around, now almost manic. I haven’t dunked the clown, but his makeup seems to be running more viciously down his chin anyway.
This is where I usually wake up.
…
When a few different studies, albeit mainly internet polling, are cobbled together, somewhere around 40% of adults claim to be at least moderately afraid of clowns. There’s not been too much academic study (“coulrophobia” is simply a neologism that neither the WHO or APA recognize official”). Most thought on the matter generally tends to agree that clowns are scary for three reasons:
- That clowns are supposed to be comic, childlike characters, so the natural inversion of them as evil is automatically frightening.
- Their heightened demeanor and disfigured costume appearance and makeup can be aesthetically disturbing, as well as inherently threatening.
- Perhaps most importantly, clowns are scary to us because the “scary clown” archetype repeats itself again and again.
To the third point, it takes only a cursory look to see the many examples of fictional evil clowns throughout history, from Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci to Batman’s Joker. The most influential in the modern era is undoubtedly Stephen King’s Pennywise, the common manifestation of his shape shifting monster in IT. The newest adaptation, from Mama director Andy Muschietti, arrived last week, securing both the largest opening weekend box office tally for the horror genre and the month of September. What scared us before will continue to scare us, and apparently we’ll keep paying to do so.
IT works exceedingly well when it gives space to its young actors, who are at once funny, charming, tragic, and terrified. The standouts are Stranger Thing’s Fionn Whitehead (one of several reasons the film is drawing comparisons to the Netflix series), Jaeden Lieberhur as main Loser’s Club captain Bill, and Sophia Lillis as Bev Marsh. As great as the child actors may be, the film’s horror largely lives or dies off of Pennywise. In that respect, Bill Skarsgård delivers a manic performance, though one less likely to etch on the cultural conscious like Tim Curry’s in the television miniseries did.
Mama (2013), Andy Muschetti’s previous horror film, was a standout work because of both circumstance and style. The film stood out as a mainstream horror entry able of inducing real scares, with a bevy of fine performances, in a genre where those aspects trend increasingly towards independent, “post-horror” art films. IT carries over much of those aspects that made Mama so enjoyable (the disjointed stylings Muschietti and DP Chung-hoon Chung capture in the Pennywise-induced walking terrors the children experience certainly stand out), but also carries some of the pacing and plot contrivances that hindered Mama. Many of these have to do with adaptation King’s novel, which in addition to being doorstop length, isn’t tailor made for a film adaptation. King is known across all his works to spend a fair amount of time examining daily life in his cities, and the terrible things that happen when no monsters are around. Muschietti is able to capture some of this well, particularly in Bev’s story, but there just isn’t enough time to do it all well, like in Mike’s story.
As well, as Angelica Bastien points out in her NPR Fresh Air review, the children & towns would have responded in the late 80s (when the film is set) to abductions and murders of children is quite a bit different than it would have in the 50s (when King’s novel is set). It’s hard to carry over King’s tone into a different time period, and while this misshaped historical tone could go unrealized while watching the film, is hard to dismiss once it’s presented. Then again, it does make the citizens of Derry seem that much more negligently horrifying.
When all’s said and done, however, IT is the first film of any genre in some time to feel like a theatrical event. Muschietti is able to fit a lot of story over two-plus hours, and make it exceedingly enjoyable.
But IT, the monster, is a manifestation of evil only presenting itself as Pennywise the Dancing Clown. This is quite an ingenious device in King’s book, but now the mask of Pennywise has outlived the monster under it. In much the same way, IT, the movie, is a horror exercise wearing the scary clown mask, representing a great fear of 40% of people back to us. It, the monster, is a clown only because it knows it can lure and frighten children that way. IT, the movie, uses its clown to do the same. But like Bill and the rest of the Loser’s discover, IT only feeds off of preexisting terror. When I got home from IT, I didn’t have a nightmare about Pennywise in the sewers. I had the same clown nightmare I always have. All IT did, after the credits, was remind of something it can never be as scary as.
Perhaps this is unfair to lay at the film’s feet, as it tries to entertain more than terrify. Perhaps more of this will be realized in the next chapter, when the cyclical nature of adulthood is terrifying enough. Regardless, IT is a pretty extraordinary time at the theater, and I watched it through fingers more than once.
IT is in theaters now.
where once there had been nothing 