After much nervous speculation, this
weekend we finally got to see the new film adaptation – the first
theatrical film adaptation – of Stephen King's horror masterpiece,
It. This is one that fans
have truly been awaiting with baited breath, and while it has turned
out to be every bit as great an adaptation as we could have hoped
for, it is very understandable that many people were so nervous. It
is a story that means a lot to a lot of people, both in its original
form as a novel, and in its second form as a 1990 TV miniseries. As
one of Stephen King's most iconic works, it made a massive impression
on a whole generation of horror fans, particularly kids who saw the
popular miniseries during their own youth. In terms of the importance
of both of those works in their readers' and viewers' lives, this new
film has a lot to live up to. It also has a daunting amount to try
and get right, as the novel is a sprawling, hugely ambitious epic
that not even a three-hour miniseries could properly contain. We've
already published our review of the new film, but in order to better
understand exactly what it has to live up to, we need to take a look
back at both of these previous classic iterations of King's tale.
What better way to wrap up our week-long celebration of the films of
Stephen King?
The Novel
(1986)
By now surely everyone knows the premise, about a group of childhood
friends (“The Loser's Club”) who come of age while fighting a
nightmarish evil that is feeding on the children in their town, and
who then reunite as adults to face it once again when it returns. But
there is so much more to the novel than just that. With the time and
attention to detail that King gives to the story, it certainly is not
only about that, but about their more real-world coming-of-age
experiences as well, telling a story that is as relatable as it
terrifying. The drama in the book is as well-told as the horror, and
anyone who grew up as a bit of an outcast will surely find much to
relate to in the slice-of-life stories of Bill, Richie, Eddie, Bev,
Mike, Ben, and Stan. The chemistry between the kids, and their
non-supernatural experiences together, feels extremely true to life,
and is alternately funny, sad, and frightening – not even just in
the horror elements, but in the tense interactions with the sadistic
bullies led by Henry Bowers. Further refining the formula that The
Body/Stand By Me did so well, It gives us the prototypical
coming-of-age story for its decade and beyond, while wrapping it up
in supernatural elements that enhance the themes and help them
resonate further. When Super 8 and later Stranger Things
became such major pieces of our modern nostalgia-loving pop-culture,
“Spielbergian” became the go-to adjective used to describe such
things. But while both of those borrow plenty of visual and
storytelling cues from Spielberg, they owe at least as much to
Stephen King for their narrative format and the makeup of their cast.
Neither Stranger Things nor Super 8 could possibly
exist without It, as they both reinvent the Loser's Club for a
new generation.
But even beyond the Loser's Club, the novel is about the town of
Derry and the evil that resides in it on a much, much grander scale:
with its nonlinear storytelling and its excerpts of historical study
dating back decades and centuries, It brings to life an
elaborate mythology stretching back to when the town was founded, and
beyond. The long-lasting, eternally present effects of It's evil are
felt very strongly in the book, and It becomes so very clear that It
is much more than just a creature that feeds on children: It is a
Lovecraftian Elder God which is as eternal as fear itself, and which
boasts a mythos that could make Cthulhu jealous. It is, crucially, so
much more than just a killer clown. It can take any shape, but it is
bigger than all of them, and King's writing lets us feel just how big
and scary it is, on a cosmic level. Its closest literary analog is
Lovecraft's Crawling Chaos, Nyarlathotep (which also sometimes
performs as a sinister entertainer – a stage magician), and like
Lovecraft, King is able to give the sense that its true nature really
is indescribable in human thoughts. It's the sort of horror that only
a novel can readily tell.
But it is about more than that still: It feeds on fear, and fosters
fear and hatred in the victims it preys on. In practice, this means
that it brings out the worst of human nature, and plays people
against each other to fuel animosity on which it can feed. This means
that the villain of the novel is not just It, but the darker side of
humanity as well. It stirs up people's racism, homophobia, and
misogyny and takes pleasure in making us turn against each other, and
kill each other, while it simply eats up the emotional fallout.
Thanks to this subplot, the social themes in It run
unexpectedly strong, and also provide the book with some of its most
chilling moments, like the fire at the Black Spot (a white
supremacist mass-murder of black concert-goers at a 1920s jazz club),
the hate-crime murder of a gay twentysomething that sparks the 1980s
portion of the story, and Beverly's ongoing struggles with domestic
abuse and its aftermath. Re-reading the novel today these themes are
just as powerful as ever, and possibly more powerful than they've
been in a good few years: the idea of an incorporeal force that
divides and devours populations by stirring up violence and hatred
directed at the Other (whether that means people of color, LGBT
people, or women) hits terrifyingly close to home in these times when
large swaths of the population feel a palpable sense of danger. It
may have overslept a few years (the book came out 31 years ago, and
in the story Its feeding cycle sees it wake up every 27), but It
certainly feels alive and well today.
Score:
The
Miniseries (1990):
Allowing for the content restrictions of the TV format, the first
episode of the miniseries genuinely is really good. The framing
device is very effectively handled, as the kid story is told in
parallel with each of the Loser's adult selves remembering back on
that time as they return to Derry. But the best thing about this
first half is how good the kid storyline is. The kids have great
chemistry, and genuinely capture the feeling of being a group of
close friends. Most of them are also very well-acted, especially the
haunted, wise-beyond-his-years Jonathan Brandis as Bill Denbrough and
the already-hilarious Seth Green as Richie Tozier. Even seeing it at
the time, it would have been clear that Green would go on to be big,
and much like seeing River Phoenix in Stand By Me, this
miniseries is a sad reminder of the life and career that the late
Brandis should have enjoyed, even as his strong performance anchors
the first half of the film.
Rewatching the miniseries as an adult and a fan of the novel, one of
the biggest surprises was how actually really faithful the first half
of the miniseries is, to a point. A lot of the major story beats and
character dynamics from the book are present here, and while plenty
had to be cut due to the time constraints (most notably the major
subplot involving the house on Nieboldt street), both the story and
the soul of the book are faithfully represented. Especially when it
comes to the coming-of-age arcs, and the Losers' escalating run-ins
with Henry Bowers and his gang, the miniseries adapts the novel
unexpectedly well. Though again, that is to a point. While I viewed
it trying to be very lenient to the ways in which network TV content
restrictions would limit what from the book could be shown, it is
undeniable that the brutal impact of much of the book is severely
lessened. On the human side of things, Henry Bowers is reduced to a
mere bully, if still an especially nasty one, while the book had him
gradually escalate (with some help from It) to become a full-blown
violent sociopath. On the supernatural side of things, since most of
the book's horrors involve violence against children, and that
certainly couldn't be shown on TV in 1990 before the 10pm watershed,
It/Pennywise is basically reduced to either killing people
off-screen, or threatening to kill our main characters the next
time he sees them. He does the latter a LOT by the end of the
miniseries, making him a villain of much talk but much less action,
and it robs him of more than a few of the teeth he has in the novel.
But a bigger problem than all of this is that, since the miniseries
had to conclude the first episode with the kids defeating It for the
first time, there comes a point at the top of the third act where the
pacing accelerates like crazy. After being a mostly very faithful
translation of the novel which really takes its time in the character
development portion (the strongest point of the whole miniseries, to
be sure), the plot jumps from the point where the Losers all figure
out about Its existence to the point where they decide to kill It
literally from one scene to the next. It still works, but especially
to a fan of the book it feels pretty obviously like a large chunk of
act 2 got skipped over in the interest of time. The character arcs
still function as they should, and part 1 ends very strongly, but
what suffers is the mythology, and that is a very unfortunate
casualty indeed.
The themes and mythology are the one part of the first episode that
the miniseries really doesn't get right. For starters, it totally
tosses out the window the themes of It manipulating people's hatred
and bigotry; It certainly still manipulates people and brings out the
worst in them, but the themes of racism, misogyny, and homophobia are
altogether absent, which is a shame. But more importantly still, it
hugely glosses over and oversimplifies the mythology of what It is
and where It comes from. We don't get nearly as good a sense of its
history of using the town as a feeding ground, we don't get any real
explanation about the psychic hold it has on the people of Derry (or
the way that it wipes itself from the mind of those who encounter it
– so it's totally unexplained why the adult Losers don't remember
their first fight with it), and its very nature is changed
significantly. In the novel, it is clear almost from the beginning
that It is a shape-changing being – again, rather like a
Lovecraftial Elder God – which takes many forms, of which Pennywise
is only one. The miniseries way overemphasizes Pennywise, to
the point that you get the impression that it is Its true form, and
It is basically just a clown-demon that can also transform into other
things. The Lovecraftian proportions of what It is are largely lost,
to the point that when, at the end of part 1, It appears as the
Deadlights and starts referring to itself as the eternal Eater Of
Worlds, it comes totally out of left field and seems like an
arbitrary change that hasn't been built to at all. It feels as if the
miniseries wanted to turn Tim Curry's Pennywise into a Freddy
Krueger-esque villain, at the expense of the novel's much more
interesting mythology. It is also worth noting that in the novel it
is VERY rare for Pennywise to appear as just a normal-looking clown
to lure kids in before it kills them (that happens probably just two
or three times in the book's more than 1,000 pages – usually it
appears as a demon vision of a clown more like in the new film), but
that is almost all that Pennywise does here, again changing the
nature of It as a villain. Of course, none of this is to say that
Curry's Pennywise isn't great on his own terms: Curry is brilliant,
and creepy as hell, and his iconic status as one of the most
memorable horror villains of the decade is entirely deserved. His
performance completely lives up to its strong reputation, and works
very well as its own character; it just isn't the same as It from the
book. The real issue is that the very different nature of the
character doesn't always gel well with the otherwise very faithful
narrative, causing things like the third-act appearance of the
Deadlights to not make much sense in the new context. Pennywise still
provides plenty of creepy and memorable moments, but the end result
is some added unevenness.
Part 2 is where a lot more unevenness occurs. Once again, the cast is
(mostly) great, with standout performances from John Ritter as Ben
and Dennis Christopher as Eddie, who truly inhabits the neurotic
character, and gives some of his best acting work outside of his
award-nominated role in Breaking Away. Once again the script
is also extremely faithful to the novel – although in this case, it
may be a bit too much so. Subplots from the book make it into part 2
that the limited runtime doesn't really have time for, some things
are kept in that translate rather awkwardly from book to screen, and
while the cast once again has excellent chemistry, they are too often
reduced to group conversations that mostly just provide huge amounts
of exposition. It's an admirable attempt to faithfully translate the
book, but too often it feels a bit stilted and doesn't always work.
There are also a couple odd changes to the characters: specifically,
the baffling reduction of grown-up Richie to a spineless,
constantly-complaining foil who gets almost nothing to do, while in
the book he wound up being a strong character who was very important
to the plot. Still, when it works, it really works – like in the
famous Chinese restaurant scene – and is much better than its
reputation suggests, thanks largely to the strong cast.
I expected this miniseries to not hold up well at all, and to pale in
comparison to the book once I had read it. It certainly has its
flaws, of both content and budget, but overall it held up much better
than I expected. Unless it had more money and a longer runtime, I
can't imagine an early-1990s television adaptation of It being any
better than this. Within the restrictions that it had to accommodate,
it really is quite good, faithfully adapting much of the plot, and
certainly capturing the novel's heart. The much-dulled teeth caused
by the network-TV content restrictions are unfortunate, and it is
even more unfortunate that the supernatural mythology of It is so
drastically reduced, but particularly in the kid half of the story,
the dynamics between the characters find the soul of the book and
bring it to life. It certainly helps that the cast is mostly
excellent: the kids, the adults, and especially Tim Curry, who really
does earn his fright-icon status. Sure, it's uneven, and sure, it
leaves a lot of room for improvement (this really did deserve a new
film adaptation, and I'm so glad it got an appropriately great one),
but for a 27-year-old television miniseries, I still think it defies
expectations in what it was able to do, even if that sometimes is
faint praise.
Score:
For Part 1:
For Part 2:
- Christopher S. Jordan
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