Ahoy, squirts! Quint here. It's a good time to be a Stephen King fan. We finally have big screen adaptations coming of some of his very best work (with a STAND movie series still being threatened). We've seen a bit from The Dark Tower movie and now that they're well into production we're starting to see a bit from Andy Muschietti's take on IT.
I've got a lot of photos to share with you. We'll start with images shared via Muschietti's Instagram page and we'll end with EW's full Pennywise look.
First up, is Stuttering Bill Denbrough's big, old, clunky, but fast (fast enough to beat the devil, they say) bike: Silver. Hi-yo, Silver! Away!
Perfect. The bike in the book was second hand and way too big for the kid riding it, so the fact that it's very used and rusted to hell is just right. Silver is a safe place for Bill, whose stutter was always bad, but never when he mounted his bike and cried out “Hi-Yo, Silver! Away!”
Witcham Street is a major place in the story. Bill's little brother Georgie has... a bad time here.
This is obviously the front gate of 29 Neibolt Street, an abandoned house that plays into the story many times. The kids encounter Pennywise here a few different times (Eddie sees him as leper and Bill and Richie run into the Teenage Werewolf there when they investigate Eddie's story and then, as a full group, they return to try to kill it.) I imagine they'll whittle the back a bit, but I'm excited to see them incorporate 29 Neibolt into this adaptation because the '90s mini-series left it out.
This gory image is perhaps the most effecting picture in this batch. A young girl's head floating (they all float afterall). I'm not sure if this is one of Pennywise's current victims (could be Betty) or if it's the story of the Kitchener Ironworks exploding during an Easter Egg hunt decades before. That story very memorably had a child's head found in a neighboring tree and sets up that this creature has been at work for generations and Derry is kind of a cursed place. It's probably not the Kitchener story, as I'm not sure how you fit that in a feature film, but it'd be cool if they figured out a way.
Speaking of Betty Ripsom, here's her Missing Child poster. Unless my memory is failing me, we never see what happens to Betty in King's book, but we know she's one of the children who disappeared when Pennywise was on the hunt. This is probably how it'll play out in the movie and this is production design texture to add depth to the world (as well as nod to the fans of the book).
The most interesting image from Muschietti's reveals is this one, which shows us Stranger Things' Finn Wolfhard as Richie Tozier (beep-beep) and does it in an unexpected way. In the book Tozier never goes missing or falls victim to Pennywise. I doubt they'd reveal a big twist on expectation in this way, so it's probably just a fun way to reveal Richie for the fans or something that's a bit of an office joke that they wanted to share.
Now that we've gone through that tour of Derry, let's take a look at the new Pennywise, in full:
Here's the thing to remember when it comes to Pennywise. It isn't a clown. It projects that image because it's on the minds of his prey, the children of Derry. In King's book, this section is set in the 1950s so Pennywise is described as looking a lot like Bozo, which was on a lot of kids' minds at that time.
For this new crew to update the look of Pennywise makes sense. This one looks a lot more like the clown from Poltergeist, which again would make sense since this one is set in the late '80s.
What I liked about Curry's take on the role is that you could see Pennywise fitting in at a kid's birthday party. I mean, he was creepy, but he was regular clown creepy. This is horror movie clown creepy. At least in the form we've seen so far.
It's a jolt, but it's not a movie-killing jolt for me. Plus I see the logic in the different look. More than anything, the bulk of the images have shown me that those in charge are not only going for something that captures the spirit of King's amazing book, but something that won't shy away from the darkness of the story.
Can't wait to see how this one shakes out. What about you?
-Eric Vespe
”Quint”
quint@aintitcool.com
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