[8.8/10] One of the laziest critiques of a horror movie is that “it’s not really scary.” There’s plenty of ways horror films can be great without actually frightening you, whether it’s a film like Rosemary’s Baby where the horror is more atmospheric, to a film like It Follows which is as much about tension and mood as it is about solid scares. There’s tons of different flavors of horror, and restricting “good” horror movies to the ones that you might deem “scary” is unduly limiting to the genre.
But holy hell, IT will scare you. For all the great horror films that have come out in the last decade, I’m not sure there’s one that’s packed in a better frights-per-minute ratio than the 2017 release from director Andy Muschietti. The film tells the story of a group of kids confronting their town’s ancient evil, an entity embodied in the form of “Pennywise the Dancing Clown”, who comes to torment them through the movie in endlessly terrifying ways.
Pennywise doesn't move right. He doesn't sound right. When he’s on the screen, the camera doesn't move right. Everything about his taunts and hauntings, from the slithering, stop and start motions of the malevolent clown, to the music box tinks and winks that melt into auditory mush, to the way the frame goes jittery and the movements turn sudden, are calculated to instill the FDA maximum level of fears in both the film’s pre-teen characters and its audience.
Those scares are a treat worth the price of admission alone. There is expert cinematography, editing, lighting, sound design, and performances all carefully constructed and calculated to extract as much terror as possible in a beautiful, horrific symphony of skin-crawling craft. Choices in the film like the design of Pennywise’s various forms, how he responds when attacked, the aural and visual approach adopted when he seems to possess or consume some innocent soul, offer pound-for-pound the most creative collection of cinematic scares in years.
But beyond just the artistic and creative choices Muschietti and his team put together, IT is a film centered on childhood fears, and it does a good job of capturing the specific feeling of those childhood terrors, beyond just constructing impressively frightful sequences that could unnerve even out of context. There’s a specific sort of chill you get as a child, when you’re sent to grab something out of the basement, told to venture into a darkened room with strange pictures on the wall, forced to explore those little corners of everyday life that seem different and strange.
IT makes those child-like fears of the unknown real and justified. The film does a nice job of escalation. Most of the film’s characters have some initial run-in with Pennywise, where he preys on their deepest fears, but which initially result only in close calls and near misses, that underscore the “it could all just be in my head” sense of youthful doubt. But from there, the encounters become serious and more threatening, as our kid heroes slip deeper and deeper into Pennywise’s disturbing grasp and those childhood fears become realized.
But beyond the scares, IT also does an able job of capturing the more mundane, if no less relatable parts of young adulthood. While the film’s bully antagonists are more than a little extreme, it captures how young kids are with one another better than most films set around this stage of life, horror or otherwise. The central “Losers Club” of local misfits hang amiably with one another, they throw curse words at one other, nurse crushes on one another, get into lanky nerd scuffles and parent-concerning escapades and joust and jaw with one another. There’s some stylized hyperrealism to it all, but there’s also a sense of truth to the dynamic within the Losers Club, of kids who are perhaps a little more adventurous and brave than the average preteens, but otherwise behave and interact like real kids, that makes the movie more relatable, livens the moments when they’re just bonding, and heightens the moments when the film turns to horror.
That turn is just as aided by the film’s visual creativity. The film uses aesthetics to contrast the heavy slice of Americana that is Derry, the town where IT is set, with the cesspools that Pennywise inhabits and lures his prey to. The scenes above ground are filled with warm and bright primary colors: impossibly green grass, gleaming sunshine, and costuming that fits into that world. But when our heroes descend into Pennywise’s domain, or he takes over some corner of their world, the frame becomes literally darker, muddier, immediately cutting a distinction between the nominally cheery world the characters normally occupy and the inky, disquieting evil that lurks just around the edges of it.
The film doesn't necessarily have much on its mind beyond that elemental theme, but does a solid job of motivating each of its characters through those frightening adventures. While some members of the Losers Club can start to blend together, especially in the beginning, rationales like a desire to find a missing sibling, escape from abuse at home, and the misfit acceptance and camaraderie offered by the group all do well to distinguish the main characters and account for why this pack of kids would charge headlong into Pennywise’s anatomically impossible, razor-toothed maw.
There is a recurring motif, albeit one mostly reduced to subtext, of parental figures (almost exclusively men) shaming, rebuking, or outright abusing their children. That lends itself to the film’s conceit of a hidden evil within the seemingly idyllic town, one that children in particular are sensitive to, because they haven’t been socialized into their community’s blind spots and tacit acceptance of such things. And it adds to the terror of the mix of the adult and childlike represented by Pennywise -- a grown man in a playful guise, that adds a psychological undergirding to the horror.
At base, though, IT is just terrifying. Pennywise is terrifying. His pretzel logic assaults are terrifying. Our heroes’ efforts to face him are terrifying. Those frightening moments are balanced by the warmth of the camaraderie among the protagonists, the lived-in feel of their friendships. But that just adds stakes and motivation to those times when they descend into Pennywise’s realm, fight back against his horrifying broadsides, and confront, along with the audience, an avatar of fear worthy of the chills he inflicts on his victims on the screen and in front of it.
