Surprisingly, going to see Stephen King’s " It" in theaters at midnight was a lot less scary then I thought it would be. It certainly was scary enough to make me jump out of my seat on many of an occasion. Who isn’t scared of cute little kids turned zombie killing machines?
However, it wasn’t one of those psychological movies that stayed with you (I’m talking about you, Blair Witch Project). Much of the movie seemed to take place in another dimension, a nightmare from which you can barely manage to wake up from. However, I found it to be easy to separate the two.
To my surprise, I found the movie to be more similar to Stranger Things and The Goonies than anything else. The movie is driven by the friendship between a group of young kids in the late 80’s and their struggle to defeat it and come to terms with their own fears. For every terrifying scene, there was an equally funny scene of pre-teen cursing and your mom jokes. The character Richie (also known as the kid from Stranger Things) had enough one raunchy one-liners to make anyone laugh. It has enough of that childhood nostalgia to make the viewer look at it fondly when you were literally screaming only moments before.
In my opinion, something that made the movie thought-provoking was the fact that sometimes, the scariest thing to someone is not a psychotic killer clown lurking in a sewer, but things in someone’s own house or neighborhood. As someone who got partway through the massive Stephen King novel (forgive me it’s really long), I thought that the movie stayed as close to the movie as was within well reason.
It takes a lot more than two hours to adapt a twisty 1200 page book to be screen friendly. I’m interested to see if any sequel movies will be made, because there’s a whole half of the book that the first movie leaves out. I’m not someone who has an inherent fear of clowns, which may be another reason I didn’t leave the theater like some people did halfway through the movie. However, if this Halloween is a repeat of last year and there are random people roaming the streets dressed as scary clowns I will probably be looking at them with an added layer of fear due to this movie.