The famous novel by Stephen King makes its return to the silver screen.
With Halloween approaching, so many activities are on people’s schedules, from heading to the pumpkin patches, to finding costumes to be worn on Halloween Night, to the list of scary movies that are need to be watched before the big horror night. Just in time for the scary holiday, an old favorite amongst horror movie fanatics was remade into a modern day film.
Stephen King’s IT was a novel written by famous horror and suspense author, Stephen King in 1986 about a human eating entity that comes to Earth in the form of an evil clown that preys on children. The story is based out of a town called Derry up in the state of Maine about a dancing clown, Pennywise who feeds off the children of this town. The story plot is focused on Pennywise the clown stalking and harassing 7 school aged friends living in the town of Derry; he does so by disguising himself as each of the children’s fears after grabbing their attention as a harmless, friendly clown. Each character has their own experience with Pennywise and ultimately each of the children’s experiences bring them closer to one another creating a plan to defeat the clown.
On September 8, the new movie of Stephen King’s IT was shown in theatres throughout the United States and worldwide just in time for the Halloween season. A product of the new line Warner Bros. Pictures and director Andy Muschietti created what is one of the best remakes of a classic horror film for the 2017 year. The 2 hour and 15 min horror movie hit the box office hard too.
The movie earned about $317,000,000 domestically and about $636,000,000 worldwide ranking as of October 19, 2017 on the box office charts. Opening weekend, Stephen King’s IT had made $123,403,419 which is a total gross of 39% and was ranked the number one movie in the Horror genre for movie releases. The Mojo Box Office chart, currently as of the October 13- October 15 weekend, sits as the number 4 movie currently after The Foreigner as 3, Blade Runner 2049 as 2, and Happy Death Day ranking as number 1.
The movie does a great job of keeping King’s story together but adding newer, more modern twists of what the world would find scary. Between the two movies, each character has their own experience with Pennywise the clown, creating what makes Pennywise so scary, but director Andy Muschietti creates new experiences which creates a new twist for the story.
Pennywise himself is also a scarier clown physically than the 1990 version of the child eating entity. From the facial makeup to the style of red clown hair and the old clown clothing, there are numerous changes that were made to create a scarier type of clown for this movie. Muschietti did a great job relating to what 2017 scary is from the 1990 version of the movie, and the Rotten Tomatoes ratings for the movie were only one percent apart, as the Tomatometer was 85% and the Audience Score ranked at a 86%.
Overall, the Stephen King’s remake of IT was a great success for Warner Bros. Pictures, but it does not stop there. The original movie in 1990 consisted of two parts. The first being the experiences the characters had with Pennywise as children with what they thought was the defeat of the clown and creating a pact amongst one another that if Pennywise ever came back, they would come back to stop him. Stephen King then created a second portion of the story where Pennywise comes back to the character’s lives as adults where after separating they must all come back to the town of Derry to stop the clown one more time.
Warner Bros. Pictures left the suspense for their movie fans by not including the part of the movie where the characters are adults. Ultimately, the ending of this new IT movie left all horror movie fans in a suspense knowing that Pennywise the clown will be back.
Brianna Kidwell
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