The year 2017 proved to be a high point of what an article in Vanity Fair dubbed “The Stephen King Renaissance.” In that year, good news for the writer and his legions of Constant Readers abounded for nearly as far as the Eye of Randall Flagg could see—with the lone exception being the dismal reception of the cinematic debut of the Dark Tower series. Twenty seventeen could also rightly be called “The Year of the Killer Clown,” primarily because the latest adaptation Ed. Note: an IMDB of IT (2017) of It, King’s epic narrative Ed Note: The IT novel promo page at Stephenking.com of a cyclic monstrous evil that most often incarnates in a small Maine town as a razor-toothed clown named Pennywise, met with arguably the greatest critical and financial success of any King adaptation so far. A film that cost about $35 million to make, It went on to earn globally over $700 million, a phenomenal success by any measure but especially by the standards established by previous King adaptations. As directed by Andy Muschietti, who replaced True Detective director Cary Fukunaga after the latter departed the project over the proverbial “creative disagreements,” It surpassed the generally rosy expectations of the producers, and even King himself.

King had been confident the film would be a hit since his viewing of the rough cut a little over a year before the finished product premiered, but he did not know just how big of a hit. For example, he told Entertainment Weekly in an interview on December 22, 2017 that “I don’t think anybody knew it was going to be, you know, like $700 million dollars worldwide.”¹ He attributes the film’s massive success to three main factors. First, he points to the 1990 television miniseriesEd. Note: The Warner Bros. web portal to the series that stands as the first adaptation of the novel. King elaborates: “A whole generation of kids between the ages of 8 and 14 were scared shitless by Tim Curry and when the new one came out it was a chance to revisit that particular experience in their childhood.”² Second, he cites what he calls “this weird viral bulge in stories about creepy clowns” that dominated the press Ed. Note: a Guardian article on the "clown panic" in 2016 through the first part of 2017, perhaps as both a relief from covering a particularly fraught election year and as an uneasy reflection of that generalized anxiety. Finally, he believes that the debut of the Netflix series Stranger Things Ed. Note: an IMDB page for Stranger Thingsalso contributed to getting audiences excited to see the latest version of It. “It’s kind of an incestuous thing,” King says, “because so much of Stranger Things reminds me of stuff that I’ve written. But I think that played a part. Obviously the idea of a bunch of kids fighting a supernatural terror just sort of appealed to people, and they saw a chance to root for the good guys, which doesn’t always happen in horror movies.”³ While these three factors undoubtedly contributed to the film’s success, the cultural memory of the first television adaptation of It, directed by Tommy Lee Wallace and aired on ABC over two nights during “sweeps week” in November 1990, bears closer scrutiny, just as a comparison between the two filmed versions of King’s original narrative provides an interesting case study in adaptation theory.

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Linda Hutcheon’s study A Theory of Adaptation Ed. Note: the publisher's portal to the book, published in 2006, is particularly relevant to the novel It and its multiple adaptations. Hutcheon proceeds on the rather simple but nevertheless profound-in-its-applications thesis that the adaptation of a text from one medium to another offers “the pleasure of repetition with variation.”⁴ This provides a useful way of tracking the adaptation history of a text over time (often in multiple media, not just the move from literary to cinematic work) and how each adaptation both re-establishes and transforms the pre-existing version or versions for the expectations of a new audience in a new era. From this perspective, the Hollywood strategy of greenlighting Ed. Note: a Variety article on franchise fatigue remakes and reboots and restarts and resets and refashions and re-dos and re-imaginings and re-visionings of older work becomes, if not exactly noble in intent, at least not quite so jaded, cynical, risk-averse, and creatively bankrupt as critics of the industry would have it. Rather, Hollywood and the other arms of the entertainment industry are upgrading a familiar text for the contemporary audience because history has proven that people want to experience the previously mentioned “pleasure of repetition with variation.” To return to Stephen King’s novel It and its two (thus far) adaptations into a television series and a two-part movie series, the audience who grew up with King’s novel and the mini-series that followed it a few years after publication now is compelled, like the grown-up members of the Losers Club, to return to Derry to relive the story of the evil lurking in the sewers beneath the haunted city as told in a new adaptation.

For a property that developed a cult reputation and something of a bargain-basement reputation because of that status, It as a television miniseries actually received good ratings: 17 million viewers its first night and 19 million the second. Coming at a time when stock in King television and cinema adaptations was at one of its periodic lows, It kick-started something of an early 1990s “King Renaissance,” including a television mini-series of The Stand. Of It’s success on television, director Wallace in an oral history of the miniseries entitled “Back to Derry” explains the appeal as its focus “on a group of kids who band together for comfort, solace, protection and courage, as well as certain rites and rituals of childhood friendship.” ⁵ While It the miniseries has for at least some viewers withstood the test of time to become what Sean T. Collins calls a “cult classic” in his Rolling Stone article, this same writer points to the “secret sauce” ingredient that really elevates the miniseries above pedestrian TV fare and ensures that almost 30 years later a cinematic remake would generate such buzz: Tim Curry’s role as Pennywise. Collins calls the performance “the stuff sleepless nights are made of. He gloats, he giggles, he taunts, he devours the scenery like the monster himself devours middle-schoolers.”⁶ Ethan Alter in the oral history “Back to Derry” hails Curry’s performance as one that “has long since entered the Horror Hall of Fame, while also dealing the clown industry a blow they’re still trying to recover from.”⁷ In fact, a great deal of interest in the 2017 film resided precisely in how Bill Skarsgard, the new Pennywise, could possibly match, let alone exceed, Curry’s performance.

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In part, Curry’s antic turn as the suggestively leering killer clown with the mouthful of razor-sharp teeth owes its power to a lean adaptation (lean when compared to King’s lengthy novel, anyway) that eschews much of the evocative context and backstory of Derry’s history to focus “its scares and horror impact primarily in the figure of Pennywise,” ⁸ to quote Simon Brown in his book Screening Stephen KingEd. Note: the publisher's portal to the book. Director Wallace in “Back to Derry” admits that he doesn’t miss the many subplots and the more cosmic elements of the novel Ed. Note: an Inverse article on King's extended universe, such as Maturin—the Turtle creator of the prime universe, one of the Twelve Guardians of the Beams holding up the Dark Tower, and nemesis of the entity known as It. As Brown also notes, the novel’s persistent refusal to describe Pennywise’s horrifically mutable face in any detail does not carry over to the miniseries. As portrayed by Curry and augmented by make-up and prosthetics, Pennywise lunges dagger-mouthed at his victims (the first being the hapless boy, Georgie) like a shark. Throughout the entirety of the series, Pennywise mugs and leers and capers, like a nightmare version of the physical comedy clowns from a traveling circus, until the end, when he reveals his true monstrous self as a rather unconvincing giant spider, which in a September 1, 2017 Guardian article Curry now admits is the one thing he dislikes about the miniseries and actress Annette O’Toole, who played Bev, in “Back to Derry” calls the “Alaskan King Crab monster.”

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Director Andy Muschietti, while acknowledging the power of Curry’s interpretation, tells The Guardian that the “1990 TV version of Pennywise is a classic 20th-century clown. I wanted to go for something more layered, weird, and ancestral, a stranger and unpredictable kind of horror.” ⁹ Muschietti went back to King’s original vision of It as a “shapeshifting monster. He can literally become your worst nightmare, your worst fear.”¹⁰ While King’s 1950s kids in the original visualize their worst fears in the shape of Universal movie monsters, such as the Mummy, Muschietti has his 1980s kids haunted by a kind of “fear that was deeper, more related to trauma.”¹¹ Intent on restoring the cosmic element from King’s novel that was missing from the television miniseries, Muschietti’s vision of Pennywise is “a force of elemental evil escaped from another dimension, only nominally choosing the form of a clown to terrorise its victims,” ¹² according to Clarisse Loughrey in her article for Independent. She further observes how Muschietti’s Latin American heritage, particularly his love of the genre of magical realism as popularized by Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, influences the depiction of Pennywise as an entity “coming from the other side and he's not human.”¹³

As portrayed by Bill Skarsgard, Pennywise the Dancing Clown is a fantastically confabulated, impossibly jointed creature popping in and out of the kids’ reality: a monster uncannier than Curry’s “familiar, rowdy clown that’s always playing the same notes,”¹⁴ according to Muschietti as quoted in Loughrey’s article. Generally, critics and audiences responded well to Skarsgard’s take on the character, though of course inevitably comparing it to Curry’s. Skarsgard anticipates that comparison, as well as perhaps unwittingly invokes adaptation theory, when he tells Caitlyn Hitt in her article in for the New York Daily News on the one hand that “Tim Curry’s performance was amazing” but on the other, somewhat defensively, that “We were making a new film, a new adaptation of the book. Of course, I wanted to bring something different and unique to it. Otherwise, I don’t see the point in remaking something. I hope that people can consider both performances separately and appreciate them for what they are.”¹⁵ While Skarsgard is to be commended for trying to create a separation between the two adaptations, practically all reviews of Skarsgard’s performance, no matter how laudatory, compare it against Curry’s. And really, why shouldn’t the comparison be made? Part of the pleasure of adaptation for an audience is mapping the homages and the changes from one version of the narrative to the next. Indeed, it’s really kind of the point.

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Nor is It’s physical appearance limited to the iconic Pennywise. To young Stanley Uris, for example, It takes on the guise of a vacant-eyed, flute-playing woman with a freakishly distorted face who emerges from a painting in his father’s office. The woman resembles a character from a Modigliani painting, taken right from Muschietti’s own childhood fears according to his interview with John Squires for Bloody Disgusting: “[Modigliani] often does these portraits with elongated characters. His vision of humans were with elongated necks, crooked faces and empty eyes most of the time. It was so deformed that as a child, you don’t see that as an artist’s style. You see it as a monster.”¹⁶ Muschietti invested the creature in his previous movie, Mama (2013), with similar attributes based on Modigliani’s work, thus establishing a self-referential dialogue between the two films. It also appears as a rotting, scabrous leper to the germophobic, hypochondriac Eddie Kaspbrak at the house on 29 Neibolt Street. To torment Bill, It takes on the dead Georgie’s form in the basement that Georgie feared in life. It appears as a surreally voluminous fountain of blood jetting from the bathroom sink to Bev, tapping into her fear that her budding sexuality is an unhealthy attractant to her abusive father. While Pennywise the Dancing Clown may well be the preferred, default setting for It’s earthly manifestations, It also taps into the conscious and subconscious fears of its intended child victims to appear to them in the most terrifying form conceivable to the child.

In this regard, then, the 2017 adaptation of It reincorporates at least some of the cosmic horror elements of King’s novel that the miniseries discarded, but at the same time the film asserts itself as a bold new adaptation through Muschietti’s distinctive vision of It as an interdimensional, shape-shifting entity who no longer takes on the form of old Universal movie monsters (as It did in the novel during the 1950s when not masquerading as a clown), but rather is updated to reflect the 1980s setting. The Mummy or the Gill-Man or the Wolfman given literal flesh would not terrify the 1980s Losers Club; however, the villainous clown, the uncanny-valley woman from the painting, the leper, the dead-boy ghost with the missing arm, and the symbolically menstrual fountain of blood in the bathroom are deeply personal referents that speak to the children’s fears much more directly than old black-and-white celluloid monsters that would not resonate as much with a child audience in the 1980s as they did in the 1950s. In conclusion, the two filmed texts in dialogue with one another and the original novel constitute a fascinating example of adaptation theory in motion over 27 years: of course, the same length of time that It goes into hibernation before venturing forth on another child-killing spree.

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Endnotes

1. ^{[Return to Article]} Breznican, Anthony. “Stephen King Q&A: Pennywise’s Creator on Scaring the Hell Out of 2017.” Entertainment Weekly, 22 Dec. 2017, ew.com/books/2017/12/22/stephen-king-pennywise-it-entertainers-of-the-year/.
2. ^{[Return to Article]} Ibid.
3. ^{[Return to Article]} Ibid.
4. ^{[Return to Article]} Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation, 1st edit. Routledge, 2006, page 4.
5. ^{[Return to Article]} Alter, Ethan. “Back to Derry: An Oral History of the Classic ‘Stephen King’s It Miniseries.” Yahoo Entertainment, 8 Sept. 2017, www.ya hoo.com/entertainment/back-derry-oral-history-classic-stephen-kings-miniseries-212828553.html.
6. ^{[Return to Article]} Collins, Sean T. “’It’: Everything You Need to Know About Stephen King’s Killer Clown Story.” Rolling Stone, 6 Sept. 2017, rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-news/it-everything-you-need-to-know-about-stephen-kings-killer-clown-story-113662/
7. ^{[Return to Article]} Alter, Ethan. “Back to Derry: An Oral History of the Classic ‘Stephen King’s It Miniseries.”
8. ^{[Return to Article]} Brown, Simon. Screening Stephen King: Adaptation and the Horror Genre in Film and Television. University of Texas Press, 2018.
9. ^{[Return to Article]} Godfrey, Alex. “’It was Wonderfully Scary’: Tim Curry, Rob Reiner, and Kathy Bates on the Joy of Adapting Stephen King.” The Guardian, 1 Sept. 2017, www.theguardian.com/film/2017/sep/01/stephen-king-it-carrie-rob-reiner-kathy-bates-horror
10. ^{[Return to Article]} Ibid.
11. ^{[Return to Article]} Ibid.
12. ^{[Return to Article]} Loughrey, Clarisse. “It Interview: Director Andy Muschietti On Staying True to the Spirit of Stephen King.” Independent, 8 Sept. 2017, www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/it-interview-director-andy-muschietti-pennywise-stephen-king-adaptation-bill-skarsgard-chapter-ii-release-date-a7937366.html.
13. ^{[Return to Article]} Ibid.
14. ^{[Return to Article]} Ibid.
15. ^{[Return to Article]} Hitt, Caitlyn. “Bill Skargargard Doesn’t Want ‘It’ Viewers to Compare His Pennywise to the Original.” New York Daily News, 7 Sept. 2017, www.nydailynews.com/2017/09/07/bill-skarsgard-doesnt-want-it-viewers-to-compare-his-pennywise-to-the-original/.
16. ^{[Return to Article]} Squires, John. “Muschietti Talks Paintings that Inspired Nightmarish New ‘It’ Creature.” Bloody Disgusting, 10 Sept. 2017, bloody-disgusting.com/movie/3458110/muschietti-talks-paintings-inspired-nightmarish-new-creature/.