A satanic leering clown who wants to trap kids in a sewer is terrifying
This is an ensemble smorgasbord of scariness, or maybe a portmanteau of petrification, throwing everything but the haunted kitchen-sink at the audience in the cause of freaking us out. As creepy and horrible things keep happening to each of the kids, it almost feels like a horror anthology, a collection of scares which could be shuffled and presented in any order. In some ways, it is more suited to a TV series – such as Twin Peaks, maybe – and has in fact been adapted that way.
Bill (Jaeden Lieberher) is a kid with a stammer who has to look after his little brother and perhaps partly just to get rid of him, lets Georgie (Jackson Robert Scott) play outside in the rain, sailing a paper boat down a rushing gutter. Just as the boat disappears down a drain, Georgie is surprised to see a clown standing down there in the darkness: this is the sinister red-balloon-wielding Pennywise (Bill Skarsgård), who asks him if he’d like his boat back? Just lean down into the darkness and take it! It is a very disturbing scene, at least partly because of its starkness and simplicity, like a lucid dream, and very different from the over-the-top horror routines that come into play for the rest of the film.
Georgie’s encounter is to end in macabre disaster and he winds up as a statistic, in a town notorious for kids going missing and the police not able to do anything. As for Bill, he makes friends with a bunch of other kids who are outsiders and losers, oppressed among other things by a collection of vicious older bullies. Beverly (Sophia Lillis) is being abused by her dad; Ben (Jeremy Ray Taylor) is a shy, overweight kid with a crush on Beverly and whose nerdy interest in local history opens everyone’s eyes to the long-standing evilness of what’s going on. Mike (Chosen Jacobs) feels he can’t hack the brutality of working in the family meat-packing business. Eddie (Jack Dylan Grazer) has been turned into a hypochondriac by an overprotective mother; Stanley (Wyatt Oleff) is scared he will let his dad down by making a mess of his upcoming bar mitzvah and Richie (Finn Wolfhard) is the bespectacled, back-talking smart aleck of the group
The loser club hang out together all summer long, dealing with their loneliness, their intense feelings of love and yearning. It would almost be idyllic, elegiac and bittersweet, were it not for the fact that they are also in fear of their lives from a satanically leering clown who occasionally turns into other disfigured creatures and wants to imprison them all forever in his horrendous lair somewhere in the town’s sewage system. And it often is scary: the simple succession of bizarre episodes in this sunny place has something surreal about it. The film interestingly shows us that non-supernatural violence, bullying and abuse has been normalised in this apparently picturesque town – so a demonic clown is just something else to worry about.
“We were all together when we saw it! That’s why we’re still alive!“
