Film adaptations of Stephen King’s work often suffer from genre misidentification. This isn’t to say that filmmakers mistakenly read King’s work as horror fiction — much of it undoubtedly is horror fiction. The primary shortcoming of many adaptations — including Andy Muschietti’s 2017/2019 It duology — is a limited perception of what the horror genre is, what it can do, and how it interfaces with other literary and cinematic traditions. It (1986) might well be King’s most horrific novel, its title representing the numinous and multifaceted object of fear itself. It’s as replete with monsters and grotesquerie as anything the author has written, but it also might be his most thematically and structurally ambitious work.
King repurposes horror’s most outlandish concepts within the domain of detailed, lived-in, contemporary American realist fiction. As such, reading his work with the seriousness it deserves requires understanding of its literary genealogies. King’s influences are wide-ranging, from 20th-century dark fiction writers like Shirley Jackson, Rod Serling, and Richard Matheson to 19th-century novelists like Charles Dickens and French naturalist Émile Zola. Outside the orbit of horror fiction, though, the most prominent influence on It might well be Southern late-modernist William Faulkner.
Faulkner situated realist engagements with class, racism, religion, family, and gender in the fictional Mississippi county of Yoknapatawpha. Among the author’s Yoknapatawpha novels are the classics As I Lay Dying (1930), Light in August (1932), and the harrowing Sanctuary (1931), which Faulkner described as a “potboiler” — a term sometimes lazily levied at King’s books. In Faulknerian fashion, King has designed a fictional Maine for his enormous oeuvre; among his invented municipalities are Castle Rock (Needful Things [1991]), Chester’s Mill (Under the Dome [2009]), and, perhaps most noteworthily, Derry, the setting for It (as well as several later works, including Insomnia [1994] and It’s unofficial companion novel, Dreamcatcher [2001]). Like Faulkner, King uses these manufactured sites to contend with real contemporary injustices, especially in It, which represents Derry’s collective prejudice as a sewer-dwelling, cosmic shapeshifter.
To a degree, It also recalls Faulkner’s prose style. Of course, King’s approach differs dramatically from the late-modernist giant, but It’s formal representations of interior experience do take noteworthy cues from modernism: namely, through its explorations of unreliable narration, stream-of-consciousness, and varying subjectivities. Written in quasi-omniscient third-person, the epic horror novel scaffolds past on present. It alternates between consciousness and material reality via seven primary characters’ voices, occasionally broadening its scope to replicate minor characters’ perspectives (most notably the abused psychopath, Henry Bowers).
It is a baggy, digressive novel. Despite long sections of brilliance and a stunningly inventive overall vision, it poses some problems. It’s an expressly anti-oppressive study of subliminal and overt violence exacted on marginalized groups, but its ideological focus is clouded by jokester Richie Tozier’s pervading racist impersonations and the disturbing gender imbalance of the Loser Club’s childhood pre-battle sex ritual. Although the book’s scatological humor is thematically consistent, it occasionally leans too heavily on what King’s book-length essay Danse Macabre winkingly calls “the gross-out.” Nevertheless, It is an important American novel packed with astute insights into trauma, aging, socially cultivated prejudice, domestic abuse, innocence lost and reclaimed. It addresses these themes while deftly synthesizing elements of disparate traditions: the Gothic, cosmic horror, splatterpunk, dark fantasy, naturalism, and modernism. It’s a sophisticated literary achievement that just so happens to occupy a popular genre.
Any filmmaker attempting to adapt this novel of over 440,000 words is bound to “fail” in some respect. Breadth and depth aside, cinema’s grammar differs fundamentally from literature’s — it’s a more externally representative and intrinsically collaborative art form, for better and worse. Both Tommy Lee Wallace’s 1990 miniseries and Muschietti’s 2017 and 2019 adaptations present compelling studies of the challenges and possibilities of translating text to screen.
Director/co-writer Wallace and telewriter Lawrence D. Cohen’s 1990 adaptation of It honors the source’s focus on memory, mimicking the book’s flashback-and-flashforward structure through alternating POVs. Their version retains the book’s sociohistorical focuses, only slightly shifting the childhood section’s poisoned Rockwell Americana from 1958 to 1960, and bumping the adult section from the Reaganomic mid-’80s to 1990. Cohen, who penned the screenplays for both Brian De Palma and Kimberly Peirce’s Carrie films, understands the importance of character psychology and setting in King’s fiction; he deftly balances the miniseries’ three-hour runtime between the seven Losers Club members, past and present.
Since Wallace and Cohen’s work is made for television, they are beholden to ABC’s cable censorship standards. Their adaptation loses something in softening King’s poetically colloquial coarseness, which not only provides the novel’s regional textures, but also acts as an important conduit for linguistic violence. So too does the miniseries shed some of the novel’s affective power by dramatically paring down its visceral brutality, instead mining its horror from social cruelties and the titular being’s psychological menace. The miniseries’ disturbing effects owe a great deal to the uniformly strong performances, notably the menacing work done by Jarred Blancard as young Henry Bowers and Tim Curry as It’s clown persona, Pennywise.
Meanwhile, with a collective budget of approximately $115 million and a total runtime of five hours, Andy Muschietti’s two-picture adaptation suffers from fewer production constraints than the $12 million miniseries, and its R-rating unshackles it from many of the content restrictions imposed on Wallace and co. Muschietti’s versions update the novel’s timelines from 1950s/1980s to 1980s/2010s, likely motivated by the decade’s commercially successful wave of eighties retro fetishism (from Super 8 [2011] to The Force Awakens [2015] to Stranger Things and beyond). The first picture pointedly indulges in nostalgia for ‘80s aesthetic surfaces, shying away from period-specific horrors such as Reagan’s hard right policies and AIDS-based homophobia. While King’s book establishes a playful rapport among the Losers Club members, the children in Muschietti’s film trade sincerity for glib irony. They never convincingly believe in the horror the way King’s vibrant characters do. Further, Muschietti’s picture makes the puzzling decision to rewrite and decenter Black history buff Mike Hanlon, shifting much of his narrative role to the body-shamed new kid, Ben Hanscom.
Edited with the jittery speed of a film trailer, it contains moments of visual invention — the autumnally-lit Neibolt Street house sequence stands out, elevated by creatively designed monsters and efficiently choreographed action — but it sacrifices most of the novel’s tonal and thematic textures, opting instead for the rhythms of a summer adventure movie punctuated with incessant, loud scare sequences. Muschietti’s film only cursorily glances at the novel’s domestic and social horrors. The shortcomings of such tonal distance show most clearly during the scene wherein Eddie Kaspbrak exposes his mother’s Munchausen syndrome by proxy. In King’s novel, this is a pivotal moment of innocence-rupturing psychological trauma, but Muschietti’s version plays it for a cheap joke, with Kaspbrak mistakenly calling his faux-inhaler a “gazebo” rather than “placebo”.
At 169 minutes, Muschietti’s second feature, It Chapter Two, is 30 minutes longer than its predecessor. As with the first chapter, Muschietti approaches the material with cynical wryness, driving for levity more often than genuine disturbance. However, Chapter Two hews closer to the novel’s thematic tenets of trauma and memory, by virtue of its central Gothic conceit: honoring a childhood promise, the Losers Club members return to Derry to confront the long-repressed titular entity, which has reemerged to spread fear and pain. The film has no choice but to engage with the past’s dark residue on the present.
The second entry draws on the novel’s Lovecraftian cosmic elements, which are totally excised from Muschietti’s first film and are mostly absent from Wallace’s miniseries. Chapter Two repurposes a childhood smoke-hole ceremony from King’s novel wherein Richie receives a vision of It’s ancient, cosmic origins. In Muschietti’s film, Mike Hanlon plies adult horror author Bill Denbrough with a drug used in American Indigenous rituals, giving Bill a vision like Richie’s. This is one of the most compellingly designed sequences from either of Muschietti’s films, a brief procession of psychedelic, Quay Brothers-esque apparitions presenting the shapeshifter’s history as a kind of perverse, hallucinatory puppet show.
Muschietti’s It duology’s shortcomings differ from those in Wallace’s adaptation. The 2017 and 2019 pictures benefit from a higher budget and fewer content restrictions, but they mostly lose the novel’s structural and thematic foundations. By contrast, Wallace’s version taps into King’s uniquely vivid representation of memory and childhood experience: earnest and painful, deeply acquainted with Americana — the beautiful myth that overlays real suffering. Most illustratively, taken together, both adaptations exemplify the difficulty of adapting King’s sprawling, complicated, flawed, and captivating opus to screen.
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