Thursday 12 March 2009

Stephen King's IT

Other than 'The Shining', film adaptations of Stephen King novels often aren't very successful. It's fairly ironic that the second most successful film adaptation isn't a film at all, but instead is two television programmes pushed together, and is simply intitled 'It'.



In 'It', children in the small Maine town of Derry are being killed in mysterious, bloody, gory ways. Parents are scared to let their children outside, and are right to be scared. There is a 200 year old killer clown on the loose!

It is, of course, not a clown, but what turns out to be an evil monster who can take on the form of anything it wants. 'It' is usually seen a clown, as kids are attracted to it, before changing into whatever the child is most scared of, making the child too scared to move, so 'It' can devour their souls.

This happens every 30 years when the creature needs to feed, and when a group of friends hear that the same thing is happening from when they were children, they return to the town in the hope of destroying 'It' for good.

What is very hard to describe is the way the film is presented. Anyone who has read the book knows it is absolutely terrifying. I read it as a teenager and didn't sleep properly for weeks. There were times I actually had to put the book down because I was too scared. The film does NOT deliver this at all. Some bits of it are a little creepy, or gory, but nothing in the film scares you, but that's OK, because it is not meant to.

The makers of the film decided to change it from a horror to a drama, and you know what?

It works.

So what we have here is a drama about a killer clown, that is witty, romantic, fun to watch, and just sometimes a little bit creepy.

It's not amazing, but it is a personal favourite, just for the fact that small unimportant bits of the story have been left in by the film makers, just because they loved King as much as I do.


VERDICT - NOT ONE FOR PEOPLE WITH COULROPHOBIA!

1 comment:

  1. Well I can tell you that watching this film when I was like 5 or however young scared the b'jesus outta me!!! Though I have made myself watch it again recently as I seem to have lost all fear of films and it was really good. Glad you did a review of it :)

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