“It’s such an extreme character. Inhumane,” Skarsgård says. “It’s beyond even a sociopath, because he’s not even human. He’s not even a clown. I’m playing just one of the beings It creates.”
Pennywise’s look suggests bygone times, among them the medieval, Renaissance, Elizabethan and Victorian eras. His neck is frilled by a thick, puffy collar, like a ruff from the late 16th century, and his sleeves and pantaloons dangle with orange-ball fringe. “I wanted it to have an organic, gourd or pumpkin kind of effect,” says costume designer Janie Bryant (Deadwood, Mad Men). That included the peplum at his waist, which is the flared, skirtlike fabric blossoming below his doublet. “It helps exaggerate certain parts of the body,” Bryant says. “The costume is very nipped in the waist, and with the peplum and bloomers it has an expansive silhouette.”
It’s all aimed at creating a subliminal suggestion of a creature with long, lanky limbs, a head and neck like a cephalothorax and a bulbous, arachnoid abdomen. But this creature is walking upright and calling to you with a fistful of balloons.
“There is almost a doll-like quality to the costume,” Bryant says. “The pants being short, the high waistline of the jacket and the fit of the costume is a very important element. It gives the character a childlike quality.” The gloves are so tight and seamless they make his hands look like porcelain.
Even Pennywise’s creator finds this version creepy. “It’s a scary clown,” King tells EW. “But to me they’re all scary.”
IN KING’S STORY PENNYWISE FACES DOWN A team of outcast kids known as the Losers.
They’re the ones in Derry who—against all odds—have developed a sensitivity and compassion from years of abuse. That allows them to see clearly what the rest of the townsfolk cannot: There’s something bad in Derry. Or maybe the creature has taken up residence because Derry itself is bad—a place where everyday cruelties are overlooked or excused.
While It takes many forms—a leper in an abandoned house, an abusive parent—It’s favorite guise is a manifestation of its nature. “It truly enjoys the shape of the clown Pennywise and enjoys the game and the hunt,” Skarsgård says. “What’s funny to this evil entity might not be funny to everyone else. But he thinks it’s funny.”
The group of Losers who confront this goliath of evil is led by Bill Denbrough (Midnight Special’s Jaeden Martell), who lost his little brother Georgie during a torrential autumn downpour. Little Georgie went out to float a paper boat that Bill had made for him and encountered a curious sight: a clown. Inside the mouth of a storm drain.
In King’s book the boy is found with his arm torn off. In the movie . . . he’s never found at all. “That’s something Andy came up with because of the need to have Bill be proactive and not just act out of vengeance or fear,” says Barbara Muschietti. “He has a real quest, and in that quest he brings the Losers.”
The novel alternates between timelines —the experiences of the Losers as children in the years 1957 and ’58 and their return to the town as adults to confront the monster again in the mid-’80s. It Chapter One cuts the narrative neatly in half and tells only the tale of the children, updating it all to the year 1989.
“The dialogue between timelines is one of the most interesting things in the book, but we came into the project when the idea of making two separate movies was already dealt,” says Andy Muschietti. He came aboard after the previous director, Beasts of No Nation’s Cary Joji Fukunaga, parted ways over creative differences with the studio. “I just rolled with it,” Muschietti says.
EACH OF THE LOSERS IS SOMEONE YOU KNOW from school—or someone you saw across the cafeteria, sitting alone. Mike Hanlon (Chosen Jacobs) is one of the few black kids in the otherwise all-white town, and he faces racism and hatred every day. Beverly Marsh (Sophia Lillis) is the only girl in the group—her abusive father is a constant threat. Ben Hanscom (Jeremy Ray Taylor) endures no end of fat jokes but nonetheless considers himself a romantic, harboring a secret crush on Beverly.
Richie Tozier (Finn Wolfhard of Stranger Things) is the class clown who uses his smart-ass routine to mask his crushing insecurity. The smallest of the bunch, Eddie Kaspbrak (Jack Dylan Grazer), has a hypochondriac mother who keeps him in a constant state of anxiety. Stan Uris (Wyatt Oleff) is tormented for being Jewish.
While casting the roles, the filmmakers looked for young performers who had some sense of what it might be like to be the character they’re playing. “All of the kids, apart from being really good actors, they’re brilliant children,” says Barbara Muschietti. “You can see characteristics in them that you would see in the Losers. They all come with baggage but in a fantastic way. And in that same way, when they met this last summer, they just attached to each other like they had been together their whole lives.”
The filmmakers hosted bonding sessions for the kids: bike rides, swimming trips, hikes through the woods. Only one actor was excluded.
You know who.
The Losers: (from left to right) Eddie Kaspbrak (Jack Dylan Grazer), Stanley Uris (Wyatt Oleff), Ben Hanscom (Jeremy Ray Taylor), Richie Tozier (Finn Wolfhard), Beverly Marsh (Sophia Lillis), Mike Hanlon (Chosen Jacobs) and Bill Denbrough (Jaeden Martell).
One of many children who have gone missing in the sleepy town of Derry.
Georgie (Jackson Robert Scott) receives his paper boat from brother Bill.
Bill Skarsgård as the yellow-eyed Pennywise
The Losers
Director Andy Muschietti capturing the shot. “It is a horror movie, but it’s not only that,” Muschietti told the audience at 2017’s Comic-Con International. “It’s a story of love and friendship and a lot of other beautiful emotions.”
Concept Art
From Page to Scream
In Stephen King’s It the monster reads your thoughts to learn what scares you the most. Here’s a look at the concept art and storyboards that director Andy Muschietti used to figure out how to strike those same nerves. BY ANTHONY BREZNICAN
“YOU’LL FLOAT TOO”
It has just given Bill a vision of his missing little brother Georgie—to lure the older boy into the recesses of his flooded basement. There, the clown manifestation of It will strike. “Andy draws his own storyboards,” says producer David Katzenberg. “He has precise ideas about nearly every shot. We would start each morning by going through his sketches, and it always struck me how close they ended up being to the final image.”
“THAT’S WHERE IT LIVES”
There’s a well in the basement of 29 Neibolt Street that leads directly into It’s lair. Below is the concept art, a vision of an ominous abandoned house, and to the right is the full-scale version, built on an empty lot in a Toronto suburb. “Our production designer, Claude Paré, and his team did an amazing job building something that looked as if it had been rotting away for decades,” says producer Seth Grahame-Smith. “We drew big crowds every day we were there. The locals wanted us to leave it in place after we finished shooting so they could use it on Halloween.”
“IT WANTS TO DIVIDE US”
Inside the Neibolt house Bill and his friends in the Losers’ Club confront It as a group—no longer isolated but still scared as hell. “I love this image,” says Grahame-Smith, “because it conjures the original It book cover that scared me as a kid—Pennywise’s green clawed hand reaching up through the sewer grate.” The producers say there are more allusions to It’s past iterations. “If people look hard enough,” says Katzenberg, “they’ll see our tribute to Tim Curry too.”
His Dark Universe
IT ALL CONNECTS
Delve into any Stephen King novel, and at some point you’ll likely find a secret passageway into another. His 1986 epic It is a perfect nexus—not only does the terrifying novel reference books that came before, but characters and places from It also turn up again and again in subsequent stories. Here are just a few of the connections from It to King’s broader carnival of twisted tales. As the author himself has acknowledged, “It’s sort of like Stephen King Wor
ld, the malevolent version of Disney World.” But how? Here, we unravel the web. BY ANTHONY BREZNICAN
“I don’t really map anything out. I just let it happen. But once it happens, it’s always there”
—Stephen King
THE SHINING (1976)
Dick Hallorann, the cook from the Overlook Hotel, appears as a young soldier in a flashback scene in It, in which Derry’s racist residents burn down a black dance club full of servicemen during Prohibition. Hallorann saves the life of Mike Hanlon’s father, though no one understood how Hallorann knew the right way to escape. It’s almost like he had second sight.
THE STAND (1977)
The grown-up character Ben Hanscom lives in Hemingford Home in Nebraska, which is where Mother Abagail drew the survivors of goodwill in The Stand. It’s described as just down the road from “the deserted little town of Gatlin,” which was also the setting of King’s short story “Children of the Corn.”
THE DEAD ZONE (1979)
When Beverly Marsh mentions a long-ago crime spree when “that crazy cop killed all those women in Castle Rock,” she’s referring to serial murderer Frank Dodd, an antagonist from King’s novel about reluctant psychic Johnny Smith.
RITA HAYWORTH AND SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION (1982)
There are numerous references in It to people being sent to this fictional upstate Maine prison, where once upon a time an inmate named Andy Dufresne made a daring and unlikely escape.
CHRISTINE (1983)
When It’s murderous bully Henry Bowers escapes from a mental asylum near the end of the book, the ancient evil entity takes the form of a cherry-red 1958 Plymouth Fury to ride him back to Derry—with one of his long-dead former friends behind the wheel.
THE TOMMYKNOCKERS (1987)
A character named Tommy Jacklin is one of countless townfolk from the sleepy little village of Haven who is possessed by an alien intelligence that’s mutating his body. While making a supply run through Derry, he thinks he sees “a clown with shiny silver dollars for eyes” watching him from an open sewer manhole. He assumes it’s merely a hallucination.
DREAMCATCHER (2001)
In a later alien-possession novel, a detour into Derry leads a character named Mr. Gray to the remains of the town’s water storage Standpipe. The tower is long gone, but in its place is a plaque memorializing some of the victims of a storm from It. Spray-painted across the memorial is the graffiti “Pennywise Lives.”
THE DARK TOWER (2004)
Many readers think the character Dandelo, from the seventh book in the series, is the same kind of creature as Pennywise since he also feeds on emotion—in this case, amusement. (Dandelo can make you laugh yourself to death.) King himself isn’t sold on the link. “I would say that they were probably related just because they both came from my head,” he says. “But it wasn’t a conscious thing to say one was like the other.”
11/22/63 (2011)
Part of King’s JFK assassination time-travel thriller is set in Derry, and protagonist George Amberson meets the childhood It characters Beverly Marsh and Richie Tozier in late 1958 as they play in the wooded area known as the Barrens. As Amberson asks about a particular violent crime in town, he overhears the girl say to her friend, “That wasn’t the clown.” (But he has no idea what that means.)
MR. MERCEDES (2014)
In this cat-and-mouse serial-killer story, the murderer wears a clown mask to hide his identity when he deliberately crashes a car into a crowd of people awaiting a job fair. “Creepy as hell. You ever see that TV movie about the clown in the sewer?” someone asks Det. Bill Hodges. Whenever King references one of his own characters as fictional, he usually does so by citing the TV or movie adaptation. When Hodges finally checks out the TV movie, he agrees: The mask and Tim Curry’s Pennywise do look a lot alike.
The King of Fright
THE AUTHOR’S GREATEST (AND SCARIEST) HITS
ILLUSTRATION BY ROBERT SAMMELIN
Carrie
FOR STEPHEN KING IT ALL STARTED WITH HIS DEBUT HORROR NOVEL, ABOUT AN ABUSED TEEN WHO UNLEASHES TELEKINETIC POWERS AT HER HIGH SCHOOL PROM. BRIAN DE PALMA’S FILM ADAPTATION TERRIFIED AUDIENCES IN 1976 AND JUMP-STARTED KING’S PROLIFIC CAREER. By Leah Rozen
CARRIE’S SUCCESS, BOTH ON THE PAGE AND on celluloid, transformed Stephen King into a brand and initiated a long-running, fruitful partnership with Hollywood. But the book almost didn’t get written. Thank Tabitha King, the author’s wife, for rescuing the first several crumpled pages of what would become Carrie from a wastebasket. She wanted to know what happened next, she told him. “You’ve got something here,” King quotes Tabitha in On Writing, his 2000 memoir-cum-advice manual.
In 1972 the twentysomething couple were barely scraping by, crammed into a trailer alongside two children (a third baby would soon arrive) in a small town in King’s native Maine. The aspiring novelist earned $6,700 teaching English at a local high school and worked summers at an industrial laundry. On nights and weekends he pounded away on Tabitha’s portable Olivetti.
Carrie’s publication changed everything. “King writes with the kind of surety normally associated only with veteran writers,” praised a reviewer in The New York Times. While King’s advance for the hardback was a measly $2,500, paperback rights sold for $400,000, a transformative, quit-your-day-job sum.
Hollywood came calling. Brian De Palma, an up-and-coming director with a predilection for Gothic material, signed on to make Carrie. The force was with him—literally. De Palma suggested to pal George Lucas, who was casting his first Star Wars movie, that they conduct joint auditions for their flicks. “I said, ‘George, let’s do this together. We’re looking at the same types of actors,’ ” De Palma recalled in De Palma, a 2015 documentary.
The result? Star Wars hopefuls Amy Irving and William Katt—she as Princess Leia and he as Luke Skywalker—instead landed key roles in Carrie. Also cast, though minus a Star Wars connection, were John Travolta, a then newly minted teen heartthrob on the sitcom Welcome Back, Kotter, and Piper Laurie, a 1950s and ’60s ingenue returning to acting after a 10-year break.
It is impossible now to think of Carrie without Sissy Spacek as Carrie White, the story’s titular fulcrum. Spacek’s vulnerability turned Carrie into an achingly sympathetic character, even as she wreaks gory havoc. But De Palma was close to casting another actress in the title role and told Spacek as much when she asked to audition.
That didn’t deter the waifish Texan, then best known for starring in Terrence Malick’s Badlands. She gooped Vaseline into her hair and left her face unwashed and her teeth unbrushed, the better to look unkempt and forlorn at her tryout. “I felt so used and abused at that point, because I knew Brian. I was not his favorite, and that worked for me. I just decided I was going to get it!” she recalled in Acting Carrie, a 2001 documentary short. Her mission: accomplished. “She blew everyone away,” De Palma said in the same doc.
Carrie opened in November 1976. Critics mostly raved, loving the mix of humor, sex and scares. The sensuality of the shower scene! The masterly editing of the prom night massacre! The scream-out-loud shock when the dead Carrie’s bloody hand reaches up from her grave at the end! “Carrie is a terrifyingly lyrical thriller,” gushed The New Yorker’s critic Pauline Kael, linking De Palma with Hitchcock and Polanski.
The film grossed $34 million, ranking it one of the top moneymakers for the year, and Spacek and Laurie, who played Carrie’s religious-zealot mother, both nabbed Oscar nominations for acting.
What no one could have predicted at the time was Carrie’s enduring influence and mutability. Over the years, Hollywood has churned out a forgettable sequel, The Rage: Carrie 2, in 1999, and two remakes. Carrie even made it to Broadway as a musical in 1988, complete with an Act II opener in which Carrie’s classmates cheerily sing and dance as they slaughter pigs (prior to dousing Carrie in pig’s blood). A notorious flop, Carrie: The Musical closed four days after opening, losing a then-record-shattering $7 million. But Carrie will not die so easily. A cult
favorite, the musical was revived Off-Broadway in 2012 to slightly better reviews. Productions regularly sprout up around the world, including at high schools.
What’s the secret to Carrie’s enduring appeal? King thinks he knows. “It’s really a simple story,” he told The New York Times in 2016 on the film’s 40th anniversary. “And people saw Carrie as an extreme case of what they went through in high school.”
Carrie (Sissy Spacek) fights for control as her mother, Margaret White (Piper Laurie), cowers.
CARRIE (2013)
Director Kimberly Peirce (Boys Don’t Cry) took a stab at King’s story with a remake starring Chloë Grace Moretz as Carrie and Julianne Moore as her deranged mom. It was the second remake, after David Carson’s 2002 TV movie starring Angela Bettis—and written by future Hannibal showrunner Bryan Fuller.
A cameraman captures Carrie’s final scare: When Amy Irving’s Sue Snell places flowers on Carrie’s grave, the dead girl’s bloody hand appears and grabs on to her arm.
EW the Ultimate Guide to Stephen King Page 2
