Stephen King says new IT movie has characters you will like — no “Spam in a Cabin” here
The movie adaptation of Stephen King’s IT is set to release next month, and Warner Bros. are currently showing off first look trailers of the 2017 horror film. Needless to say, I’m worried.
Worried because, while King’s IT novel was superb and the 1990 TV miniseries based on the book and starring Tim Curry as Pennywise the clown was also excellent, the new movie may not be.
Because, let’s face it, adaptations often start off with grand ideas and then go tragically wrong.
Look at the recently released TV series adaptation of Stephen King’s novel The Mist, and what an abysmal mess that one is. Even though it too was probably started off with good intentions.
Now here we have IT, one of the pieces of work King is known best for and one that would be a bit sad if it too is completely destroyed in this latest adaptation.
King himself, however, does not seem to be worried. At least according to a short interview he gave about the film (although, of course, he has to sell the film — it’s based on his book — so you might want to take what he says with a grain of salt).
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Stephen King says about the characters in the film, “It’s something audiences are going to relate to. They’re going to like the characters, because to me it’s all about character. If you like the characters, you care. And then the scares generally work.”
He went on to say, “I’m sure my fans are going to enjoy the movie. I think they’re really going to enjoy the movie. And I think some of them will go back two or three times to actually savor…I mean, I went back and saw it a second time and felt that I was seeing things the second time through that I had missed the first time.”
As for Pennywise the clown, King had this to say about why he was created, and why he doesn’t care that the movie adaptation of IT has been moved from the original 1950s of the book to the 1980s.
“The entity that is Pennywise focuses on whatever that particular child fears the most. And I was thinking about the universal monsters, the ones that scared kids in the 50s. Well, they’ve moved the timeframe, they had to, to the 80s.
He goes on to say, “To me, that isn’t the important thing. The important thing is they kept the core idea. That Pennywise gets to these kids by finding out what they’re afraid of and being that thing.”
When Stephen King talks about the characters in IT, he does explain why the movie is likely to be much more liked than the recent The Mist adaptation.
“One of the things I wanted to do in all of my novels is to create characters that are fundamentally decent by and large. And that way, you don’t want them to be Spam in a Cabin. You don’t want them to be wiped out. You want them to live and you want them to win. That’s one of the reasons why I really like this movie”.
And it is the main reason why I detested The Mist and why I stopped watching it at episode eight, as there is not one character in the entire series I liked or gave a damn about. In fact, the faster they all died the better, as the quicker that horrible piece of junk was over.
Hopefully, with IT, I will have the opposite reaction.
Watch Stephen King talk about the new movie adaptation of IT in the short video below. Let’s just hope, because he thinks it is good, it might actually be.
You can also watch the first look trailer of IT below King’s interview. It’s the bit where young George Denbrough meets Pennywise, and thus becomes the catalyst for the rest of what happens in the movie.
The 2017 movie of IT stars Bill Skarsgård as Pennywise, Finn Wolfhard, Sophia Lillis, Javier Botet, Jeremy Ray Taylor, Jaeden Lieberher and Nicholas Hamilton. The film will arrive in movie theaters on September 8th.
Cross your fingers this thing is actually going to be likable.
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