The Real Horror of
Stephen King’s IT is a difficult beast to adapt. The final showdown is meant to be understood as being somewhat metaphorical, which works in the thousand-page epic that King created, but watching Bill actually bite the tongue of an eldritch alien has unsurprisingly - not made it to either the television or film adaptations of the novel. We couldn’t make it work in the 90s, and we couldn’t make it work now. This Christmas after reading the book, I watched the 1990 miniseries and both the 2017 and 2019 films, because waiting on results is more stressful than watching seven kids deal with their trauma four times over. Seeing the story of the ‘Losers’ Club’ play out differently each time got me thinking about how it should be adapted. As much as I loved the 2017 film, it really works much better as a TV show. The difficulty of what you want to keep and what you have to change means that you really need to have the whole story planned out. This was clearly not done for the films, where the scriptwriter has Mike deface a Native American artefact, the only alternative worse than just filming the tongue scene. It is also 6 6haphazardly ‘revealed’ that when Bev looked into the ‘Deadlights’ she actually saw each of her friends and herself die as adults, crucial information she decided to keep from her friends, and also from the audience. IT simply works best on the small screen.
The first advantage that tv has over film when adapting IT is that with tv you can use the book’s format. The story of the ‘Losers’ Club’ is told in a non-linear fashion, cutting between the tweens and the adults. The 2019 film showed the problem with splitting up the adults and the kids into separate stories – the kids are the best part of it. However, you can’t tell the story in one film, so splitting the kids and the adults up makes sense. When it comes down to it, there’s not really enough in the adult’s story to put in a film. There’s the interludes where Mike gives the reader information about Derry’s backstories and how IT has corrupted the town over centuries, but that pauses the story and doesn’t really give the audience any essential information. You can include Maturin, the great turtle that created the universe and advises the Losers how to defeat IT, but even in the book finding out that the universe was created by an animal burping hurts the tension a little; it’s not worth the cost to include it. That’s why the film seems so sparse, it calls itself a meal when really it’s leftovers.
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