Stephen King's IT

Last week, the Nostalgia Critic did a review of this movie. He hammed it up, turning it into a Stephen King drinking game. Look, I have no issue with the NC doing this, it's his job to nitpick and go over-the-top for laughs, and the problems he pointed out with the movie are legitimate. But let's be fair to the movie: it was made for tv in 1990, so not only are the effects not going to be that good, but the story is going to have to be butchered. Not to say they did a bad job with the story, they hit the main points of the book and captured the atmosphere of Derry.

I'm going to compare/contrast events in the book and movie and explain a logical reason why they were changed.

Sightings of It


Almost all of the seven Losers' first sighting of It was changed from book to movie, but the changes make sense when you take into account budget and whatnot.

Ben: In the book, Ben saw It as the mummy while walking home from school in the winter. The movie was probably shot in the spring/summer and they couldn't afford to draw out the shooting long enough to actually shoot in the dead of winter. Also, Ben saw the creature on the frozen over Canal, a channel that keeps the Kenduskeag river flowing through downtown Derry. I don't know of any town in America that has something like this and it would have been to expensive to create some kind of analogue and so, Ben's sighting was changed to seeing It as his father in the Barrens.

Bill and Bev were unchanged.

Eddie: Eddie saw It as a leper under the porch of 29 Neibolt street. This would have introduced several plot threads into the movie that would have made it probably made it 2 hours longer, so it was changed for time.

Richie: Richie saw It as a moving Paul Bunyon statue. Let's face it; the computer technology that tv studios had to work with even now could not make a 30 foot Paul Bunyon statue look anything but fake. Back then, it would have been worse. This one goes to tech and budget.

Stan: Stan saw dead boys in the Standpipe. Once again, we deal with location and budget. What town has something like the Standpipe?

Mike: Mike saw a giant bird at the ruins of the Kitchener Ironworks. Once again location and budget. They would have had to create a field full of detritus from the exploded ironworks and on top of that make a giant bird chase a small boy. No way they could have done that on a tv budget in 1990.

So we can understand why these changes were made. Other changes were mostly for time; they left out the Neibolt street stuff and the children facing down the giant spider.

Another thing the Critic complained about was the flashbacks; and he's right to complain about that. Half of the story is told through flashbacks, both in the movie and the book. The thing is, in the book they make sense. The adults forgot everything about that summer and the phone call from Mike triggers their memories and they start to remember things that happened. As they remember, we learn what happened.  This isn't really explained in the movie and the flashbacks get kind of annoying.

I think the movie was made for fans of the book, who can kind of plug in the missing sequences from the book to make the movie that much better.

God I don't want to talk about what I'm about to, but it's all the people who trash on this book seem to focus on: the sex scene in the sewers between Beverly and the boys. Look, I know it sounds bad, especially when you take into account the kids are 12 but damnit, it's not the point of the book! First of all, did you pay attention to this book? Supernatural forces were keeping the kids bound together as one force to kill It. When they were leaving the sewers, the bond began to break down and they got lost. Bev used sex as a way to bind them together forever. IT MAKES SENSE WITHIN THE CONTEXT OF THE BOOK!

Besides, it's not like its written in disgusting detail like a Penthouse Forum letter; its very downplayed and sweet, not to mention vague. This is sex from the point of view of a kid who's just starting puberty. If you let something like this, which amounts to maybe 20 pages in a 1104 page book, hey, too bad for you. IT is one of Stephen King's best. The man not only knows what scares us, but how to write it.