Horror october #15
Oct. 15th, 2017 01:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beer_good_foamyAbout halfway, so maybe it's time to dig up some more indepth discussion.
Since watching It (2017) a few weeks ago, I've had this perhaps not entirely rational urge to rewatch It (1990) again. I remembered it as pretty goddamn awful, and even if I wasn't entirely blown away by the remake, surely it would look even worse now?
And you know, I'm not sure it does. Honestly, the first half of the 1990 version is pretty solid, introducing the characters one by one while gradually filling in the story of what happened 30 years earlier. Being a 1990 TV production it rarely gets very scary, but most of the child actors deliver solid performances (Seth Green is annoying, but he's supposed to be), and King's strength was always as much in his characters as in his monsters, and as a drama it actually works pretty well. It all falls apart with all the overacting adults in the second half, even long before they get to the absolutely laughable finale, but yeah; there's more to this than just a great performance by Tim Curry.
And here's one thing it gets right, that the remake doesn't even bother with: By cutting back and forth between kids and adults, yeah, you give away that they're all going to survive - but also that they're all going to have to live with this, that they're going to grow up to be successful 80s Americans hiding deep dark fears that they'll do anything to not think about. There's been a lot of talk about nostalgia recently, and how both It (2017) and Strange Things are examples of this. But the thing is, neither of those stories actually feature nostalgia as part of the story, they're just about kids living and trying to survive in their now. That is scary, and it was scary when I read the book as a kid, but when I re-read It as an adult, I was struck by how much of the power of the novel comes from that pain of loss, about trying to reconnect with what you lost when you grew up, grew apart, and forgot; of learning to look at what you've spent a life learning to look away from. In removing that part of the story, It (2017) becomes just a story about kids, a safe adaptation of a book and a TV movie we remember from when we were young, full of jokes about NKOTB and Molly Ringwald, with a bunch of scary set pieces about others but no actual need to face ourselves. Nostalgia here is the rock to cling to, not the gap that opens under your feet.
So, yes, the 2017 version is a vastly superior production, with better actors, better special effects (god, the stop-motion effects in the 1990 version would have looked silly 30 years earlier...), better gore (rated R, so the target audience is safely removed from the protagonists), better set pieces, all that. I'll even argue that Bill "Can we be sure he's really a Skarsgård if he doesn't get nekkid" Skarsgård is a better Pennywise for 2017 than Tim Curry would be; if for no other reason, then because Curry's version is so iconic that it's hard to not see clowns as monsters afterwards, so let's just play him as one right from the get-go. And yet, as successful as it is, as much as it tries to play up the horrors and powerlessness of childhood (and mostly does it rather well) it leaves depths unexplored that the 1990 version falls on its ass into.
Since watching It (2017) a few weeks ago, I've had this perhaps not entirely rational urge to rewatch It (1990) again. I remembered it as pretty goddamn awful, and even if I wasn't entirely blown away by the remake, surely it would look even worse now?
And you know, I'm not sure it does. Honestly, the first half of the 1990 version is pretty solid, introducing the characters one by one while gradually filling in the story of what happened 30 years earlier. Being a 1990 TV production it rarely gets very scary, but most of the child actors deliver solid performances (Seth Green is annoying, but he's supposed to be), and King's strength was always as much in his characters as in his monsters, and as a drama it actually works pretty well. It all falls apart with all the overacting adults in the second half, even long before they get to the absolutely laughable finale, but yeah; there's more to this than just a great performance by Tim Curry.
And here's one thing it gets right, that the remake doesn't even bother with: By cutting back and forth between kids and adults, yeah, you give away that they're all going to survive - but also that they're all going to have to live with this, that they're going to grow up to be successful 80s Americans hiding deep dark fears that they'll do anything to not think about. There's been a lot of talk about nostalgia recently, and how both It (2017) and Strange Things are examples of this. But the thing is, neither of those stories actually feature nostalgia as part of the story, they're just about kids living and trying to survive in their now. That is scary, and it was scary when I read the book as a kid, but when I re-read It as an adult, I was struck by how much of the power of the novel comes from that pain of loss, about trying to reconnect with what you lost when you grew up, grew apart, and forgot; of learning to look at what you've spent a life learning to look away from. In removing that part of the story, It (2017) becomes just a story about kids, a safe adaptation of a book and a TV movie we remember from when we were young, full of jokes about NKOTB and Molly Ringwald, with a bunch of scary set pieces about others but no actual need to face ourselves. Nostalgia here is the rock to cling to, not the gap that opens under your feet.
So, yes, the 2017 version is a vastly superior production, with better actors, better special effects (god, the stop-motion effects in the 1990 version would have looked silly 30 years earlier...), better gore (rated R, so the target audience is safely removed from the protagonists), better set pieces, all that. I'll even argue that Bill "Can we be sure he's really a Skarsgård if he doesn't get nekkid" Skarsgård is a better Pennywise for 2017 than Tim Curry would be; if for no other reason, then because Curry's version is so iconic that it's hard to not see clowns as monsters afterwards, so let's just play him as one right from the get-go. And yet, as successful as it is, as much as it tries to play up the horrors and powerlessness of childhood (and mostly does it rather well) it leaves depths unexplored that the 1990 version falls on its ass into.
