If you want a quick opinion — it’s absolutely worth watching, but don’t expect a masterpiece or anything special. “It” is more a tribute movie to King, the 80’s and to what used to terrify kids back then. The film was never designed to be a horror movie, so no wonder it didn’t work as one. But otherwise, the atmosphere, the picture and setting were really good. For more words on that keep reading!
Watching “It” in the movie theater felt more sentimental, almost nostalgic, rather than scary. The settings of the movie, the script and dialogues with all those “yo-mama” jokes make this whole horror atmosphere to actually act like a clown – satiric and funny from the first glance with an appreciable amount of terror afterwards. To admit, I wasn’t expecting it to be good, but the movie definitely worked well as just a warm nostalgic one-timer.
Now about the bad part. Horror movies, or at least ones that are supposed to terrify people in some way, exploit the cognitive dissonance — a disagreement between what you expect and what you actually get. This is why in early 70’s things like dolls (“Chucky”), kids (“Exorcist”) and, of course, clowns were intensively used by moviemakers to trigger this kind of dissonance. And this got absolutely mainstream with guys like James Wan sticking this simple rule in any possible movie.
And the problem is that it doesn’t work anymore. Clowns are already too scary to be scary. You expect them to be scary, the dissonance does not work. A modern movie watcher has seen a lot more, than people back then in the 80’s. So you can’t just pick a script from then, adapt it and expect that people will react the same way.
Overall, creators admitted that a clown with huge mouth full of needle-sharp teeth does not scare people enough, so they put a huge stake on jumpscares, which made a movie somewhat worse, putting it in the same row with shitty low rated horrors. If it wasn’t for the atmosphere of good-ol’ 80′s – the movie as just a horror would have hugely failed.
But anyway, if you enjoy King, or if you’re tired of waiting for the 2nd “Stranger Things” — you definitely want to watch “It”. Teenagers riding bikes in a search for adventures, escaping their family problems and fighting with almost stereotypical bully-boys… This is something you definitely won’t find in any of the horrors – the consistency and beauty of the non-horror part. But again, don’t expect from the movie what it’s not. In the end of the day it’s just a tribute-movie, and it absolutely does the job.
PS. So what would I love to see in modern horrors, and what I think could terrify people enough now, when we’re no more afraid of inhuman creatures? I think the most promising and perspective idea (at least of those I can see) is to somehow exploit the psychoanalytic concepts of parental archetypes — a somewhat more difficult setup to work with. This was done to some extent in “Babadook” — a low budget horror that I loved a lot, and where the Jungian archetypes were used. Also in some less complicated and more trivial way this was done in “Mama” — the earlier movie by the “It” creator.
