My love of horror films can really be traced directly to the different influences of my parents. My mom grew up in the 80s so she adored slasher films and introduced me to most of the major franchises, from classics like Halloween and Nightmare on Elm Street to then-contemporary films I was definitely too young to be watching like Scream. My dad on the other hand was somebody who had bookshelves lined with Stephen King books and regularly brought out the VHS copy of the IT miniseries which definitely gave me and I’d bet my sister too a lot of nightmares as kids. That is a big reason that as a 32 year old I find all these things to be absolute comfort films, but few more than IT.
As such, I tend to do a rewatch of it at least once every single year, even owning a version of it on DVD as part of a King box set I own. However, this one was a very special one cause it came just hours after I finished listening to the Steven Weber-read audiobook over the course of over a couple of months. While there’s some stuff that has aged like milk in IT the book, I really enjoyed my time and finally digging into the deep lore and side characters that the couple of adaptations have left out or barely touched on or drastically changed. I would likely revisit the book again in the future even though it was a big undertaking, but this review isn’t for the book and I will try to limit how many references I make to the text to judge it entirely on its own merits as visual media, but thought it was worth noting.
I always like to start with the negative first to end on the brightest possible note, so let’s get into it. I’ll try to avoid spoilers, but I think most people will argue that the worst part of the miniseries is the ending which seems lazy and half-assed on a set that looks extremely cheap with an animatronic that looks like it’d be laughed off a spooky dark ride at a theme park, it’s obvious that they lacked the budget or guts to try and translate the very metaphysical and metaphorical final clash with Pennywise but couldn’t really come up with anything better. The translation to network TV is also where some of the other problems occur, like the use of blood probably being A LOT for TV for the era but so much less than you would think a project like this would call for, same for the goofy PG replacements a lot of characters use for actual profanity. The tendency to boil down “friendship” establishing scenes into really corny, upbeat montages that just reuse the same song rather than shell out for licensing rights and largely just ignoring the huge role music plays in the book I think is clearly more a cost saving measure than time. There are certain scenes where even if you had never read the book, you just know from watching them “I bet this was probably better/longer/more in depth” in the book such as the rushed scene where Eddie finds out what a placebo is or there are certain characters like Henry Bowers that seems really undercooked and generic in a way that isn’t very King-like.
However, I don’t see how anybody could argue this isn’t one of the most effective King adaptations, and I still argue it is far superior to the fairly mediocre but bigger budget film adaptations done more recently. Every single time Pennywise is on screen is a great strength of the film, Tim Curry gives one of the most iconic scary movie performances of all times that works when “funny” just as much as when outright scary, he has shocking range within a fairly limited role and it is just truly wonderful. Pretty much all of the adult cast give really solid performances, though I’d give a special shout out to the perfectly cast Harry Anderson, Richard Thomas who is asked to take the most on as the leader of the gang and John Ritter who makes a mid-range character without a great deal to do shine through his pure charisma that made him arguably one of the biggest stars in the cast. Likewise, and this is real difficult for a production like this, they managed to find kids who are both realistic and likable, rarely do they come off as annoying or grating and or too mature for their age and only sometimes do they have moments of woodeness in their performances when they are asked to run the gambit of emotions much more than your typical children’s roles, not a surprise a couple of them would go on to decent careers.
The film is one of the single best directed and shot TV movies or miniseries in the pre-It’s Not TV, It’s HBO era I have ever seen. Tommy Lee Wallace, whose most now-iconic film as a director was Halloween III: Season of the Witch which is something I’m planning to review later on this year when spooky season comes but it is safe to say I’m a firm fan, does a wonderful job keeping the action exciting, moody, scary, nostalgic, fitfully bloody. Along side legendary Canadian cinematographer Leiterman, the only thing that really makes it feel like TV are the 4:3 aspect ratio and hard cuts to black for commercials, otherwise it could absolutely pass as a really good mid-budget theatrical horror epic. The special effects and makeup work, except where noted towards the end of the film, is really solid throughout, very effectively creeping anybody out on a regular basis whether balloons of blood or snarling wolfmen or stretching a drain in a shower to man sized via stop-motion. This effects work really gave the first confrontation in the sewer in particular a deep sense of dread and somebody on social media told me about how much the Fortunate Cookie scene still sticks with them from when they were young and for simple puppetry it still works tremendously well.
Obviously, nostalgia still colors how fondly I view this film but for basically a PG-13 take on Stephen King it really works just as well as it ever did, especially if you felt the CGI and foul mouthed humor of the most recent films was really over-the-top and often boring. In reading the book finally, it is funny how there are certain things I actually thought the miniseries does better like Richie’s voices not being mostly racial stereotypes or Ben as an adult being given more focus within the narrative, which I definitely didn’t think would be the case. It wasn’t one of the greatest times in horror, the early 90s, when the genre kind of took a backseat except for some notable cases until the slasher revival, but that doesn’t blunt my saying that IT can stand alone as one of the best horror films of its era as long as you don’t mind wading through a bit of cheese to get there.
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