I was wondering why watching It the other night felt like deja vu, then I remembered the entire fourth season of Stranger Things followed virtually the same story line. To be fair, the movie came out after the first season of Stranger Things, and even featured Finn Wolfhard as one of "The Losers." However, the movie was based on a 1980s novel by Stephen King, which in itself was based on Lovecraft's The Shadow Over Innsmouth. So, you could say Stranger Things was a copy of a copy, although to their credit the Duffer Brothers did a better job of adapting King's novel.
These stories are the staple of dark fantasy and if you go back far enough you can find earlier examples. However, when you lift so many scenes directly from a movie, like Max floating in mid air with her eyes rolled up or copy the dilapidated house right down to the stain glass windows, you are bordering on plagiarism. I was curious what King thought of the latest season of Stranger Things and to my surprise he didn't seem perturbed by it. I guess he felt these were pretty common tropes and fair game when it came to horror movies.
The Duffers delved into the book a little deeper than did the screenwriters of It, as King had called up ancient creatures that had haunted this area of Maine for centuries. Chud, with two points over the u, was much easier to pronounce the Cthulhu. Ultimately, the grown-up kids had to get inside the head of this mythic beast to rid the town of this evil once and for all, much like we saw in Stranger Things. Andy Muschietti decided not to go that far back in time, leaving Pennywise's backstory in the 19th century, although I haven't watched the second part.
I'm not sure if I will after the first part, which was rather meh. Muschietti connected all the dots but there was a surprising lack of suspense, not to mention terror in this movie. It was more like a black comedy with its clunky screenplay. Is a little kid really going to fall for a clown in a storm sewer drain? I would have thought better from Cary Joji Fukunaga, who directed the True Detective series for HBO. At least they were smart enough not to include the scenes where Bev had sex with all the guys to ease the tension among "The Losers." God knows what Stephen King was thinking.
To be fair, It was not one of King's best. It was like he decided to go full throttle with his novella The Body (previously made into Stand By Me) and turn it into a horror story, spicing it up with gratuitous amounts of violence and sex to appeal to 13 year-old boys. It really makes you wonder what he endured as a kid, as he splits time between the 1950s and 80s. The book had been made into a two-part television movie with Tim Curry as Pennywise in the 90s. This time around Bill Skarsgard had the honors.
Pennywise was always shape shifting, another common theme in Stranger Things. It was more scary as a clown but in the end morphs into a spider, sound familiar, dropping its little eggs all over the place, which the protagonists have to kill in order to lay this evil to rest once and for all. Given how possessive Stephen King is of his work, I was surprised he gave the Duffer Brothers a free pass on this one.
King was sharply critical of Stanley Kubrick's reimagining of The Shining, which quite frankly was much better than the book. I think this movie was a great inspiration for David Lynch's Twin Peaks.
King reminds me a little bit of Fyodor Dostoevsky in that he turned out horror stories without much editing, as if being paid by the word. But whereas Dostoevsky always had a strong moral center at the heart of his novels, King seems content to let the stories go where they take him. Probably his best novel was The Dead Zone, as he established a strong moral center that made it a very compelling story. His books were better when he kept the supernatural elements to a minimum and the page count to 400. I never really understood the great appeal in his novels other than they could easily be turned into movies.
Anyway, this is what happens when you have too much time on your hands. It would be better spent writing my own horror stories based on my own childhood experiences.
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