STEPHEN KING'S IT KNOWS WHAT SCARES YOU...

After seeing "IT" last week, I carefully considered Stephen King's vast archive of fear that he has compiled since I started reading. Pet Sematary is absolutely my favorite and the scariest book I've ever had the pleasure of being terrified by. Dead Zone was beautifully haunting and prophetic. Cujo was the most primal of all the King books for me and touched on my greatest fear, a rabid dog. The Shining is a brilliant reworking of Poe's Usher but in the end becomes its own thing. Salem's Lot visuals and the idea of a town overrun with vampires seems simple but is still incredibly unnerving. I've read plenty of King and can admit that sometimes he carries on too long about certain subjects, he can sometimes go off on lengthy tangents but at the core of all his tales is an idea...a single concept that provokes fear. He is uncannily in tune with his own fears. And he is good at articulating what those fears are. For instance, when I was a young buck...I insisted that the covers at the foot of my bed were securely tucked in before I fell asleep. Why did I feel this way, and an even better question is why do a lot of other people who I don't even know remember having the same feeling? I can clearly recall my thought was something lurking in the dark of my bedroom or beyond my sight line was going to reach up out of the void and drag its fetid talon across the bare bottoms of my feet. Ridiculous thought, right? But nonetheless its one that many of us had as children at bedtime. Being dragged by your feet by some amorphous creature out of your warm bed is a thought that Stephen King has long considered. As adults, we've learned that there are things waiting for us in life that are much more frightening than Dracula or The Creature from the Black Lagoon, but Stephen King's particular vocation is to remind us of those irrational fears our minds conjure in the middle of the night. This is where "IT"shakes its money maker.

The novel "IT"was given to me as a birthday gift in college. I was literally stricken with fear at the sheer size of the tome. Being that it was over 1000 pages...I read the first ten pages and quickly secured it to the far reaches of my bookshelf. There was no way I was ever going to read this book especially during the first semester of my freshman year of college. Over the course of the school year I would read huge sections of the book, never quite completing the read or getting lost within the labyrinthine corridors of the book's fairly complex plot line. This is not your average horror story. This is a story about fear itself and what is does to us. One recurring fear that appears in most Stephen King works is the loss of a child. He seems to be preoccupied with precious innocence of youth and the darkness that can envelope a parent or sibling when this young life is extinguished by real life horrors or the supernatural. In IT, the character Georgie is the unfortunate catalyst of a 27 year curse that claims his life and becomes a lifelong obsession for his older brother, Bill. Georgie is pursuing a sailboat that his brother Bill constructs for him out of newsprint...the paper vessel sails swiftly out of his sight and down a sewer grate. Georgie peers into the sewer only to discover a vile clown looking back it him. Pennywise is the clown's name and at first he attempts to engage Georgie in a friendly conversation but as this particular scene continues, we recognize that Pennywise is some kind of twisted supernatural predator. This one event drives the rest of the story, bringing several kids together who will ultimately challenge Pennywise, the demonic sewer clown.

I waited for awhile to write this because I wanted to make sure I was genuinely enjoying the movie IT and not just experiencing a faux exuberance. Nowadays, when someone tells a story worth listening to at the multiplex...it's a rare event. You can get lost in a maze of lukewarm remakes, reboots and cinematic universes. I can honestly say that "IT"is a worthwhile experience even though it's a remake due to the fact that Stephen King's writing is timeless; his stories are relevant to any generation and warrant reinterpretation. Andres' Muschietti creeped me out completely with "Mama", a Guillermo Del Toro horror flick, not because he knows how to stage jump scares or blast the volume at the precise moment...but he understands fear involves the delicate balance between reality and our nightmares. With this celebrated King story...he ups the ante with his now iconic take on Pennywise. I heard somebody say that "IT" was a combination of The Goonies and The Exorcist. I would tend to agree...it runs the gamut of emotions included in both of those movies and you will walk out of the movie theatre with a brisk chill you didn't feel before you walked in.