It is coming. Apart from a couple of production stills, we still haven’t seen too much of director Andrés Muschietti’s fresh adaptation of the Stephen King classic, but now, to whet our appetites for tomorrow’s full trailer, a sneak peek has been released. The clip, seen above, sends us spiralling down a sewer tunnel as children worriedly chat to each other about the sinister clown they’ve been seeing around town. It’s also punctuated with the iconically creepy line, “we all float down here.”
For those unfamiliar with King’s bestselling novel (and the 1990 TV miniseries), It sets Pennywise (Bill Skarsgard), the diabolical clown on the sleepy town of Derry, Maine. After a series of murders, a gang of misfit kids team up to put an end to him. But this isn’t any ordinary psycho in a clown suit: Pennywise is something… more. Something far more horrible and, perhaps, immortal.
King’s book is split into two parts, the first following the children in the 1950s and the second returning to them as (very screwed up) adults in the 1980s. Muschietti’s film adapts the first part, with its full title the cumbersome It: Part 1 – The Loser’s Club. Strangely, Part 2 is yet to be confirmed, so perhaps the studio is keeping an eye on how well this does before giving that the greenlight. Either way, there’s more than enough here to make a marvellously spooky and intense cinematic experience.
Muschietti sums up his philosophy thusly:
“It happens in the book, this coming of age and kids facing their own mortality, which is something that in real life happens in a more progressive way and slowed down. There’s a passage (in It) that reads, ‘Being a kid is learning how to live and being an adult is learning how to die.’ There’s a bit of a metaphor of that and it just happens in a very brutal way, of course.”
It slithers into cinemas on September 8th.
