Review: It Chapter Two (Andy Muschietti, 2019)
Fig. 1 - IT Chapter Two (Andrés Muschietti, 2019).
I wouldn’t say I am scared of clowns, but I definitely don’t like them. If you Google search ‘fear of clowns’ there are over ten million results, so it seems I am not alone in my dislike towards these peculiar figures. Taking its cue from something of this ongoing cultural fear around such make-upped entertainers, horror sequel IT Chapter Two (Andrés Muschietti, 2019) offers an often engaging - but always disturbing - and certainly uncanny piece of cinema about an iconic killer clown returning to terrorise his victims once more. The film picks up where we last left the Loser’s Club in the first film IT (Andrés Muschietti, 2017), with the gang – Bill (Jaeden Martell), Stanley (Wyatt Oleff), Eddie (Jack Dylan Grazer), Richie (Finn Wolfhard), Beverly (Sophia Lillis), Mike (Chosen Jacobs) and Ben (Jeremy Ray Taylor) – all making a pact to stay friends forever whilst promising to reunite should evil clown Pennywise (Bill Skarsgård) ever reappear in their hometown of Derry, Maine. The film then rapidly fast forwards to present-day Derry, a full twenty-seven years after Pennywise was last seen. Here we find the Losers’ Club have all grown up, moved on and inevitably lost touch. Our opening shot of present-day Derry is that of the local fairground – the symbol of family-friendly, let-your-hair-down, fun-for-all entertainment – that is unless you’ve ever seen a horror film. Fairgrounds are overwhelming places offering dazzling prizes to be won. However, there are always the sounds of screams from rollercoasters, or a haunted house among the twinkling and colourful lights. In its opening scenes, IT Chapter Two is very similar to eighties horror comedy Lost Boys (Joel Schumacher, 1987), matching the happiness of the fairground with a false sense of security and dread that sets the tone for what is to follow. One of the clown’s main residences, the fairground, is a trope repeated in numerous horror and fantasy films, from German expressionist classic The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Robert Wiene, 1920) to more recent examples of popular horror cinema, such as Us (Jordan Peele, 2019). Given the horror genre’s sustained emphasis on clown performers, and with the imminent release of Joker (Todd Phillips, 2019), and documentary Wrinkles the Clown (Michael Beach Nichols, 2019), it’s no wonder contemporary audiences may have a problem with trusting their smiling faces. Even the recent The Lego Batman Movie (Chris McKay, 2017) offers a very different and more light-hearted take on the life of the Joker feature the character’s famed smile (Fig. 2). The clown’s painted grin offers a specifically unsettling and falsified signifier of happiness, so why would we be comfortable around something we know not to be real or artificial? Even when it’s made of Lego bricks (Fig. 2).
Fig. 2 - The Lego Batman Movie (Chris McKay, 2017).
As Sigmund Freud notes in his famed writing on the uncanny, such an effect “is often and easily produced when the distinction between imagination and reality is effaced, as when something that we have hitherto regarded as imaginary appears before us in reality, or when a symbol takes over the full function of the thing is symbolizes” (1990 [1919]: 367). Therefore, we as the audience must work alongside protagonists in IT Chapter 2 to decipher what is real and what isn’t in the world of Derry, and to ask whether actual threat is present. The film asks us to experience the uncanny; to question what is it about Derry that feels safe and terrifying simultaneously. I can’t tell if it’s the scary clown we all love to hate, or if it’s something deeper than that, perhaps a latent feeling within the society of which the clown is symbolic. This is where our agency as spectators and our alignment with the Losers’ club in IT Chapter 2 becomes imperative.
Horror and fantasy films often employ the help of CGI/VFX to accentuate their image of reality, often blurring the line between the possible and impossible. The advancements in technology allows for live-action cinema to transform its characters and the worlds they inhabit, with sometimes positive and negative effects (Barratt 2007: 62-79). Suspended disbelief is a key element of our spectatorial encounter with fantasy and horror cinema, something that has been theorised as a form of “cognitive estrangement” in which something appears that “compels us to imagine a different way of conceiving the world” (Buchanan 2016: 90). To allow for the narrative of IT Chapter Two, for example, to be all encompassing, one must accept what is happening on the screen, whether you believe it is real or even possible. IT Chapter Two succeeds as a horror film because it uses techniques that craft a sense of the uncanny, alongside CGI/VFX, as its narrative fully immerses the viewer into the drama. Pennywise has become synonymous with cinema’s ‘evil clown’ trope, and we know him as a shape-shifting, omnipresent and omniscient threat in Derry. He prays on the innocent and the vulnerable, with his main target being children. There is something vastly unsettling about a clown praying on the very people he is (traditionally) meant to entertain, and often appearing in safe places that these children inhabit. This disconcerting dependence and fixation on children is strongly emphasised in this latest sequel, when Pennywise tells the Losers’ club he has ‘craved’ them since their last meeting. It is this sense of the threat and urgency that structures the narrative of the sequel.
With fresh Pennywise attacks on the population of present-day Derry, the story of IT Chapter Two, involves the now-adult Mike (Isaiah Mustafa) - the only member of the gang who remains in the town - who is forced to reconnect the gang and bring them all back to Pennywise’s playground. It is down to them to confront their past traumas, and by doing so take down Pennywise once and for all. IT Chapter Two gives spectators a long montage of Mike calling each member of the original gang, mapping out what has become of our tenacious children from IT. All seem to be successful, but all appear to have forgotten the terrors Derry holds until now. Richie (Bill Hader) vomits instantly and Eddie (James Ransone) crashes his car, thus suggesting the fear of returning to Derry is a very real one. Yet fear shouldn’t be an initial response to the thought of returning to your hometown to reconnect with your middle-school friends. Will Napier argues that masking terror in the ‘safe’ is a preference of Stephen King’s literature, and works as an uncanny effect to unsettle the reader (or in our case, the audience). Napier argues that “Just as Freud suggested that the uncanny results when the familiar becomes unfamiliar, so King’s horrors most often emerge after his reader is engrossed in domestic normality. It is there, at home, or in a home-from-home, in a place perceived to be safe, that the horrors take place.” (Napier 2008: 112). The longer the gang spend in Derry, the more they remember of summer of 1989. And remembering is the only way to succeed in their fight against the past. It’s just like the old days, except everyone is much older (apart from Pennywise himself, who always appears as a figure of fantasy suspended in time).
Fig. 3 - The casting of IT Chapter Two (source: https://www.aintitcool.com/node/80206).
The casting of IT Chapter Two is perfection. The adults match their child counterparts seamlessly: Jessica Chastain as Beverly, James McAvoy as Bill, Bill Hader as Richie, Isaiah Mustafa as Mike, James Ransone as Eddie and Andy Bean as Stanley (Fig 3). This allows the film to flip between present and past with no confusion to the audience. The dealings between past and present are integral to the story, to defeat Pennywise the Losers’ gang must find their own totems to offer in a ritual by revisiting specifically painful moments of their childhood, and finally enter into a face-off with Pennywise in The Well House (also known as the Haunted House, or a “creepy-ass house” as Richie refers to it) on Neibolt Street. As with the first half of this franchise, IT Chapter Two deals with some intense themes, but I can’t help feeling that some of these emotional and essential parts of our protagonists’ stories fall short of really being dealt with. We see a very graphic homophobic attack, racism, fatphobia, more homophobia, domestic violence, suicide, death and very overt engagements with childhood trauma. These are all powerful themes that can be used well in horror (see Get Out [Jordan Peele, 2017] and Green Room [Jeremy Saulnier, 2015]), but which here perhaps need to be explored in more depth to have a real impact. These confrontations are often embedded in childhood trauma (with one theme attached to each member of the Losers’ club) but are bookended by jump scares or absurd fantasy creatures that are at times almost laughable.
IT Chapter Two lacks the tension of part one, and this is where the film falls short. Despite its uncanny frights, at no point was I truly scared, but I was emotionally invested enough to have haptic spectatorial reactions to people being licked or vomited on - sometimes to the point of being horrified. The use of CGI and digital visual effects in the film is the real motivator in these moments, achieving the film’s haptic qualities and inciting my embodied reactions. Tongues that are far too long for any living being, and monsters with rubber-like gangly bodies make for a disturbing watch. This is a typical trope of the horror and fantasy film, as “the most effective way of characterizing such monsters is to say that they are beings whose existence science denies. Worms as long as freight trains, vampires, ghosts and other revenants, bug-eyed creatures from other galaxies, haunted houses, and wolfmen are all monsters on this construal” (Carroll 1999: 148). Yet perhaps being scared isn’t really the point of IT Chapter Two. Terrifying the audience to the point of no return would distract from the horror of the traumas we see, as well as the significance they hold for each of our characters. This isn’t just a horror film about a scary clown, this is an uncanny film about overcoming childhood trauma in order to move on. Pennywise is the children’s childhood trauma personified as a fantastical figure, just as a scar is a longstanding reminder of a childhood blood-pact.
Fig. 4 - Pennywise (Bill Skarsgård) in IT Chapter Two.
Overall, I enjoyed IT Chapter Two and thought it was a technically well-crafted and a well-cast piece of cinema. However, it didn’t scare me in the way I thought it would, but I don’t think this is necessarily a negative. It Chapter Two still unnerved me enough to be rooting for the gang to defeat Pennywise and end his terrorising ways, and I still felt anxious after the film ended – instantly turning on all lights possible when I arrived home alone (Fig. 4). It is captivating in its game-like narrative, absurd monsters and emotional turmoil and as such makes for an entertaining experience. But I think I am scared of clowns after all.
References
Barratt, Daniel. “Assessing the Reality-Status of Film: Fiction or Non-Fiction, Live Action or CGI?” in Narration and Spectatorship in Moving Images, eds. Joseph D. Anderson and Barbara Fisher (Anderson: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007), 62–79.
Carroll, Noel. “Horror and Humor.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 57, no. 2 (1999): 145–160.
Freud, Sigmund, “The “Uncanny”,” The Penguin Freud Library Vol. 14: Art and Literature, trans. James Strachey (London: Penguin, 1990 [1919]).
Napier, Will. The Haunted House of Memory in the Fiction of Stephen King (Glasgow: University of Glasgow, 2007), available at: theses.gla.ac.uk/516/.
Biography
Hannah is a writer and avid cinema goer who specialises in Fantasy & Reality theory and spectatorship. She received her BA(Hons) from King's College London in Film Studies in 2014. Although currently working full time, Hannah is currently reading around Queer Theory and Feminist Theory in her spare time whilst continuing her interest in the above. Originally from Teesside she lives in London with her partner and pet cat Bmo. Her twitter is @hnewmansmart in case you also like animation, cats, cinema or Harry Potter.