It (2017)

directed by Andy Muschietti

Colin Bonini

No shit, I was a scared kid. Every night, I prayed I would not get murdered, kidnapped, or have nightmares. I once cried trick-or-treating because of our neighbors’ decorations, and I had to leave the theater for Spider-Man 2 before the movie even started, freaked out by a trailer for Anaconda. So, ironically, my avoidance of all things It began with exactly what Pennywise was hungry for: basic childhood fear. The pure terror of a kid’s imagination.

At some point, an Important Person—my dad or older cousin or an eighth grader—told me It was the scariest book of all time. The DVD cover for the 1990 miniseries constantly on sale at Target (Tim Curry clowned up in the corner, all red and white, inhuman claws reaching toward the title) didn’t help. When I learned Pennywise’s sole purpose was to trick and devour scared children, I understood completely: It, in all possible forms, book or miniseries or cartoon or movie, was a collection of my greatest fears rolled into one—much like It itself. A saga of terror that, if unleashed, would upend my life beyond repair.

This began the period of time when It posed an immediate and life-altering threat. I was certain I would be forced, somehow, some way, to come face-to-face with Pennywise and suffer an unimaginable, gruesome end. This was a phase many kids, I think, go through. A time when nightly trips for glasses of water are filled with tall and lurking shadows; when sleeping with your foot off the bed means you'll be dragged under by a set of cold, blistered, graydead hands. Monsters as much a reality as lice, chapped lips, ear infections.

Around the same time I first began to fear It and Pennywise, my fear of Bad Things happening to me and my family manifested itself into a set of protective rules and rituals. I counted sounds and syllables constantly, tapping my thumb, index, middle, and ring fingers—never my pinky—to make sure sentences and song lyrics ended in multiples of four. If they didn’t, I would sneeze and cough or click my teeth to make up the difference. Upon entering a room, if I closed the door without first turning on the light, I had to exit the room and try again (especially in garages). When I passed the hedge of elephant bush leading to our front door, I had to take a leaf and lob it against the wall as an offering to the house; otherwise, I couldn’t go inside. I often felt guilty about the way my clothes and toys were attended to, and I strove for equity between them.

If I neglected even one of my rules, if I failed to fulfill them without performing a reversal, Something Bad would happen. To me or to someone I loved or to the world. The same way you wash your hands after going to the bathroom to avoid getting pinkeye, you make sure every song ends on a four-count. You make sure the house has its offering of elephant bush. You do not, do not go into the garage without turning on the light. You do this so the Nazgûl don’t hunt you while you sleep. You do this so your parents and your siblings don’t disappear in the night. You do this to atone for every Bad Thing you’ve ever done, and you’ve done so, so many.

I counted. I clicked my teeth in just the right order, at just the right tempo. I left rooms and re-entered and left again. I did it all. And most importantly—most illogically and randomly and laughably—I never, never, never had anything to do with a specific book, by a specific man, with a specific, child-killing clown in the woodsy town of Derry, Maine.

The book, yes, and all the reimaginings.

It.

*

Beyond being scared years, these were lonely years. I was chubby, and dually ridiculed for it by myself and my peers. My canine teeth were gaps in my mouth. I had hair like a mop that refused to flip the way I wanted it to, like skateboarders and BMX bikers, but didn’t straighten out like the scene kids, either. This was 2005-ish, so no iPhone, and my siblings had all transferred to a different school. I was, to myself, an in-between mess, and even though in retrospect there were plenty of spaces where I was loved and safe, I felt bullied and lonely. I didn’t like myself very much. I felt like a loser.

I occupied my time with an old broom stick in the front yard. It went up to my shoulder, and it had two beautiful, dull, rounded edges perfect for sticking into the damp dirt of our lawn, pretending to impale an orc like Gimli or Legolas. I would throw it in the air and try to catch it—usually bruising myself—imagining it a lightsaber. In my musings, I fought next to the kids in my class who lived too far to play with after school. I stood up to playground bullies and sacrificed myself for the girls I crushed on. I was their unstoppable, battle-hardened boy; I was their bravest soldier. I was their friend. These play sessions were the moments when I was the most courageous, most daring, and least loathed version of myself. They were what I wished my life to be: adventurous, filled with magic, filled with friendship.

Things changed when I transferred schools in the sixth grade. I was still big, and I spent a good amount of time anxious about my new teasing classmates, but I made new friends who lived closer by, and with each passing season, I felt less alone. For the next three years, we were each other’s refuge as well as each other’s bullies. We had bikes. We rode around on them and drank Arizona Iced Tea from the liquor store next to my house. We argued about spit and fell in love with the same girls and showed off by riding our bikes into the lake and jumping down flights of stairs. We never, as far as I can remember, which I guess is the point, encountered evil clowns or haunted houses or magic anythings. But we had those kinds of summers. It went by fast and felt like forever. It was nice.

Then, to keep it short, much like the Losers in It—we grew up. I came to love horror movies, my fear of in-the-night kidnappings subsided, and I understood the firm line between fiction and reality. By all logic, my fear of It and Pennywise and Derry should have dissolved.

Instead, as I grew older, It came to frighten me not in the nightmare sense, but in the same ways as odd numbers, closed doors and unswitched lights, forgetting the house’s gift of elephant bush. Despite my new friends, the world continued to be an unpredictable and dangerous place, and the universe confirmed this. My grandmother and a childhood friend died two years apart, both on 5/23 (two prime numbers: Bad); the beloved pastor of my old school was succumbing publicly to Parkinson’s. Neglecting my rituals would end in even more catastrophe, especially now that there was more to lose, and I upheld them with dedicated, twitching fervor. Avoiding It hardened itself into one of the unbreakable pillars upholding my life’s stability. Red balloon. Little yellow raincoat. We all float down here. These were as taboo to me as ending a song on thirteen. All I had to do was stay away. As long as I did, for reasons no longer related to its subject matter, but purely superstitions, life was safe.

*

I kept these rituals into college, counting and tapping on autopilot until my sophomore year, when a boyhood friend of mine lent me his copy of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home. The passages detailing Bechdel’s childhood OCD tendencies gave me, for the first time, language and perspective for my own compulsive rituals and superstitions.

Penned across multiple panels—a young Bechdel neck-deep in the tub; two sneakered feet stopped dead in front of a doorway—Bechdel describes her growing number of compulsions. She counts the drips from faucets and the panels in flooring, manipulating what she sees and hears so the final sum is always an even number. She uses her hand to clear away “the invisible substance that… hung like swags of drapery between all solid objects.” If she undresses in the incorrect order, she must put on all her clothes and start over. There is a special incantation for crossing doorways with odd-numbered flooring panels.

I couldn’t ignore the similarities in our patterns, but what struck me even more than the parallels was Bechdel’s explanation for why she upheld them.

“I learned about tics, and something called St. Vitus’ Dance,” she writes. “But these nervous habits and involuntary twitches were child’s play to the dark fear of annihilation that motivated my own rituals.”

I knew the feeling.

Never being formally diagnosed with any form of OCD—or even knowing I had any OCD tendencies—made it hard to know whether my rituals were true compulsions like Bechdel’s or childhood superstitions taken too far. My rules weren’t as ever-present as the veil between all of Bechdel’s solid objects, and they were comparatively easy to satisfy… but still. My family’s history with mental illness was hazy to me. I’d had a brief, overwhelmingly negative experience with antidepressants the year before. The thought of confronting this new side to my mind became another unknowable, unseeable terror to be avoided at all costs. Don’t forget the elephant bush, don’t forget to turn on the lights, don’t watch It—you’ll be fine.

The year after reading Fun Home was the year I was first diagnosed with an anxiety disorder. One night, with the help of my roommate’s bong and a plastic bottle of vodka, I suffered a next-level freakout complete with hallucinations, voices, and a certainty that, if I went to sleep, I would never wake up. Later that same week, I got rocked with a career-ending concussion playing rugby (not my first), and I was hospitalized with a panic attack that night.

The intensity of the two episodes in one week sparked a new kind of fear. The hot, paralyzing terror I experienced during the panic attacks was the manifestation of exactly what I had been trying so long to waylay. The Bad Thing.

For the next six months, my dread of suffering an episode became so constant that it unfailingly spurred one into action, creating a cycle of self-inflicted terror. I was scared of myself, for myself, 24/7. I had trouble sleeping, waking up every few minutes after forgetting to breathe. The concussion symptoms were worse than any I’d had before. I lost my friends’ names mid-conversation, forgot words like they’d dropped straight out of my vocabulary. These were no tip-of-my-tongue blunders; these were black-hole blanks that sometimes took days to fill. The new gaps in my memory made me even more scared, and boom. Another panic attack. Rinse and repeat.

I doubled down on my rules for protection and created a list of new ones. I quit smoking, abstained from alcohol and caffeine and tobacco and anything else that might get my heart racing. I stopped playing rugby for fear of another head injury. I became wary of any food that was high-carb and low-protein, speculating that my blood sugar was responsible for the episodes. I convinced myself Greek yogurt was a salve to any oncoming panic. I exercised as much as my concussion would allow, and then, when it wore off, I exercised more. Eating wrong, a hint of secondhand smoke or a sip of black tea, missing a workout—all of these were means to spiral into a fresh wave of panic. My superstitions and these new rules reached a level of manic control over my life they had never before reached, dictating my every move and thought and decision.

All this in the spring and summer of 2017, just when, thanks to Andy Muschietti’s new film, It and Pennywise were re-centering themselves in mainstream culture.

*

Superstitious as I was, the release seemed too well-timed to be incidental. Just like It returns to torment Derry and forces the Losers to confront their childhood trauma in their adult lives, the newest It film felt like a callback to my boyhood terror. Growing up, I was terrified of Pennywise for his monstrousness, and I relied on my rituals to keep him and the other evils of the world at bay; now, I was frightened of It for what It really was: the uncontrollable unleashing of internal, suppressed, self-inflicted fear. It was no longer a physical monster; It was the possibility of losing myself, fully, to the fear I experienced during my incessant panic episodes. Muschietti’s movie would send me spiraling into a dark, irreparable mental health crisis.

By the time the movie came out, in September 2017, I’d been dosed some Paxil, diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder—a lifelong companion from then on, likely triggered by the concussion—and sent packing. My nerves were fried, but I was sleeping, and the panic attacks had gone from daily threats to something more manageable. My mental health slowly improved. My compulsions took on new forms. I counted less, but I began wearing a pair of rings I couldn’t leave my home without; I became more lenient in my routines, allowed myself vices, but never touched drugs again, scared they would unleash my anxiety; my parents moved houses, so there was no more elephant bush to bar my entry. I still refused to have anything to do with It. I likely never would have—if it weren’t for my own writing.

Along with anxiety, depression, and a host of other mental and physical health problems—some of which I was already predisposed to—post-concussion syndrome is known to cause trouble with short- and long-term memory. This spotty relationship with my own ability to recount the past, paired with my general fears and anxieties, means that loss, memory, fear, and fear of oneself—what one has done, what one has the capability of doing, what one has failed to do—have always been central themes in my work. They culminated in my second year of grad school, four years after Muschietti’s It debuted, when I began writing a novel. It was loosely inspired by the gaps in my own memory, the lonely boyhood years that led to my closest friendships, and the synthesis of my old and new fears.

The novel stars a group of adults—formerly childhood best friends—all afflicted by unexplainable memory loss. They reunite and return to their hometown to uncover the sinister magic of their pasts and overcome the evil that turned them against each other. The book involves specialized hallucinations and powers according to ones’ fears and desires. There’s a subplot involving cruel bullies and love triangles and escaping on bikes. It’s written half from the adults’ perspectives, half from the kids’. It might as well be called It II: That.

I didn’t know the plot of my book had any parallels to It for a long time. In my devout avoidance of King’s story, I never researched It’s plot. My book was inspired primarily by a series of whodunnits by Irish author Tana French and a Netflix adaptation of Locke and Key (originally written by Joe Hill, King’s son, and produced by Muschietti). I was surprised as more and more people, after telling them the general plot of my novel, responded with the same comment.

“Oh, kind of like It?”

This didn’t bother me. If anything, it was funny. The story I had vehemently avoided my whole life, the one with so much superstitious baggage attached to it, was also the one I had tricked myself into writing. There was nothing to do but laugh it off, take it as a compliment (after all, who hasn’t heard of It), and keep writing. But as the book grew and the similarities continued to overlap, avoiding It became more and more difficult. My best friends, my most trusted readers, my project advisors—all of them told me the same thing: you need to see/watch read It.

*

It was October 2022 when I finally gave in. Six years after my panic disorder, five years after the movie premiered, two years into writing my own book, and over a decade since first being terrified of Pennywise on a routine Target run, I suggested, during a visit to my girlfriend’s cousins in Tucson, that we watch Muschietti’s rendition of It. (My girlfriend, who knew of my superstition, had to double-check to make sure I was serious.)

Muschietti’s first installment of his It duology has an 86% on Rotten Tomatoes from critics, an 84% audience score, and was reviewed with limited enthusiasm and praise. Many articles bemoan the CGI jump-scares as suspense-killing and gimmicky (if not still impressively gory and violent). Others muse on parallels to the first season of Stranger Things, which was heavily influenced by King’s work, also stars Finn Wolfhard (Richie in It), and was released a year prior to the remake. Curry loyalists faithfully compare the 1990 version of Pennywise to the baby-faced, bucktoothed Bill Skarsgård with general underwhelm.

Me? The same way I felt Bechdel’s compulsions were the closest representation of my own rituals and superstitions, the Losers and their adventures felt like the nearest depiction of my hazy, frightening, memory-addled boyhood. What I wished it to be, and what I fear it was.

Muschietti’s first It movie is isolated to the Losers’ childhood, and without first reading the book or seeing Curry et al.’s performance, Muschietti’s movie and Skarsgård’s Pennywise were the clean slate on which to paste my fears and expectations. I was allowed to take the movie for what it was: nostalgic and romping, concerned not only with identifying the perceived terrors of boyhood (not childhood; Bev’s experience is in constant relation to how her body is seen by the men and boys of Derry, rendering her a two-dimensional object of boyhood rather than a synthesis of girlhood), but with reminding us that all things come with equals and opposites. The pristine, supernatural fear that accompanies growing up in an unknowable world comes, too, with moments of science-stumping joy and kinship and wonder and discovery. The communities we form through love and adversity are matched by power-hungry systems set on undoing us. It’s the world I knew, those lonely-scared years. One that terrified me and hurt me, and one that spawned my most cherished moments. An evil world, yes, but a good one, too.

*

To look back, to explore the gaps between memory and event, is also to re-account the currency of our selves, to re-tabulate the stories that make us. This is why retrospective coming-of-age stories are so interesting. It’s impossible to separate our rememberings from our reckonings, and there’s a natural fascination with characters well past their pasts returning to the places that formed them. This is The Ocean at the End of the Lane. This is Hook. This is Locke and Key and Piranesi and Sharp Objects and In the Woods. This is childhood trauma. Magical encounters. Our deepest padlocked and safekept mysteries. This is It.

I don’t know what it says that the same years I developed many of my first anxieties, the rituals and compulsions that would one day spiral into panic, were the same years I would form my longest-lasting, most meaningful relationships. I don’t know what it says, either, that one of my most consistent superstitions involved avoiding a story that mirrored my own experiences of fear, friendship, and growing up. I’m certainly not sure what it means that the book I would eventually write is, in many ways, that story’s progeny.

What I do know is that It, across all its renditions, is one of the ultimate stories of returning and remembering, and it shows us the power and danger of doing so. King’s novel and the 1990 miniseries are nostalgic for the late ‘50s—a time when King and director Tommy Lee Wallace both would have been the same age as the Losers; Muschietti’s movie adapts the story for the late ‘80s, closer to his own adolescent years. For all three men, It was an opportunity to reimagine the atmosphere of adolescence and to explore how those young years shape and horrify us—sometimes even destroy us—but also tempt with the promise of treasure locked beyond our memories.

With that treasure comes much else. Looking back, we do not only remember the good, but recognize anew the sinister. Our own terrors, yes, but also the ones that permeate deeper, more far-reaching. In It, these are what make the world of Derry so ugly—even worse than Pennywise: racism; homophobia; physical, sexual, and emotional violence; apathy; the corrupting lust for power. The Losers are all victims to themselves, to each other, to It, and to a world that, in one way or another, seeks to destroy them.

Ultimately, though, It is about overcoming these horrors, which only some of us are lucky enough to survive. It is a world of evil and tragedy, of unfairness and things beyond human comprehension, but also a world of the simple kinds of love that make surviving possible.

So when I watch the Losers splashing in Derry’s Quarry in white underwear, playing chicken and dunking each other, Benjamin Wallfisch’s swelling piano in the background, I believe in those moments. I believe in that magic. I believe in it the same way I believe a lonely, chubby new kid like Ben Hanscom might make some new friends and bike around town with them, that he can be the kind of brave he’s always wanted. I believe in the nightmares, too. That growing up, we have a keen vision of just how frightening the world is, as demonstrated for us by a thousand awful things—many of which we forget, a few of which we can’t.

I believe, in one way or another, It is a story many of us return to. One that ends with us standing in a circle. Bloodied. Bold. Saying goodbye to something we’ve already lost. We promise we won’t forget but, of course, we do. Until we notice the scars. Because that’s how it ends. That’s how it always ends.

Colin Bonini is a writer from San Jose, California. He holds an MFA in fiction from Arizona State University, and his work appears in The Under Review, The Adroit Journal, glassworks, and elsewhere. He is very mad the A's are leaving Oakland.