In middle school, I had a crush on a boy in my class. He wasn’t one of the cool boys, wasn’t teen-heartthrob-cute or tall for his age (actually he hadn’t hit any puberty-related growth spurts, so he was pretty short for his age), but he was exceptionally nice, and had been straightforwardly friendly toward me since the start of grade six, when I was a new kid who had just moved to the country and had a weird British-ish accent that I was desperately trying to lose (I learned English at an international school where all the teachers were from the UK).
His family lived in the townhouse complex next to our low-rise apartment building, so we occasionally walked home together, when the weather was nice or we were too impatient to wait for a bus. The walk was about 20 minutes, and I don’t remember what we chatted about most of the time, but I do remember that at one point, he told me he was reading Stephen King’s It.
This was a nice, non-spooky kid, a literal boy scout. But hey, it was the late ‘80s, and Stephen King was pretty hot, so even regular eleven year olds were into him. I asked to borrow the book when he was done with it, because wanted to have more common points of interest to chat about on these occasional walks. He handed it off to me some days later, and then, for reasons I have yet to fully unpack, I devoured the entire book in a matter of days even though it terrified me from the start, right down to my bone marrow. I wasn’t a full-on loser back then, I was just new in town, and therefore simultaneously a bit weird and a bit interesting to my peers. But I identified with the seven members of the “Losers Club” in It deeply.
It is *that book* for me, the one that rearranged my brain, and continued to fuel my nightmares for the next three and a half decades. I think about it with surprising regularity, even now.
When the 1990 mini-series adaptation starring Tim Curry as the titular clown aired, I felt compelled by dark forces to watch. It wasn’t as scary as the book, but it did allow me to picture the characters more clearly (as the beloved TV stars of the day).
Last summer, I found a VHS copy of It at a roadside charity shop in the countryside, and it felt like destiny. 30-ish years after I first saw it, I had to return to Derry, Maine, just like the characters themselves.
Yesterday, I sent Colin and the kid off on a fun adventure without me, and I settled in to revisit my old, primal fears. It was a strangely emotional rewatch. Of course, I expected the story to hit differently now that I’m a parent than it did when I was a tween, the exact same age as the characters at the start of the story.
Back then, I felt the kids’ peril as my own, and 1990 was an easy time to feel imperilled as a 12-year-old girl. The École Polytechnique massacre had just taken place, on December 6th, 1989. The “Scarborough Rapist” had been assaulting women for three years in a suburb adjacent to the one I lived in, and on the radio, they were constantly warning women about him and talking about the special police task force assigned to the job of finding him. He later turned out to be serial killer Paul Bernardo.
That year, the year I was 12 — and a scrawny, young-looking 12 — three separate adult men pulled up to me on the street in their cars and asked if I needed a lift home. I extricated myself from all three situations easily enough, but the sense of danger bloomed in my gut, and the fear of getting snatched out of my life and into some dark nightmare felt completely reasonable.
Is there an expression that means the opposite of “gilding the lily”? Like, adding something awful to a situation that is already quite bad? A rotten cherry on top of a shit sundae? Because that’s what reading and watching It felt like for me at the time. I already walked to school with a baseball bat, because I reasoned that a predator might pass me over, judging that some other pre-teen without a potential weapon might be an easier target. I didn’t need to also be afraid of supernatural clowns who infiltrate my dreams and make me question reality itself. My fledgeling insomnia loved It. Sleep was a distant stranger for months.
As an immigrant kid whose parents worked multiple jobs, I was often home alone after school in 1990, sometimes till 9:00 p.m., or later. The TV was constantly on, and I binged a lot of ‘70s and ‘80s sitcoms that were in syndication. I watched countless episodes of Three’s Company and Night Court, and loved John Ritter and Harry Anderson, two of the gentlest, most non-threatening men on primetime TV. Both actors died too young, and I was glad to visit with them in It, where Ritter played Ben (the soft, former-fat-kid with the soul of a poet) and Anderson played Richie (the goofy one who’s constantly joking to hide his real vulnerability). The casting was perfect, and it made me sad to remember how much range Ritter especially had, what a broad spectrum of funny and dramatic roles we missed out on from him over the past two decades.
There were so many disturbing scenes in the book that didn’t make it into the 1990 mini-series — kids being abused by their guardians, kids being killed by It in horrific ways (heads ripped off, flying leeches, and more), a young sociopath suffocating his baby brother to death and killing animals in an old fridge at the dump, and of course the infamous child sex scene1 — but Tim Curry delivered in spades, as he always does. His Pennywise was hammy, ridiculous, and utterly terrifying. No shade to Bill Skarsgård, who is fantastic in everything he does, but Curry is the scarier clown, for my money.
Rewatching It was a perfect bit of Halloween-themed self-care. It felt good to remind myself that I no longer have the same fears I did when I was a kid. I never think about being abducted by a stranger! And as a parent, it’s not even in the top 20 worries I have about my own kid.
My kid hasn’t yet entered his Stephen King era, but we have been experimenting with our own version of letting him access content that might be too mature for his age. At the moment, he’s obsessed with Xenomorphs and the Alien franchise, and we (by “we” I mean “Colin, almost entirely on his own”) have been crafting an elaborate chest-burster Halloween costume for him all month long, which is finally going to make its neighbourhood debut tonight.
It’s always a fine line between trusting your gut, and trusting the prevailing wisdom of the day, in parenting as in life. I know that the Alien movies are not for kids any more than It is, but I also know that my specific kid was always drawn to darker, spookier content, and loves a peek behind the curtain of how movies are made. We have lots of books about classic movie monsters, and he’s always been full of questions about what’s makeup and what’s prosthetics, or a guy in a rubber suit. He asks about whether things are real or fake on screen, and knowing the difference doesn’t seem to ruin any of the magic for him.
I might have died of fright if I’d watched Alien at the age of eight. But, based on him-in-particular, and not past-me or eight-year-olds-in-general, we decided to give into this fascination and watch the first four Alien films as a family. The kid declared them to be only 1% scary. Go figure. At least the costume is 100%!
Happy Halloween, loves! Tell me what books and movies messed you up the most when you were too young to have been exposed to them.
In it, 11-year-old Beverly, the only female member of the Losers Club, has sex with all six 11-year-old boys, in a sewer. At age 11, I was more bewildered than disgusted by the scene, but it haunted me for years, and I definitely noticed its (pretty understandable) omission from both the 1990 and 2017 adaptations.
Amazing costume! I was in college when I went to see Alien one night by myself. John Hurt’s demise was 100% for me!