‘You’ll float too... you’ll float too... YOU’LL FLOAT TOO’
The most in-depth trailer for the film adaptation of Stephen King’s IT has dropped following its premiere at San Diego’s Comic Con. In it, we hear Pennywise the fucking freakiest clown alive speak properly for the first time, and get a full in-action shot of him in a room full of clown dolls. Great.
Detailed in the second visual to come from IT: Part One, The Loser’s Club, “When you're alone as a kid, the monsters see you as weaker. You don't even know they're getting closer until it's too late.” The first instalment of the reboot will focus on a young gang that face a great demonic evil in the fictional Derry, Maine, where kids are starting to go missing. In a town marred by the sinister and terrifying, they must face their worst fears that the child-consuming clown unleashes in full force. The first kid is Georgie, who encounters Pennywise while scrambling for his paper boat: “Here, take it,” the clown hisses. And of course, it’s little unfortunate Georgie who says that chilling line, “you’ll float too”.
The trailer seems to be a disturbing step up from the original miniseries in 1990, with more big scares, though like Tim Curry’s Pennywise, this clown carries a similar red balloon of doom.
IT stars Bill Skarsgård as the terrifying clown creature – today, Dazed announced Skarsgård as the first of four covers for our autumn issue. Stranger Things/Dazed 100 winner Finn Wolfhard also plays one of the young gang. Mama filmmaker Andrés Muschietti directs the feature.
“It is a horror movie, but it’s not only that,” Muschietti told a crowd Comic-Con last weekend. “It’s a story of love and friendship and a lot of other beautiful emotions.”
The film comes at a time when a slew of Stephen King reboots and adaptations are in the works: The Mist, Dark Tower, a series based on Mr Mercedes and a Hulu series titled Castle Rock, a horror anthology based on the author's short stories.
“The story is the same, but there are changes in the things the kids are scared of,” he told Variety. “In the book, they’re children in the 50s, so the incarnations of the monsters are mainly from movies, so it’s Wolf Man, the Mummy, Frankenstein (and) Dracula. I had a different approach. I wanted to bring out deeper fears, based not only on movie monsters but on childhood traumas.”
IT will hit cinemas September 8