Eleven reasons why It (2017) wasn’t scary for me

  1. No giant spider.
  2. It is a clown that gets it’s ass handed to It more than once by a small group of loser children.
  3. It is really a demon-thing, but doesn’t even require a +1 weapon to deal damage to it.
  4. Whenever It gets hurt by the loser kids, It usually retreats, or else flips out twitching and jerking for a few seconds. It’s kindof a wimp.
  5. It bites Georgie’s arm off. Real scary, right? But there’s almost no pain reaction from him, I guess because he’s in shock? But this recalls the Black Knight from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. “Tis but a scratch! I’ve had worse!” Apart from when Henry Bowers uses his knife on New Kid Ben, I didn’t get any sense of horror from the gore in this film.
  6. Any time It’s around, there’s red balloons. I guess they’re supposed to be threatening and creepy, but they’re really just a giveaway: OK there’s another balloon get ready for It to try to scare us again. Get ready to not be surprised! Literally every single jump scare foreshadowed.
  7. It doesn’t seem to be capable of hurting anyone unless they’re scared. Literally the only thing they have to do is stand up to It, or realize that It’s mind-tricks aren’t real. It’s hard to be scared of something that isn’t real, or is only real in your head.
  8. When big brother Bill encounters It (in the guise of little lost Georgie) in the basement, and It starts repeating “we all float down here” and turning “scary”, I’m thinking “OK he’s just glitching out. Someone needs to file a bug report, and then we can patch it.”
  9. It mostly likes to scare people by turning ugly. Deformed, decaying walking corpses, and that sort of thing. But years of informal sensitivity training has enabled me to empathize with people who have severe appearance deficits, rather than feel repulsed by them. I want to help It feel accepted, as though It too is capable and worthy of being loved.
  10. The creepy house at 29 Niebold Street is pretty overboard. Hey, it’s not like that place doesn’t scream “haunted”. It obviously put a lot of effort into decor. But did It really have to go with “late 19th century cliche American Victorian?” It’s literally the most obvious place in town It could have picked to make It’s home. Send in the crack team of loser kids!
  11. We have a much worse clown in the White House, and he’s threatening to destroy the world in a nuclear exchange with North Korea. What I wouldn’t give for there to be a supernatural demon that only eats a few children once a generation instead of this president. Literally every single day in 2017, the news is worse than a statistically abnormal number of missing children in a small town.

Overall I enjoyed It, for the acting and the casting, and especially the humorous/lighthearted moments when the kids are just being kids. The children who act in the film look and feel like real children. That much, was great. But I didn’t feel scared. The teaser trailers made it seem like It would be a lot worse than it was.

Updated: 2018-Jan-26 — 9:58 am

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