Stephen King’s 1986 horror novel It is, of course, a monster in its own right. There are few reviews of the book that don’t mention its massive, 1,100-plus page count; Kirkus’ reviewer, for instance, called it a “gargantuan summer sausage.” It’s no wonder, then, that the second installment of its film adaptation, It Chapter Two, streamlines the story in multiple, welcome ways.
One way it does this is by simplifying the novel’s structure. Both the book and films focus on a group of friends in the town of Derry, Maine, who confront a supernatural entity they call “It,” which has, for centuries, appeared every few decades to murder and feed on locals—mostly children. The shapeshifting creature, which often takes the form of a macabre clown named Pennywise, taps into people’s deepest fears and tortures them with horrifying hallucinations before killing them. The adolescent friends, who call themselves “the Losers,” manage to temporarily defeat the creature. But 27 years later, It comes back, and the Losers must come back to Derry to kill It, once and for all.
The novel bounces back forth between the past and future storylines, but the films’ storytelling is much more straightforward. The first installment, 2017’s It—no chapter number—solely concentrated on the Losers as kids in the late 1980s (updated from the novel’s 1950s); the second film focuses mainly on the group as adults. It Chapter Two does have a few scattered flashbacks here and there, but the much simpler plot structure allows it to speed along a brisk pace—action-movie brisk, at times.
No one would say this about King’s novel, which is laden with endless, pointless digressions. Kirkus’ reviewer described it as “banal characters spewing sawdust dialogue as they blunder about [King’s] dark butcher shop,” and, well, they weren’t wrong. Fortunately, the films do a good job of hacking away much of this excess.
Along the way, to their great credit, they excise King’s worst ideas, which included a notoriously bizarre and off-putting sequence toward the end of the book, in which a young Beverly Marsh—the sole girl among the Losers—has sex with each of the boys in the group. (There’s a knowing joke in It Chapter Two about how people love a famous horror novelist’s books, but they hate his endings.) King also gave another Loser, Richie Tozier, an obnoxious habit of doing “funny” voices—including one that he charmingly calls his “Pickaninny Voice”; blessedly, the great Bill Hader, who plays Richie in It Chapter Two, does not do this. The film also tosses out much of villain’s goofy origin story; suffice it to say that, in the book, it includes a universe-creating turtle.
Still, the novel, for all its faults, does include some exceptionally creepy scenes, and a surprisingly large number of them make it into the films intact. A horrific murder by a riverbank—one of the most memorable deaths in the book—is just as terrifying, if not more so, in It Chapter Two, which makes great use of visual effects to bring King’s chilling descriptions to life. A sequence involving a Paul Bunyan statue, which comes off as mildly ridiculous in the book, is shockingly scary in the film, thanks to CGI magic. And, overall, viewers will never look at red balloons the same way again.
Indeed, director Andy Muschietti offers up one brilliant set-piece after another in It Chapter Two. In one scene, for example, Losers Beverly (Jessica Chastain) and Ben (Jay Ryan) are nearly drowned in blood and buried in sand, respectively—and viewers may find themselves holding their breath as they watch. And the acting, by both the adults and the kids, is unassailable. Bill Skarsgård, as It, is such a feral and predatory presence that viewers won’t be able to take their eyes off him—much as they might want to. In the end, the films provide viewers with the very best elements of It, the novel—which will leave readers to free to read The Stand, a far superior King doorstopper that’s headed to TV screens next year.
David Rapp is the senior Indie editor.