There is no doubt that It is one of the most successful works of the so-called king of horror Stephen King. The story of the killer clown Pennywise who terrorized a group of teenagers and then persecuted them even as adults had already had a transposition in 1990, when a TV miniseries capable of terrifying an entire generation was released. In 2017 the director Andy Muschietti he decided to bring that story to the big screen, dividing it into two chapters. The first is the one that airs tonight at 11.16 pm on Italia 1.
It – Chapter 1, the plot
En – Chapter 1 tells the story of the first part of Stephen King’s novel, the one set in the 80s when the protagonists are still all kids with many problems. The story kicks off when little George disappears in the city of Derry after meeting a mysterious clown accompanied by a red balloon. Bill (Jaeden Lieberher) is the leader of the so-called Losers Club and George’s older brother, who is determined more than ever to find out what really happened to the boy who disappeared during a summer storm. To help him in this mission there will be friends Ben (Jeremy Ray Taylor), richie (Finn Wolfhard), stan (Wyatt Oleff), Mike (Chosen Jacobs) and Eddie (Jack Dylan Grazier). Beverly also joins the group (Sophia Lillis), the only girl in the group who experiences a situation of discomfort within her own home and who therefore feels very close to the boys who suffer bullying every day. Soon the search for the truth leads the kids to the mysterious Pennywise (Bill Skarsgard), whose intentions are far from good.
Bill Skarsgård’s preparation to become Pennywise
In Stephen King’s literary production, evil almost never presents itself as a real monster: most of the time the writer from Maine writes stories in which the villains of the situation is a common-looking creature that, for this very reason, is more difficult to detect and eradicate. With the clown Pennywise King went even deeper and created a monster just behind the appearance of a clown, a mask that children usually love and which they approach with confidence and it is also thanks to this choice that the story of It it always worked. For Stephen King, therefore, it was important to evoke fear rather than show it openly – a dogma that the director also Andy Muschietti he did just that, thinking about how to suggest fear, without necessarily having to show liters of blood. From this point of view, therefore, it is not surprising that in this first chapter, Pennywise is above all a presence that weighs on the boys, rather than a true protagonist. In fact, according to the website of theInternet Movie DatabasePennywise has no more than four minutes of dialogue throughout the film: his task is therefore to exist, to be there, to loom over the other protagonists.
Precisely because he could not rely on his acting and dialogues, actor Bill Skarsgård worked so hard to be able to restore the image of a psychopath with the sole force of his facial expressions hidden under a lot of make-up. According to reports IMDB, to achieve his goal, Bill Skarsgård spent a lot of time watching films focused precisely on psychopathic, insane and violent figures. Among the characters who helped him reach an optimal level to play Pennywise there is, for example, the Jack Torrance of Shining, Kubrick’s film based on another Stephen King masterpiece. But the actor also looked at the work done by the protagonist of Clockwork Orangeas well as that of Heath Ledger hidden under Joker makeup in The dark Knight. Finally, Bill Skarsgård said he too felt inspired by theAnthony Hopkins de The silence of the lambsespecially for the instinctive and animal movements of the character, which are similar to those of his Pennywise.