Initial Thoughts on "It" (2017)

In a year full of many good and entertaining films, “It” is currently vying for a place at the top of the bunch. It was certainly one of the more entertaining cinematic experiences I have had in a while. My two oldest wanted to see it and it has to have been their first experience of a great horror film in theaters. Great in the sense that it was roller coaster scary without resorting too much to squirms or jumps. Just good, old fashioned, scary monsters trying to feed on kids.

I had hoped to have seen this picture twice in theaters by now, but who has the time or money for that sort of thing these days? So now I am waiting for It to hit the home video market. It isn’t for everyone; certainly not the easily scared, those who don’t like kids in movies to talk like naughty kids, people who don’t like to see kids endangered, or people afraid of clowns. But it is for you if you like those stories from the eighties where it was a group of kids against the world, with the world being full of monsters and ignorantly complicit adults.

That may be where the film (and the story on which it is based) is most relevant for today. At its core, the story is about a monster (or a spirit, or even a culture) that feeds on fear. It controls people and keeps them enslaved. The adults never see what is going on, and that is either explained by the fact that adults have lost the ability to see reality; or more sinisterly, they may have turned a blind eye to the evil amongst them because complicity keeps them safe. That is the sort of Zeitgeist that fed extremism in the Twentieth Century, and that has been rearing its head in the past 3-5 years.

In real life, as in the film, the way to defeat such fear is to recognize it, expose its lies, and stand up to it with courage whatever the cost may be.