IT Chapter Two

The first chapter of director Andy Muschietti’s IT adaptation was an entertaining funhouse-style horror film—on the first watch. In subsequent viewings, the scares quickly lose their bite. That, combined with the fact that it gave us a good look at the monster (that’d be Bill Skarsgård’s evil clown Pennywise), would seem to suggest that the terrors would be exhausted for IT Chapter Two. Remarkably, though, the second part is the better, scarier, and more fun of the two.

It’s still the jump scare, haunted funhouse type of horror, not the terrifying, won’t-sleep-for-days kind (for that, I don’t think any filmmaker could possibly match Stephen King’s prose). But, it’s pretty darn effective, with some terrific horror set pieces, tension-filled chases, and a variety of monsters more numerous and disturbing than the film’s predecessor (this the grown-up half of IT, after all). And wisely, Skarsgård’s Pennywise (who, let’s be honest, always came off more like a goofball emcee than a truly terrifying foil) is kept to a relative minimum, lest he undercut the scares. The only time that happens is when the movie does so by design through injecting some macabre humor, to great effect.

As the first IT adapted the childhood parts of King’s novel, this one follows the Losers’ Club as adults (played by James McAvoy, Jessica Chastain, Bill Hader, Jay Ryan, James Ransone, Isaiah Mustafa, and, briefly, Andy Bean), with flashbacks to the time period of the first film. Set in roughly the present day, the pack has gone their separate ways, though their personal issues haven’t left them, only taken new forms. But when the evil force they battled 27 years earlier returns to the town of Derry, Maine, the group reunites to destroy it, and in doing so each confront their personal childhood trauma.

Besides the horror, Chapter Two attempts to crack the character drama that King spent literally hundreds of pages on in the book. Admittedly, the cast is pretty excellent, conveying real emotions besides fear. Hader and Ransone are particularly great at providing gallows humor that’s hilarious but also clearly a coping mechanism. Ultimately, though, there mostly just isn’t enough time, even in a runtime on the long side, to explore these elements beyond the surface level, as mere plot devices or setups for scary sequences.

This doesn’t necessarily hurt the movie as a horror flick. But there are a few pretty harrowing depictions of real traumatic stuff (abuse, homophobia, hate crimes). And the narrative does absolutely nothing with these, leaving them just sort of floating like unceremoniously abandoned subplots. These aren’t bad or exploitative scenes in and of themselves—in fact, one of them is one of the stronger and more unsettling sequences in the whole two-film arc—but leaving them in without expanding upon them or tying them into the main plotline at all can’t help but make them feel a bit gratuitous.

That aside, the only glaring complaint is that the two-film structure tilts very unevenly in the second’s favor. Scenes that are strong in Chapter Two perhaps could have been even scarier placed earlier in the whole narrative, or helped play up the mystery of the story. Since Chapter Two ends up frequently employing flashbacks, it seems a bit like a mistake to divide the novel into two films by era, instead of just doing a two-parter while still employing King’s original back-and forth plotting. Which I guess is a roundabout and backhanded way of saying the IT film cycle is one of the few horror series to get better and scarier with its second entry.