There is a reason The Los Angeles Herald Examiner called Stephen King‘S It the “Moby-Dick of horror novels.” In a whopping 1,153 pages, King manages to create an entire town with a haunting history spanning thousands of years and a wondrous, motley crew of friends who take on the town’s shape-shifting monster known as Pennywise the Dancing Clown. No wonder it took King about four years to complete the book. The latest adaptation of It, a two-parter directed by Andy Muschietti and with Bill Skarsgard The first Pennywise film hit theaters in September 2017, 27 years after the novel’s original TV miniseries adaptation. Audiences found this gap eerily fitting, since in King’s book, Pennywise returns every – you guessed it – 27 years to haunt Derry.

As with most book adaptations, some scenes from Muschietti’s interpretation were thrown overboard. Italthough the story is told in two films. Most notable is a scene so shocking that most King readers tend to skip over it or prefer not to talk about it at all. It’s a scene that happens near the end of the novel and surprises readers, to say the least.

It (2017)

Seven young misfits in Derry, Maine, are about to face their worst nightmare – an ancient, shape-shifting evil that emerges from the sewers every 27 years to torment the town’s children. Over the course of one terrifying summer, the friends band together and must overcome their own fears to battle the murderous, bloodthirsty clown known as Pennywise.

Release date

6 September 2017

director

Andres Muschietti

Duration

135 minutes

Main genre

horror

Authors

Stephen King, Chase Palmer, Cary Fukunaga, Gary Dauberman

studio

New Line Cinema

slogan

Your fears are unleashed.

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The disturbing scene in Stephen King’s “It” that everyone likes to forget

Towards the end of King’s novel, the six male, teenage members of the Loser’s Club take turns having sex with the club’s only female member in Derry’s old underground sewers. Yes, you read that right. Bill, Eddie, Stanley, Richie, Ben and Mike (played by Jaeden Martell, Jack Dylan Grazer, Wyatt Oleff, Finn Wolfhard, Jeremy Ray TaylorAnd Jacob’s Chosen) everyone has sex with Beverly (Sophia Lillis), having just defeated Pennywise in a battle so epic that the town above nearly collapsed under heavy flooding and downed power lines. The whole thing is Beverly’s idea, and although the boys protest, she encourages and gently guides them through the process, with each boy taking turns having sex with her. The scene takes place after the climax of the novel, the battle between the Losers and Pennywise, and is written under the subheading “Love and Desire/August 10, 1958.”

The next seven pages detail how each boy takes turns sitting with Beverly on the cold, damp floor of the Derry tunnels. The idea comes to them as they make their way back to the world above, but get lost in the process. Beverly, terrified, overcome with love for each boy, and worried that the group’s power is weakening, suggests the idea of ​​sex. Perhaps it’s an act that she believes, once accomplished, will help them find their way back, or perhaps it serves as a final declaration of how much she cares about each boy. No matter how you analyze it, everyone will agree that putting this scene in the film would have been disastrous, considering these are children we’ve been watching for two hours. Horror as a genre is many things, and shock value is at the top of the list. Every jump scare or bloody flash is meant to emphasize the level of terror that the genre mostly aims to achieve. It’s safe to say, however, that having kids throw an orgy to recover from a battle with an evil alien might be going a step too far.

King’s justification for the infamous scene

The novel was able to get away with this explicit scene because, unlike a movie, it doesn’t directly show viewers the act of sexual intercourse between children, although it is still quite detailed. It’s important to note that Beverly first learned what sex was from her abusive father. Although the book characterizes this abuse as more physical abuse (groping, slapping, etc.), the movie leans more toward the idea that he sexually abused her as well, especially when he repeatedly asks her if “she’s still his little girl.” During one of the many disturbing scenes in the book, Beverly’s father confronts her after hearing from people in town that she’s been hanging out in the woods with six boys all summer. He demands that he check “to see if she’s still intact,” after which she runs halfway across town from him. Afterward, she and the Losers Club enter the tunnels to defeat Pennywise. (Viewers can expect to see these infamous tunnels in the upcoming Max series about the town’s history called Welcome to Derry.)

King is able to pull off the infamous sex scene in the book because there is a lot of love and trust between the children leading up to the act, especially regarding the boys’ feelings for Beverly. She is a mother figure, a sister and their best friend for whom they have the deepest respect. Perhaps King thought it would serve as a metaphor for children losing their innocence after being forced to grow up due to the various traumas each of them has endured. According to a National Post article, King wrote in a 2013 forum post: “I didn’t really think about the sexual aspect. The book was about childhood and adulthood – 1958 and Grown Ups. The adults don’t remember their childhood. None of us remember what we did as children – we think we do, but we don’t remember how it really happened. Intuitively, the Losers knew they had to be together again. The sex act connected childhood and adulthood.” He also noted, “Times have changed since I wrote that scene, and there is more sensitivity to these issues now.”

Still, there’s no way the film adaptation could get away with depicting this scene, at least not without a huge public outcry. Reading about it is one thing, because the brain can fill in the gaps or even water down some of the details. But bringing it to the screen would be a completely different and unnecessary experience.

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