Alicia Del Re | Contributor
Featured Image: The perception of clowns has changed drastically over the years. | Courtesy of CinemaBlend
On September 8, the latest movie adaptation of Stephen King’s novel IT was released in theatres, and made $123.1 million on its opening weekend at the box-office, which broke countless records.
IT is not your typical horror movie—here, we find a mixture of vivid art with pure disaster, and fantasy with nightmare. King is a well-praised master of the horror genre, and director Andrés Muschietti shows astounding expertise at turning IT into a film that shows us King’s beautifully twisted imagination.
The film follows seven children and their misadventures with a terrorizing eponymous being—known as Pennywise. As it progresses, the group faces their personal demons and fears that Pennywise creates. Although it is a horror film, IT still streamlines the themes of coming-of-age, mortality, and death. The audience witnesses how the children lose their innocence once they encounter the clown, becoming more mature in the process.
The box-office hit is not only popular due to King’s extravagant storytelling skills, but also because of the “clown culture” that has been on the rise since last year. This is a trend where people wear clown costumes and scare people in the middle of the night with weapons. News outlets and social media followed this trend that became a global phenomenon.
Now, with the release of the film, people are dressing up as the sinister villain, Pennywise, and attending screenings.
The perception of clowns has changed drastically over the years, upsetting the perception originally intended for clowns—a symbol of joy and innocence, not fear. Parents would often rent party clowns for their children’s birthday parties, as it was entertaining to see a person with a colorful wig, white-painted face, red lips, and a big red nose blowing up balloons and turning them into animal shapes.
Nowadays, clowns are viewed as ugly, weird, and creepy, because of certain stories and movies that show them in such a light. Thanks to this, several young children are now petrified of clowns.
Movies like IT are “bad publicity for clowns across the board. It kills business, it really does,” said Alan Sloggett, who has been performing as a clown for 30 years with his characters Hot Stuff the Clown and Dotto the Clown.
Medina Torlak, a third-year Criminology student at York, says: “IT was terrifying, yet also unexpectedly funny. The clown should be feared, yet there’s a humorous touch to him as well, most so when he utters ‘these gazebos are bullshit,’ playing as a comic relief—but clowns are still jarringly scary for me.
“Even before I watched IT, I have always been terrified of them. There’s something eerie about the general nature of clowns, especially when you see old pictures of what they used to look like—they resemble something out of a nightmare.”
IT is a movie that will keep your eyes glued to the screen from start to finish. You’ll be sitting at the edge of your seat, jittering as you hold on to see what will happen next.
