Here, It appears to him as a naked woman in a tub who attempts to seduce him by saying, “You’re going to be a man soon, won’t you? I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.” When the woman rises, he sees that she’s covered in sores and missing chunks of flesh - it’s pretty much exactly like that scene in The Shining. And it’s also tied to his fears of growing up and his burgeoning sexuality.

Stan’s encounter with It is wildly different and takes place in his temple’s mikveh, where women bathe to purify themselves after menstruation. And when the kids are discussing how It manifested their fears, Beverly actually says, “‘IT’ showered me in blood because I just got my period.” Not subtle! Beverly’s mom explains her period in these unpleasant terms: “When it happens, once every 27 days, you’ll bleed, and you’ll bleed the most right before the end.” (Surely there’s a less traumatic way of relaying that information?) Recall that It resurfaces every 27 years. In the Fukunaga-Palmer script, there are repeated references to menstruation designed to make the metaphor abundantly clear. The moment underlines another aspect of It’s power: the ability to make the citizens of Derry look past the very awful things happening right before their eyes.īeverly’s fear of becoming a woman is subtext in the Muschietti film. The most unsettling part of the Silver Dollar Saloon scene? The patrons Claude doesn’t kill scarcely notice his spree, even when a decapitated head lands near a drunk’s foot. While the scene would have significantly upped the gore, it’s also notable for making clear that It has the power to make people do very bad things similarly, the Black Spot flashback implies that It spurred the already hateful Legion of Decency to commit mass murder. As in the novel, Claude Heroux slaughters everyone around him with an axe, driven to madness by Pennywise. Later on, we get an exceedingly blood-soaked flashback to the Silver Dollar Saloon in 1879. That’s not all we see of Derry’s violent past in Fukunaga and Palmer's telling. “This town is like poison,” Leroy concludes.

Leroy and Dick barely make it out, and come face to face with Pennywise, dragging away the corpses. (The script doesn’t mention this, but book readers know that this is Dick Hallorann, whom you might remember from The Shining.) It’s not long before the Legion of Decency, Derry’s version of the Ku Klux Klan, barricades the doors and sets the club ablaze, killing nearly everyone inside. A 13-year-old Leroy has snuck into the club with his friend Dick.

Here’s a look at the It that could have been: a darker, nastier, and likely less commercial affair.Īs he’s dying of cancer in the Fukunaga-Palmer script, Mike’s father, Leroy, recounts the awful night the Black Spot was burned down - and we see it all. said the creative team was unable to comment due to scheduling.) BuzzFeed News has obtained a copy of the original Fukunaga-Palmer script, which is vastly different from what ended up onscreen. While it’s not a conventional horror film, it’s undeniably more accessible than the version Fukunaga envisioned. 8 has proved to be a massive success, earning record-breaking box office numbers and raves from critics. Despite the ill omen of production turmoil, the film that finally arrived in theaters on Sept. It didn't fit into the algorithm of what they knew they could spend and make money back on based on not offending their standard genre audience.”Īfter a brief period of uncertainty, It moved forward that July with a new director, Andy Muschietti, and a script rewritten by Gary Dauberman. But Fukunaga exited the project in May 2015 over creative differences, later saying, “I was trying to make an unconventional horror film. Cary Fukunaga was first attached to direct in 2012, with a script he cowrote with Chase Palmer. For a while, it seemed like It was never going to see the light of day: Warner Bros.’ adaptation of the epic Stephen King novel had been plagued by false starts over eight years of development.

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