Coming back to Moose Jaw one time from Regina, my girlfriend at the time and I got a message from her friend – would we be interested in seeing the film adaptation of the Stephen King novel It that night with her and her husband
We’d talked about seeing a movie that night anyway so we decided to join them, with silly me not knowing much about he movie other than it was supposed to be a scary clown movie.
But had I thought about it more clearly, I’d have realized that a simple scary clown movie isn’t exactly what King does. You’ll find that in almost all of his stories in the horror genre, there are aspects of fear, bullying and many forms of childhood trauma that kids find scary at the best of times, let alone with a murderous, supernatural clown in the picture.
Because I didn’t have a bad or traumatic childhood, I can better compartmentalize the bad things that can happen in frightening movies as something that happens on the screen and not in real life.
The scenes of abuse, implied and otherwise, on the character of Beverly at the hands of her father brought up far too much for my friend though. The trauma was back in mind far too quickly.
The movie was one that stuck with me, and was directed well by the first-time director Andy Muschietti. But it didn’t make me relive anything in particular. I just have no desire to visit a small town in the United States in the late 1980s.
I’ve wondered about this as I’ve continued to watch the genre with little to no effect on my dreams, nightmares or wandering thoughts. The effect on her was a palpable, paralyzing fear.
That’s not what I got into the stories for. I was reading King from a relatively young age – although for a few reasons, my parents would have stopped me from reading It or Salem’s Lot. The horror was an escape from the mundane for me.
For some of the women I’ve either been friends with or dated, frightening movies are a no-go. They don’t watch them alone as I do. I watched The Conjuring 2 Monday night and had little to no issues falling asleep, but I understand those who may have grown up in a house with creaks and groans may find it more than a bit of a shock.
For me, the one genre I can’t watch alone is the traditional romantic comedy. We’ve all been that guy or the girl in the hopeless situation, we’ve all done the inspired monologue… except we haven’t all had the happy ending that the films portray. I’ll never watch them alone. I’ll either keep thinking about real life situations portrayed in the films as either totally unrelatable or I’ll remember a time very similar in my own life where it didn’t quite end up in the happy Julia Roberts-random handsome single guy filmed version.
I’ll take the ending of Notting Hill or My Best Friends Wedding as totally unrealistic applications of various relationship beginnings and endings, but Pennywise the Dancing Clown? Let me see another movie with that please.
They’re both forms of escapism for a couple of hours, both the suspenseful, supernatural genre and the romantic comedy. They both happen, for some people, to bring up unpleasant or traumatic memories for a part of their audience.
What the genres need is someone to mash up the two ideas so that perhaps the plots can be true to their individual lineage. The plot goes thus: a woman is about to hit the age of (insert age where biologicial clock ticks loudly). A distant relative in her hometown dies and wills her an old house that she has to live in to get the full inheritance.
While moving there, she runs into an old single high school crush who wears a lot of denim and looks like a young Paul Newman with a stylish cowboy hat pointed at just the right angle. As frightening things happen in the old creaky house, she draws closer to her crush. But hold on! Just as things get to their worst in the house, her crush’s ex-wife comes back into the picture with a hundred apologies and they get back together.
It’s hopeless! They’ll never get together and the house is about to kill her. But just as the house implodes into the pits of hell, Cowboy Paul Newman rises up on his horse and saves her. “It was you all along,” he says as they ride into the sunset, the house’s old well gurgling menacingly in the background.
On second thought, nah. Never the twain shall meet.
