There is a lot more than a scary clown going on in Stephen King’s fictional town of Derry. This was made explicit in the HBO series “Welcome to Derry,” but it’s evident here too. There’s so much going on that even with an ensemble of characters it’s impossible to get your arms all the way around the evil that has infested. You can’t focus on the whole town, something that makes for more problems with the sequel. It was a smart move to change the structure of the book and focus entirely on the kids for this half. Besides, that’s where all the good stuff happens.
While the film is overstuffed with evil, nothing comes close to the terror of Pennywise the Dancing Clown. That’s partly because he’s not really a clown, which allows him to frequently do impossible things to extract that tasty, tasty fear, and partly because the filmmakers hit the jackpot in casting Bill Skarsgård. For many of Pennywise’s moments he doesn’t even speak, and often is more effects than man, but Skarsgård incorporated this lip droop that ties the makeup and the terror together, and he gets one of the all time great introductory scenes, starting the film off with a terrifying presence in every word, drool and dead-eyed stare.
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