I remember when Pennywise first came to me to talk to me about proper financial planning. This malevolent clown, with his barracuda teeth, eyes like hell’s cinders, grinning at me like I was bait and asking me why I’d not yet opened a Lifetime Isa.
“I have a day-to-day lifestyle,” I said. “It’s expensive in this town.”
“Oh sure.” The clown looked at me with a withering concern that suggested I was yet again the last to know, the last to find out. “You think there’ll still be a state pension by the time you retire?”
“I’ll start soon enough.”
“You’re already more than a third of the way through your working life.” He unpacked this with a weary concern, more in sadness than annoyance.
“None of my friends have one,” I rebutted.
“Oh, your friends …’ He placed an unwelcome emphasis on the word, rolling his eyes. “Have you seen your friends?”
“Pennywise,” I thought. “When did you get so terrifying?”
I was a bit too young to just rent the original IT mini-series and so it became a form of contraband in my childhood. To get a glimpse at my age, you had to be a bad kid with bad parents, or you had to have satellite TV. Neither of these options were open to me.
Back then, kids like me looked at age-restricting film certificates as helpful notifiers of how amazing something would be – and we saw it as our sacred duty to dredge up the hardest tack of violence (probably Universal Soldier), or sex (definitely Basic Instinct) we could find. Horror too: Nightmare on Elm Street had sleepover currency, but Stephen King’s IT was possibly even purer-grade child-smack.
And I couldn’t get it. Instead, I had to rely for a while on the accounts of a series of kids called Jason who’d relay each scene in school quadrangles in a series of breathless “and then …” updates.
Listening to them, it was obvious they had been changed by IT. Their voices gruffer, the 20-yard stares a little bit more contemplative, they’d moved up a notch or three in the pecking order.
And then one day the VHS turned up in the hands of a friend. IT was one of those things you start playing and soon realise you need to stop – you’re in over your head – but can’t turn off ... for fear that the free-floating evil will then be decanted into your house forever. Years later, I had much the same feeling the first time I channel-surfed to Kourtney and Kim Take Miami.
It’s brimful of details that stay with you: the riptide of dread underneath the paper boat floating down the river; the sense of shame in the loss of a favourite brother to clown attack. The kids called Jason are still right right: IT is the kind of film that can single-handedly peel back the onion of innocence. Adults are lying to you about the safety of the world, IT says. And maybe, also: the adults themselves are far more fallible and much less wholesome than they’ve always made out.
Once upon a time, the clown that stalked my nightmares was more of the child-haunting kind, the proper locus of coulrophobia, ageless, undead and wielding a butcher’s knife – a creature that loomed out of wardrobes, poked from behind curtains, and generally terrorised via the imagination, which is how most satanic clowns get in. And stay in.
Fear is an excellent evolutionary mechanism. It prevents small children from being hoovered-up by snakes or turned into coyote takeaway by inserting a wide mist of generalised terror into their imaginations – their IT is about the infinite and unbounded.
But, somewhere along the line, these fears are replaced by new terrors. At the kernel of these new fears is the irritating sense that they are solvable – if only you were a slightly better, more useful person. There’s the fear of being under-promoted; or under-popular; the fear that someone, somewhere, is living the life you were intended for. That’s the Pennywise who haunts my dreams now. He’s easy-going and likeable, he owns a suit that fits, he reads at least four classic novels a year, and deals with his relationship issues by kind yet direct assertion of his feelings, rather than by making a stream of glib yet pointed gags.
As the years have gone by, Pennywise has become less a locus of disquiet in my life. Of course, I still refuse to build anything on an ancient Native American burial ground. And if six of my childhood friends ever write to me advising “IT’s happening again,” I simply message back: “Nu house, hu diss?”
Decades have passed, yet there’s something in Stephen King’s story and the new film that still rings true even now as I lie in bed, waiting for the beasties. It’s the same watermarked sense that just under the adult world there lies a bottomless pit of chaos and barely contained malevolence – that, deep down, the whole system is built on lies.
Whether that’s worrying about the fate of the Korean Peninsula, the lemming-like blind inertia of financial markets, or just the curious difficulty of getting a Gas Safe certificate posted to you – despite having phoned them up three times and spoken to three different people, two of whom who swore blind it was in the next mail – in a way, it’s the same bubbling-seething cinder-eyed terror-clown chewing on my adult toes with his serrated teeth.
