With reviews and praise for the latest adaptation of Stephen King‘s novel ‘It‘ launching it to huge box office success, audiences and fans of the source material are coming to see how ‘It’ is more than a film about a demonic-child-eating clown. Beneath the guise of the supernatural and extra terrestrial, lie the very human experiences of children.
In a video essay by CrackerJacked, an in depth analysis deconstructs the fear of clowns as a point of connection for the varying traumas and emotional damage the Losers Club undergo. Following the two part miniseries from 1990, the video essay goes into detail about how Pennywise the Clown, or It, manifests itself to the children in the story. Each child deals with traumas that, in turn, cause It to make them off as targets, revealing himself at their most vulnerable. Isolated by their individual experiences, the Losers Club is formed in the main connection of trauma and the manifestation of Pennywise.
Though the latest adaptation veers from the 1990 miniseries, the theme of childhood trauma remains the central focus of King’s novel. It is, as the video essay discusses, the pain of their childhood that inflicts the adults they become, returning to traumas simply because it is familiar. King’s strong thematic elements are given further analysis in an essay penned by Sigmund Freud. ‘The Uncanny,’ an essay discussing how the unsettling feeling of things that are both familiar yet distorted, provides a clearer understanding of the individual characters in King’s novel and later cinematic reworkings. What appears familiar and normative for one character, is distorted by the perspectives of others, the uncanny serves as a paradox of what is both attractive and repulsive.
Freud’s Uncanny Valley Effect manifests itself for audiences, and the children in King’s story, in the form of It, a being that is simultaneously disturbing and intriguing. As trauma is layered in complications of explanation, it makes perfect sense that the only term that could be given to the unsettling antagonist of Stephen King’s novel is the ambiguous term: ‘It’.
