As the numbered balloons on director Andy Muschietti’s Instagram have warned us, we’re just two days away from the first trailer for It. We’re looking forward to seeing this version of villain Pennywise the Clown in action, and creepy new photos released today reminded us of the nightmares we’ll be having as a result.
Image: Brooke Palmer © 2016 WARNER BROS. ENTERTAINMENT INC. AND RATPAC-DUNE ENTERTAINMENT LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Here we see the Losers Club — including Stranger Things‘ Finn Wolfhard as Richie Tozier, and Midnight Special‘s Jaeden Lieberher as Bill Denbrough — looking at slides, maybe in the scene where the kids recognise Pennywise’s multi-generational legacy in the town of Derry for the first time. (Whatever they’re looking at, it ain’t happy.) Eddie Kaspbrak (played by Jack Dylan Grazer), whose asthma inhaler becomes an important plot element, is the only kid missing from this scene.
Photo: Warner Bros
Then we get another look at Pennywise (Bill Skarsgård) holding his favourite party favour. Muschietti told USA Today that the film’s approach to the horror icon was informed by a quick but memorable descriptor in Stephen King’s source material:
Another small part of King’s 1,138-page tome gave rise to the director’s vision for Pennywise, in which Bill wonders if this monster is eating children because that’s what we’re told monsters do.
“It’s a tiny bit of information, but that sticks with you so much,” Muschietti says. “Maybe it is real as long as children believe in it. And in a way, Pennywise’s character is motivated by survival. In order to be alive in the imagination of children, he has to keep killing.”
(Note: King has already seen the movie and he loved it.)
It isn’t the best look we’ve gotten at Pennywise so far, but still… eeeeek.
Photo: Warner Bros
We all float down here!
Finally, another piece of Pennywise, which hints at just how freaky this movie is going to look:
Photo: Warner Bros
We’ll know even more, of course, when the trailer appears later this week. As scary-movie fiends already know, It is actually a two-part film. The first part of the saga opens in the US September 8; then, there’ll be a second film that follows the structure of King’s novel by catching up with the (variously traumatised) Losers Club 30 years later, when they’re drawn back to Derry to fight you-know-who again.