IT

Summer, 1989: In the small US town of Derry in Maine, children are disappearing and being found murdered and mutilated (partly eaten). This also happened to Bill’s brother Georgie, who was sailing his paper boat in a gutter on a rainy day. When he was found, one of his arms had been torn out. Little by little, the previously nameless horror reveals itself to a group of children, all of them outsiders who have banded together as the “The Losers’ Club” – not least of all to be able to counter the bullying by Henry Bowers and his gang of thugs. Together they endeavor to chase out the creature that frequently – but not only – appears as the clown Pennywise. And they also know where It lives: deep under the town, in the labyrinthine canals of Derry. Stephen King’s novel “It”, published in 1986 with over a thousand pages, is the massif of its overabundant oeuvre, in which essentially all of the author’s leitmotifs intersect: a dark development novel meets incisive social criticism and juicy horror inserts. “Mama” director Andrés Muschietti is responsible for the new film version of the mammoth work and shifted the plot of the novel from the fifties to the eighties. “It” is a house built of fears, a ghost-train ride and a nostalgic portrait of youth, but in any case one of the best horror films of the year.