Bill Skarsgard has made Pennywise from Stephen King’s It his own in a way that is respectful to Tim Curry’s portrayal in the TV mini-series almost 30 years ago and terrifying in new ways that expand from King’s book. While he’s hinted at some of his hopes for the sequel in the past, including the Pennywise flashback scene that was reportedly too “disturbing” for the first film, an interview with IGN lays out some of his hopes for how the second film could look into Pennywise’s origins.
Where the first film deals with the childhood story of The Losers’ Club and the type of horrors that would keep a child up at night, the sequel will face off with the adult Losers and Skarsgard is expecting the film to be different in terms of the type of horror it presents and the Pennywise that inhabits it:
The first movie worked so well at what it is trying to do, I think, and ultimately that is the kids’ story, and you follow these kids and you sort of fall in love with these kids. And the second one will be the adult story. And I think the right way to do it is to make that movie actively different. … I think there might be worth exploring sort of the psychological aspects of horror, but also maybe the sort of cosmological existence of this being. What is he, and where does he come from?
As he goes on to explain, the original novel explains that Pennywise or It is this evil being from another dimension that has found a way into Derry early its history to feed on the fear of the town. While The Dark Tower implications will be absent from the film — along with the giant spider, hopefully — the novel leaves plenty of room for interpretation for how Pennywise comes to be and the surreal nature of its mind:
It’s hardly answered in the novel, either. I mean, it’s very abstract. And I kind of like that. It could be almost a sort of surrealistic sort of psychedelic trip if you go into the mind of Pennywise. And if you’ve read the novel you know that they do actually go into his mind. Or they go into this trans-dimensional place, and they sort of beat him in this place. Which might be interesting, what that place would be, and what would it look like. There’s opportunities, I think, and I’m excited for it.
Cosmic horror would be an interesting thing to see tackled on the screen through the monster that is Pennywise. With the success of the first film, the sequel has some room to take a few risks with its presentation of It in its true form. That said, there’s plenty of time for the filmmakers to work this out while fans nitpick what comes next.
(Via IGN)
