It (Tommy Lee Wallace, 1990)

 

We all know and remember very well Andy Muschietti's version of Stephen King's spectacular book, but most of us forget or haven't even seen this 1990 version. The 1990 version of It is much closer to the book than the 2017 version. It takes place in the 50s and then in the 80s instead of the 80s and then now of the 2017 version. It also features the true face of It in the last part of the movie, exactly as Stephen King has written. But beyond those elements, It is also a great movie. It has that innocence of those children painted in great colours. And yes maybe Pennywise the clown might not be Bill Skarsgard, but Tim Curry does an equally magnificent job in embodying one of the greatest villains that we have seen in a fiction story. The 1990 version of It is much more intimate than the 2017 version. It might not have this fancy direction and the spectacular special effects, but it has another, more deep virtue. It talks straight to your heart. You feel the fear of those children really deep in you. You feel the malice of Pennywise incredibly alive around you.

And that is a gift of the movie, that with very few tools it manages to picture and give life to a project that is nothing of any easy task. It is a film that follows you all the years of your life. For me was one of the first horror films that I saw in my life. And there is no doubt that I was scared shitless of it. The clown would go and haunt my dreams. I would literally dream of him. And that is a fact that shows that the movie, had definitely its way of getting inside of you. But it wasn't only the scare that I took with me. It was also the innocence, the dream, the friendship, the love, the emotion, the nostalgia that come with the story. Because It has definitely its way of making you mellow, fragile, ready to break into pieces. And that fight, that battle, that struggle, between evil and innocent is what drives this beauty of a movie. The more you gaze at the characters of the film, the more you love them. The more you feel the characters of the film, the more attached you get with them. I can easily say that these characters were my best friends when I was young... And they still are. My best friends.