Cary Fukunaga, the man responsible for directing the brilliant first season of True Detective, recently announced he has dropped out of directing a new film adaptation of Stephen King’s 1986 horror novel, IT, claiming creative differences with the studio, New Line, were to blame for him abandoning his two-film adaptation. “I was trying to make an unconventional horror film … They didn’t want any characters. They wanted archetypes and scares,’’ he told Variety.



This isn’t the first time writers or directors have been signed to adapt King’s novel only to quit. Warner Bros was first to try and fail, hiring David Kajganich, a screenwriter whose credits include mediocre horror movies such as Joel Schumacher’s Blood Creek. This might look like a case of disaster averted, but Cary Fukunaga’s exit is a real blow. The director has both the talent and the appreciation of the source material to make a decent fist of adapting what is arguably Stephen King’s greatest work.



This leaves fans of King’s novel with a single completed screen adaptation – the disappointing 1990 TV movie, whose one memorable feature was Tim Curry’s gleefully sadistic turn as IT’s default personification, Pennywise the Clown. The novel is an often disturbing, often funny and always epic work. The TV movie is none of these things.

Clocking in at 1,138 pages, IT is genuinely vast. King takes us into the fictional town of Derry, Maine, flitting between 1957/58 and 1985, where a group of friends known by the town’s bullies as The Losers Club, face IT, a shape-shifting evil able to take the form of whatever each child most fears. These forms include a clown, a Doberman Pinscher and in one case, a girl’s father. In the summer of 1958 the children confront and kill IT, or so they think. In 1985, when they have all become adults they must return to Derry to kill IT once and for all.



That is the novel’s basic plot, butthe novel also contains intricately detailed backstories of each member of The Losers Club, from details of racist abuse Mike Hanlon’s father experienced in the US army, to Stan Uris’s wife’s awkward backseat fumbles in a car park at her senior prom before she even met Stan.

We learn at length about Derry in 1905 when it was a lumber town and, unbeknownst to citizens, IT was present and dangerous in various forms. By the end we know everything about Derry, its inhabitants, its geography, even its sewer system. Most importantly we learn about IT, and how this mystical evil figure has shaped Derry and those living there.

IT is a terrifying read. Tapping into his uncanny ability to write from the point of view of children, King details their friendships, insecurities and above all, their fears. In describing the forms IT takes to embody each child’s greatest fear, King creates some harrowing scenes. For example, Eddie’s encounter with a leper/hobo at the cellar window of 29 Neibolt Street: “That was when the face appeared … its forehead was split open, white bone coated with a membrane of yellow mucusy stuff, peered through like the lens of a bleary searchlight. The nose was a bridge of raw gristle above two red flaring channels. One eye was a gleeful blue.”

In theory some of IT’s incarnations sound more horrific than others. The thought of Eddie’s leper chills me far more than the idea of Mike’s encounter with a giant bird that “looked like Rodan” at the abandoned Kitchener Ironworks. But King is so adept at describing each character’s terror that he can write about inanimate objects and scare us, as he did when he wrote Christine, the tale of an evil 1958 Plymouth Fury car.



For all these reasons, there is no doubt IT is a difficult novel to adapt. Perhaps the only way to do it justice would be through a long episodic series, where everything from the novel could be included and fans would not feel cheated. However, this does not appear to be on the cards so, at the very least, a film adaptation needs to capture the spirit and terror within the novel.

New Line wants a film with jump scares and other typical multiplex horror cliches, but the terror of IT has nothing to do with cheap shocks. Many of the novel’s most unnerving passages do not take place at night in haunted houses, or have screaming cheerleaders chased by knife-wielding boogeymen. The death of Patrick Hockstetter in the town dump, Beverly’s encounter with a witch at her childhood home, Ben seeing a mummy drifting towards him on the frozen Derry canal – all these unforgettable moments take place during the day in a town so painstakingly evoked that we feel like citizens ourselves.



IT may lack the tightly-bound supernatural gothic sensibilities of The Shining or the utterly bleak horror and family tragedy of Pet Sematary, but it is a novel so rich, so layered and so grand that I return to it time and again. I hope that when a film does finally get made, a team of people who love the novel will be at the helm. If done properly IT could be that rarity – a truly frightening and epic horror film.