Get ready to hate clowns again.

One of Stephen King’s most chilling villains – the menacing Pennywise – is back to haunt a whole new generation in director Andy Muschietti’s new film adaptation of It, opening Sept. 8.

King’s 1986 bestseller – about a shape-shifting killer clown preying on the kids of Derry, Maine – spawned a TV miniseries that starred an unrecognizable Tim Curry. A feature film had been in development with True Detective director Cary Fukunaga on board to helm the big screen reboot. When that stalled, Muschietti (Mama, 2013) and his sibling producing partner Barbara jumped at the chance to reinterpret King’s masterpiece for moviegoers.

Now we’re getting a whole new incarnation that will terrify audiences, with Bill Skarsgard (Hemlock Grove) as the new Pennywise, whose history of murder and violence dates back for centuries.

The Sun visited the Toronto set of It last summer and spent an afternoon inside Pennywise’s lair – 29 Neibolt Street. An exterior for Neibolt was built in Oshawa, but the interior was a heavily dressed set inside a historic home at 450 Pape Ave.

If everything goes according to plan, the new interpretation of It will be told in two parts, with the first movie focusing on a group of kids (dubbed the Losers) in their battle against the shape-shifting Pennywise.

Jaeden Lieberher (Midnight Special) plays stuttering Bill Denbrough – the de facto leader of the Losers, whose little brother, Georgie, is one of Pennywise’s first victims in the book.

His fellow Losers include Stranger Thing’s Finn Wolfhard’s wisecracking Richie Tozier; Chosen Jacobs’ Mike Hanlon; Sophia Lillis’ Beverly Marsh; Wyatt Oleff’s Stan Uris; Jeremy Ray Taylor’s heavy-set Ben Hanscom; and Jack Dylan Grazer’s hypochondriac Eddie Kaspbrak.

“We’re not going to give too much away, but the Pennywise you see in the movie is a lot different from the one that you see in the pictures,” Wolfhard says.

After watching a pivotal scene being filmed in which the kids make their way through the house on Neibolt, we sat down with producer Barbara Muschietti and the ‘Losers’ to talk about the challenges of adapting Stephen King, why Skarsgard’s Pennywise will give you nightmares and more. Here are all the secrets we learned from the set.

IT REALLY NEEDS TO BE TOLD IN TWO PARTS

“The idea of doing two films came from Cary,” Muschietti says. “This is a novel that’s 1,500 pages, and if there ever was a perfect novel to split up into two movies it’s It because this is the story of the kids when they are 13 and then 27 years later when they are 40. I think it would be a terrible thing not to do a follow-up because it’s not a sequel; it’s the second part of the book. And honestly, it would have been impossible to do justice to the book with just one film.”

IT WAS DESTINY

“We knew they were doing a new interpretation of the book on film,” Muschietti says. “And horror is something that should be honoured; sadly there’s a lot of trash. We don’t talk a lot about elevating horror. So when I heard that things were not going through with Cary (Fukunaga), who we admire a lot, we started our talks with New Line pretty quickly. Not out of disrespect, but we felt that this was destined for us.”

IT WAS DESTINY FOR THE KIDS, TOO

“I keep talking about destiny,” Muschietti says, “but I think these kids were destined to play these roles just like we were destined to work on this movie.”

SPEAKING OF THE KIDS, THEY DON’T SCARE EASILY

“I used to be scared of scary movies, but now, maybe because I know what goes into them, I can watch them,” Wolfhard says. “Jack and I watched Mama on my computer. We thought we’d be hiding under the covers, but then we remembered Andy directed it and we work with him every day, so it was OK. But, there are a lot of creepy characters – women and men – that are going to scare people.”

“The thing about Pennywise is, when you look at him at first he doesn’t seem that scary,” Lieberher says. “But there’s going to be a lot of things that are going to freak people out. For example, this house we’re sitting in.”

THE NEW PENNYWISE IS A DIFFERENT BREED

“Andy and I read the book and we didn’t see the TV version with Tim Curry until much, much later. So for us, our imagining of Pennywise was different,” Muschietti says. “It wasn’t the Tim Curry version, which was fantastic and super scary. But to us, Pennywise was a different character.

“I think our interpretation presents a vaster creature. It’s not, ‘OK, here’s this scary clown.’ The way we’re doing it is much more dangerous. Also, we get a hint of what Pennywise’s Achilles’ heel is. I don’t like supervillains, or superheroes that are completely infallible because that’s very boring. You want to feel that there’s something to crack. Also it’s good to understand how Pennywise happens. There will be more of that in the sequel.”

IT’S JUST THE TIP OF THE ICEBERG

If the Muschiettis get their way, It will just be the first of several Stephen King-related projects to make it to the screen. The siblings own the rights to King’s sci-fi horror short The Jaunt, which was first published in 1981.

But they really want to tackle a big-screen redo of 1983’s Pet Sematary.

“We’re huge fans of Pet Sematary,” Muschietti says. “If we can get our hands on that and do the Pet Sematary we want to do, that will be something. One day, maybe.”

ADAPTING KING WASN’T HARD

It took three screenwriters – Chase Palmer, Cary Fukunaga and Gary Dauberman – to craft a vision for bringing part one of King’s sprawling 1,500 page novel to the big screen. But Muschietti says the task wasn’t that difficult.

“In the case of It, the story is so rich and the mythology is so huge that we had to leave certain elements out of it,” she says. “There are some things we had to omit and those will live forever in the book. But we had no interest in adapting a Stephen King book just for its title. We are true fans of his work.”

CGI VS. PRACTICAL EFFECTS

The scene we saw being shot inside the house on Neibolt was dressed with tremendous attention to detail. Fake spider webs lined the staircase. Vines and dead leaves were plastered to the wall and ceiling. A paint-peeling room in which a very eerie scene was being shot featured three doors with the words, “Not scary,” “Very scary” and “Scary” painted in red.

So not surprisingly, It will feature very little in the way of CGI.

“Neither my brother, nor I, nor the other producers, nor New Line are fans of CGI,” Muschietti says. “CG is used as a support tool in every circumstance; never as an element standing on its own. In every film, in this day and age, there is some CG, but we will use it as little as possible.”

A NEW WAY TO SCARE

The new It isn’t going to rely on jump scares to frighten people. They’re going to make the audience feel that the characters are in peril as they go up against an evil beyond their control. “You can scare an audience best if you give them something to lose,” Muschietti says. “If they are attached to those characters – and they will be – when you put those characters in peril, the fear is ripe for the taking.”

Twitter: @markhdaniell

Mdaniell@postmedia.com