The Untold Truth Of Stephen King's It

Stephen King's It has captured imaginations (and scared off pants) since its publication in 1986. The novel's unique structure—jumping between two narratives featuring the same group of protagonists as children and adults, set 27 years apart—gave King a chance to explore the development of his characters and the history of his setting like never before, and its story introduced us to one of the most terrifying villains in all of fiction: the malevolent, shape-shifting extradimensional entity who appears most often in the form of Pennywise, the Dancing Clown.

A 1990 ABC miniseries adaptation starring the great Tim Curry as Pennywise traumatized It readers as well as viewers who'd been reluctant to take on the novel's 1,138-page heft, and 27 years later, a theatrical adaptation surpassed all audience expectations, cleaning up at the box office while becoming one of the most critically acclaimed films of 2017. Since King's masterpiece is enjoying a well-deserved moment in the spotlight, let's take a look at the untold truth of It—in all of its various blood-chilling forms.

The afterword offers further glimpses into the origins of Derry, the quaint little town with a horrifying secret which has since reappeared in several of his works. The town of Bangor, Maine, where King and his family were living at the time the novel was conceived, served as the inspiration for It's setting. The city's very character and sense of troubled history inspired him to portray Derry as something of a character in its own right—and as an extension of his otherworldly villain. 

King remembers walking around town thinking about his novel, but also "asking questions: what happened here? And here? And here? I knew Bangor had been a rough place back in the day... I wanted to know what people remembered. The worst things they remembered." He learned about several tragic, half-forgotten pieces of the city's history—"a fire at a servicemen's nightclub... a Depression-era shootout with some bad boys called the Brady Gang... I also learned about the miles of sewers beneath the city, some of them... long since abandoned." 

He began to incorporate fictionalized versions of some of these stories into his manuscript, giving Derry a violent past in which major tragedies seem to happen every 27 years, always coinciding with a rash of child murders... all destined to be largely forgotten, until the cycle starts again.

It became an instant favorite, with King's fans placing it immediately among his very best work (a position it still holds to this day). ABC immediately optioned the rights, with an eye toward adapting the story into a television project which would eventually become the 1990 miniseries. To begin wrangling the massive tome into a workable script, King turned to a pair of trusted collaborators—the first of which was Lawrence D. "Larry" Cohen, who had penned the screenplay for Brian DePalma's highly successful adaptation of King's novel Carrie.

Speaking with Yahoo! TV, Cohen remembered that he received an inquiry about adapting It before the novel had even been published, and was shocked upon receiving the manuscript. "The Fed Ex delivery guy rang the doorbell, and I opened it to find him struggling with the single largest Fed Ex container I'd ever seen," he recalled. "I took the box from him, and he said, 'Hang on; there's another one.' My initial thought was that they sent me two copies by mistake, but no, inside was the typed manuscript for It — all 1,100 pages." 

Cohen agreed to the job after reading only the first several chapters, and he worked almost totally independent of King, who was very "hands-off" in the process. Director Tommy Lee Wallace, a former John Carpenter protégé, would eventually perform a substantial rewrite on the back half of Cohen's script, which covered the second part of the miniseries. Strangely, Wallace did not read the novel beforehand (though he has since,) and to this day has ever met King.

The 1990 miniseries has gone on to become a favorite in its own right, thanks largely to Curry's nightmare-inducing turn as Pennywise. It was also praised for deftly juggling King's interweaving narratives despite its limited runtime, and strong performances from both its child and adult casts. Unfortunately, two members of that cast—a former child star, and a beloved TV veteran—would meet untimely ends in 2003. 

Jonathan Brandis was a rising young star who'd been acting since the age of six when he was cast as young Bill Denbrough in the miniseries. He would later go on to become a teen heartthrob after being cast in SeaQuest DSV in 1993, at the age of 17. After the series' cancellation in 1996, Brandis struggled to adjust; set to make a comeback in the 2002 Bruce Willis vehicle Hart's War, he was crushed when his scenes were cut from the film. He died by suicide a year later at 27.

Also that year, beloved actor John Ritter—who portrayed the adult Ben Hanscom in the miniseries—became ill on the set of his sitcom 8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter, and was rushed to a hospital directly across the street. It still wasn't quick enough to save him—an undiagnosed heart condition had manifested itself, and Ritter died shortly thereafter of a torn aorta.

The film's long and arduous production had one of its more productive periods when it was being overseen by Cary Fukunaga, the writer/director of the well-received first season of the HBO series True Detective. Fukunaga's original draft of the screenplay (after a substantial rewrite courtesy of Annabelle scribe Gary Dauberman) was used as the basis for the final version, and he had even begun the casting process before exiting the project in 2015 over creative differences with Warner Bros. The film was then handed to Mama director Andrés Muschietti, who started casting from scratch—and many insiders will always wonder what might have been had Fukunaga's original choice for Pennywise remained.

Young actor Will Poulter (Maze Runner) had been cast in the role, and King himself was privy to test footage that had his hair standing on end. Speaking to Yahoo! TV, he said, "I saw a screen test of the guy [Poulter] they were going to cast as the new Pennywise, and he was f—ing fantastic! Even without the makeup, he was going to absolutely kill it. They were very close [to] going into production, and I think it would have been terrific."

It was announced in June 2016 that Muschietti had cast Swedish actor Bill Skarsgård in the role, and fans were treated to creepy teaser images of Skarsgård in costume early the next year. Any misgivings they might have had about the casting were crushed when Skarsgård's performance proved every bit as terrifying as Curry's.

With all the positive attention the new film received, contributing to a wave of nostalgia for the miniseries and renewed appreciation for the novel, one might think that King would do well to consider revisiting Pennywise. It's not like there isn't precedent: the author took 22 years to complete the seven novels in his Dark Tower series (then waited another eight years to write an eighth), and wrote a direct sequel to The Shining, one of his most beloved works, a full 36 years after the original. But unfortunately, King has made it clear to any fans waiting for a return trip to Derry that they're going to be waiting a long, long time.

During a Reddit AMA in June 2013, the author was asked directly if there was any hope of ever getting a sequel to It, and he dashed fans' hopes in short order, saying, "I don't think I could bear to deal with Pennywise again. Too scary, even for me." So if, on some gloomy day, you find yourself walking a little too quickly past a storm drain for fear that you might might spot a grinning, sinister figure holding a red balloon down there, don't feel too bad. The guy that created Pennywise is just as freaked out as the rest of us.