Who Is Andres Muschietti?
Warner Bros. seemed to achieve quite a coup when they hired True Detective producer Cary Fukunaga to direct. But the project ran aground when Fukunaga left citing creative differences. “I was trying to do an elevated horror film with actual characters,” he told Variety. “[The studio] didn’t want any characters. They wanted archetypes and scares. They wanted me to make a much more inoffensive, conventional script. But I don’t think you can do proper Stephen King and make it inoffensive.” An inoffensive script that sent a brilliant man like Fukunaga walking? It seemed like IT was doomed to be dreadful if it happened at all. This is where Argentine filmmaker Andres Muschietti came into play. Muschietti’s three minute short horror film Mama impressed the legendary Guillermo Del Toro enough that Del Toro gave it the big screen treatment in 2013. With IT now in production, Muschietti is using his Instagram account to tantalizing effect. He is clearly passionate about the subject matter and focused on doing it grim, grisly justice.
We All Float Down Here
Casting for the remake of IT has been handled masterfully. Pennywise’s prey are represented by some young actors with decent reputations. These include Finn Wolfhard (Supernatural, The 100), Jaeden Lieberherr (St. Vincent’s), and Owen Teague (Bloodline). But without the perfect Pennywise any production of IT is doomed to failure before it starts. Tim Curry left some particularly immense clown shoes to fill, but a new Pennywise has emerged in the form of Bill Skarsgard. Having cut his teeth – no pun intended – playing the brutal-yet-sympathetic vampire Roman on Netflix’s Hemlock Grove, Skarsgard has more than earned his horror street cred. Like Muschietti, the actor, who has already donned the Pennywise makeup in chilling publicity shots, takes Stephen King’s eldritch creation quite seriously. Speaking to Entertainment Weekly Skarsgard said:
“It’s such an extreme character. Inhumane. It’s beyond even a sociopath, because he’s not even human. He’s not even a clown. I’m playing just one of the beings It creates… It truly enjoys the shape of the clown Pennywise, and enjoys the game and the hunt. What’s funny to this evil entity might not be funny to everyone else. But he thinks it’s funny”
What Pennywise thinks is most funny is terrorizing and brutally murdering children: a touchy topic in films. But in the years since Mama – a movie in which young sisters are tormented by an undead matriarch – horror has been seen through the eyes of children in stark, pull-no-punches horror franchises like Insidious and Sinister. IT is very much the granddaddy of this genre of horror and is set to emerge at a time when horror fans understand that what makes a monster scary is not how many fangs or tentacles it sprouts, but how helpless and small we feel when identifying with the protagonist facing it. With so many horror filmmakers keenly understanding this core concept, it is very much the time for Pennywise to emerge from the sewers beneath Derry once again.
Just like he always intended and just like he always has.
