IT

IT movie poster

IT

Believe it or not, the film IT owes a great debt to The Lord of the Rings films. 

Based on Stephen King's voluminous novel of the same name, IT was long believed to be un-filmable. Even at the height of King's popularity in the 1980s, IT was optioned not for theatrical release, but for a television mini-series, thought to be the only medium suitable to its expansive story line.

But then came Lord of the Rings trilogy, which proved no only that audiences would sit through genre movies with running times rivaling art films, but also that they would tolerate stories told in multi-part theatrical releases. Add to that a host of ways digital production and post production has enabled logistically complicated screenplays, and the stage was finally set for an "IT" movie.

But unlike the recent box-office flop The Dark Tower, (adapted from another Stephen King book - one that took direct inspiration from Tolkien's "The Lord Of the Rings"), instead of using that digital technology to throw out endless CGI sequences, IT parses those bits out, building suspense over time. It also doles out the jump scares very rarely - making them much scarier when they do happen.

One example of the interesting and subtle way IT takes advantage of digital technology is the use of high dynamic range (HDR) photography during extended scenes in the sewers, which allows the screen to show more detail than standard film, as the human eye might see, while still keeping the overall look profoundly dark.

IT wisely updates the original setting of the small town 1950s America of King's youth, to the small town 1980s America of King's reader's (and moviegoers) youth. Territory which has already proved fertile ground for a number of TV shows lately, most notably the unabashedly "IT"-inspired Stranger Things. And it gets the dull, tedious, and often violent and degrading life of school kids in the 1980s right in a way rarely seen on the screen (even in... especially in movies from the 1980s).

The bottom line here is that IT is fun, IT is believable, and IT is scary, making IT a