Pennywise: The Story of IT review

Hello everyone and welcome to my blog. For those who know me you know about my love for horror films so once a month I’m going to review and discuss a scary flick. We’ll look at the classics, some new films, and I want your suggestions on what I should review. I’ll do my best to cover all the different genres within the genre – slashers, ghosts, monsters, etc. 

SPOILER ALERT! – These will be reviews so if you haven’t seen the movie you’ll want to watch it first before you read this. Let’s do this.

PENNYWISE: THE STORY OF IT

I love documentaries. I love to make them, and I especially love ones about scary movies! This is a really in-depth look at the 1990 miniseries IT that I certainly hope you either saw then or have seen since. Stephen King wrote his 1000+ page book in 1986, which is excellent by the way – you just need two cross country flights to read 60% of it. So, a miniseries as an adaptation? On ABC? Well, it worked. It’s really become an iconic work and this doc was something I think fans really wanted.

I probably saw IT for the first time on SyFy a long time ago and really liked it. It played there periodically for years but has been available on DVD, etc. This doc really gets into everything. How did they cast Pennywise? Why are people scared of clowns?? At 2 hours it’s divided up into chapters which is nice. We’ve got interviews with just about everyone you’d want to hear from sans King himself – although we do see a clip of him at the very beginning talking about his inspiration to write the book. The 2 hours cruises by as we get to hear about the cast, the story idea, production and more. I actually never knew that Tommy Lee Wallace directed this! He’s a longtime collaborator with John Carpenter. For those that love production you’ll really like the info in this. How they shot some of the picture book scenes, the sewers, and the spider. Yeah, the spider. That has been an issue with everyone who has seen the miniseries. It’s lame, it’s not scary but hey, it was cool to hear about in this doc. Interesting to see the production teams thoughts on night 1 vs. night 2. Great to see a lot of rare on set videos and photos too.

I know that in the last few years the new IT parts 1 & 2 have been released as separate movies, but this miniseries was great. I will note that in the late 90’s ABC also tried a miniseries version of The Shining. No comment. IT was a huge success, however. I’m a big Pet Sematary fan and the production team that created Unearthed and Untold: The Path to Pet Sematary documentary was also behind this so I was all in. Honestly, I found this by accident but sure glad I did! Give it a watch Georgie!!!

 Enjoy the trailer - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czdap4pM0kg