Are You Ready to It Your Pants?

This It has big shoes to fill—bigger that normal clown shoes, even—as the 1990 television miniseries adaptation by Tommy Lee Wallace is iconic to all of us who lived through Tim Curry’s razor-toothed depiction of Pennywise the clown. From the looks of it, Muschietti’s It seems simultaneously more ferocious (thanks to 26-year-old Bill Skarsgård’s fast-moving Pennywise) and less gritty than its predecessor. On the latter point, the ‘90s TV-movie murkiness has been replaced with contemporary sharpness. And yet the little bit of the update we’ve been allowed to see so far still feels pointedly nostalgic, like a particularly bleak episode of Stranger Things.

I’m interested, but not scared yet. Other people on the Jezebel staff are alternately terrified and giggling after having watched this trailer. Regardless, given all the scary clowns that have popped up in the news (and White House) in the past year, this It feels eerily relevant.