IT

One of the most challenging parts of any Stephen King adaptation is walking that fine line between childhood fears and adult terror. It is a perfect example: how do you take images meant to be frightening to 12 and 13-year-olds and adjust them for an adult audience? This is the formula that King has used to make him one of the most successful authors of all time, but stepping outside of the characters’ heads  —  and behind a movie camera  —  only ramps up the challenge of balancing tone just right. That’s why it’s been so heartening to hear It director Andy Muschietti say all the right things in pre-release interviews. For better or worse, it sounds like he really gets it.

There’s something up with Stephen King — rather, his house, which looks to have been taken over by a certain sinister clown. It’s a little tough to notice at first, but if you look very closely, it appears the master of horror literature has put a red balloon up in one of the front windows of his gorgeous home in Bangor, Maine to celebrate the impending release of It.

If the early buzz is to be believed, fans couldn’t get any more excited for the upcoming adaptation of Stephen King’s It. Not only does the film have one of the most-watched movie trailers of all time, and is also projected to make over $60 million in its opening weekend, it’s also coming into theaters riding a wave of impressive reviews. And somehow, the movie has done all of this without tipping its hand on some of the most impressive scares. All of this for an R-rated horror movie about children being jeopardized. We’ve come a long way since the original miniseries, America.

Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of The Dark Tower isn’t that it failed to live up to expectations decades in the making, or even that it mangled Stephen King’s source material in a way that die-hard fans found unforgivable. No, the most frustrating aspect of The Dark Tower is that it’s just… fine. Despite the plethora of negative reviews, it isn’t some disastrous flop a movie, nor is it an ambitious mess that reached for the stars and came crashing back to earth. It’s just sorta there, a Young Adult action-fantasy film that limps through its paces before ending with a thud. Really, how do you even make a King adaptation that doesn’t have a little bit of ambition?

The Alamo Drafthouse is holding a clown-only screening of the new Stephen King film. Tthat doesn’t sound scary, right? What’s the worst that could happen?

Here are 25 must-see movies heading to theaters this fall.

The corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street is a Los Angeles icon, once the heart of the city’s booming film production and now the nexus of the world-renowned Hollywood Walk of Fame. Usually, the most frightening thing a person will experience at the intersection is an encounter with improv comics attempting to strong-arm you into attending their latest show, but a new horror will soon dawn in the area. Locals now have bigger things to worry about than spending the day sad after accidentally overhearing an actor speaking to their agent on the phone.

Something fishy is going on with the two Stephen King movies coming out this year. At least, their runtimes aren’t exactly what you’d expect. It was recently revealed that The Dark Tower clocks in at a lean 95 minutes long, and now we’re hearing that Andres Muschietti’s It is considerably longer than two hours: approximately 135 minutes.

From an androgynous angel hellbent on revenge to the self-loathing mother of a sociopath, a despicable dictator, the CEO of a pharmachemical corporation and pretty much everything in between — there’s almost literally nothing that Tilda Swinton cannot do. So when the filmmakers behind IT revealed that they gave serious thought to casting one of the most chameleonic and creatively-minded actors of our time in the role of a sinister supernatural clown, it wasn’t exactly surprising.

Just yesterday, we noted the release of a new trailer for the upcoming re-adaptation of Stephen King’s seminal killer-clown novel It. Things seemed pretty normal, at first brush: terrified kids, children’s entertainer straight out of your worst nightmares, eerie red balloon, the whole nine yards. But sharp-eyed viewers have now noted a little Easter egg squirreled away for a split-second in one shot near the end of the trailer. Don’t blink or you’ll miss it, “it” referring in this instance to “IT.”