Like so many kids corrupted by Stephen King's strange brain, I read It at an entirely inappropriate age-- young enough to be worried about clowns coming out the gutter and kidnapping me on my way home from piano lessons. But I never really bothered with the movie version, given that it was unbelievably cheesy even by mid-90s standards, and a giant spider is usually scarier in your imagination anyway.
But now that special effects have moved beyond Ray Harryhausen-style beasts, Warner Bros. is giving It another go, picking screenwriter Dave Kajganich to adapt the massive novel. The Variety article doesn't get in to exactly how they'll deal with a book that opens with the murder of a child, and also manages to feature a group of 12-year-olds having sex with one another. The first TV movie left out a lot of the grisly stuff, of course, but you have to assume a feature version would include a lot more, and have more leeway to appeal to the diehard fans.
I'm not really certain I want to see a movie that keeps the explicit stuff, given that I'm not sure I can handle some parts of that book that I apparently loved as a kid. But some of the themes in It are so fascinating, and King's movies have made some great films in the past, so there's a lot of potential here beyond the icky parts. If my 12-year-old self could handle it, I supposed I can suck it up now that I'm a grown-up wimp.
