The latest Stephen King adaptation’s success has more to do with the friendship it celebrates than the scares it delivers.
An R-rated film about a demonic shape-shifter that satisfies its appetite for children by taking on the guise of a clown just became Hollywood’s highest grossing horror debut.
Hauling in over $123 million on its opening weekend, Andy Muschietti’s adaptation of Stephen King’s sprawling novel It—one of numerous recent King adaptations—proves yet again that contemporary literature’s most recognizable purveyor of the macabre is also one of Hollywood’s most bankable storytellers.
Ironically, if you tend to put a lot of stock in review aggregator sites like Rotten Tomatoes, this scary movie seems to be a very safe bet. Apparently, the widespread fear of clowns hasn’t quelled the enthusiasm of audiences around the nation. Since plenty of Christians consider the horror genre to be anything but safe, though, some initial questions are in order.
When it comes to horror films, the question “Is it scary?” often precedes the traditional “Is it good?” Of course, many seasoned horror buffs will balk at that distinction and simply conflate the two: A good horror film is a scary horror film. The reason that movies like Insidious and The Conjuring keep spawning sequels and spinoffs is because they continue to make our flesh creep.
Press a little deeper, though, and you quickly find that horror isn’t such a simple category after all. Even those who strenuously avoid the genre’s darkened corridors on general principle will recognize a world of difference between M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense and the Saw franchise. For better or for worse, fear is clearly not horror’s only calling card, and while it’s true that plenty of horror fans are lured ...
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