No doubt about it, Stephen King’s 1,000-plus page tome IT is something of a literary classic. It may be a horror book, but like much of his work, its strengths are deeply rooted in the characters he delves into. Rather than solely work with a horrific concept, King tends to put character first before throwing them through a meat grinder of awful. Yet, although IT stands as perhaps one of his best works, that’s not to say it’s perfect.
If you were like me, as you made your way through the novel, you were generally on board for everything that happened, and then about seven-eighths of the way through, you reached a very specific italicized passage. In this passage, the boys all proceed to take turns having sex with the sole female of the group, Beverly Marsh. That’s right. The book depicts a bunch of 11-year-olds having sex. Bleh.
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Obviously, they won’t be portraying that in the film, right? Director Andy Muschietti discussed it in his interview with Collider, saying:
“Well, I think the whole story is a bit of a— approaches the theme of growing up, and the group sex episode in the book is a bit of a metaphor of the end of childhood and into adulthood. And I don’t think it was really needed in the movie, apart that it was very hard to allow us to shoot an orgy in the movie so, I didn’t think it was necessary because the story itself is a bit of a journey, and it illustrates that. And in the end, the replacement for it is the scene with the blood oath, where everyone sort of says goodbye. Spoiler. The blood oath scene is there and it’s the last time they see each other as a group. It’s unspoken. And they don’t know it, but it’s a bit of a foreboding that this is the last time, and being together was a bit of a necessity to beat the monster. Now that the monster recedes, they don’t need to be together. And also because their childhood is ending, and their adulthood is starting. And that’s the bittersweet moment of that sequence.”
At the end of the day, the whole point of that was for the kids to transition from childhood to adulthood, as Muschietti pointed out. I think you’re able to get that across in more than one way. All in all, avoiding an underaged orgy at all costs is probably a good choice for the studio and filmmaker to make. What’s important is that the overall theme is retained, and based on everything we’ve heard from Muschietti in the past, it sounds like he at least understand the core of the story.
Stephen King’s IT hits theaters on September 8, 2017.
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SOURCE: Collider
