Stan Uris is probably the most underutilized character in both movie adaptations of It,
but in the novel, there’s a lot more to help us understand his character.
Stick around to the end of this video to find out why.
Today’s lesson is sponsored by Infertility TV.
Hello, welcome, welcome.
You may be seated.
They say it’s the quiet ones you have to watch out for and Stephen King’s It definitely
embraces that concept with characters like Patrick Hockstetter and Stan “the man”
Uris.
My name is Rabbi CZsWorld and today on Horror History we’re going to Sunday School, but
we may not be keeping it Kosher.
[Horror History]
Stan is one of the seven Loser’s Club members who battle against It, the creature looming
in the sewers of Derry, Maine.
Like most of his friends, he grows up to be quite successful, but despite his best efforts,
he and his wife are never able to have a baby.
So for this episode I’m partnering with Infertility TV - the YouTube channel dedicated
to helping you beat infertility.
Each week, Infertility TV uploads a new video with science-based tips from a board certified
fertility expert to help you and your partner maximize your chances for getting pregnant.
So if you or someone you know is having trouble like Stan did, click the link in the description
to subscribe to Infertility TV today -- it’s like having a fertility specialist in your
phone.
Donald Uris and Andrea Bertoli married young, in their early 20s and in 1946 they would
give birth to their only son and name him Stanley.
Stan had a Jewish upbringing, but unlike the 2017 movie adaptation of It where Stan is
the son of a Rabbi, the Uris’s aren’t particularly orthodox, they don’t keep Kosher
and don’t attend the synagogue very often.
But that doesn’t stop the bullies in town from picking on him because of his religion.
When Stan was 8, Henry washed his face with snow until it bled and Stan was crying hysterically.
Each member of the Losers Club was picked on by Henry Bowers because they had something
about them that made them different, but these differences are also what made them gel as
a group.
However -- Stan is a bit of different case.
Bowers may have singled him out due to his religious beliefs, but I think what makes
him a part of the Losers Club is his introverted personality.
This even comes across in the way the book is written.
Throughout the novel, each of the other 6 Losers Club members have moments where they
are retelling their own story, but Stan keeps everything to himself, we only learn more
about his story later on from the perspective of his wife.
He tends to keep things to himself, which I see as him taking on a huge load of emotional
stress and never really releasing it by opening up to his friends about it.
For this reason, he develops some of his own coping mechanisms, that are apparent throughout
his story.
There are many coping mechanisms recognized by psychologists, and we can use them to follow
Stan’s breakdown from healthy to unhealthy ways of dealing with his trauma.
Stan has a close relationship with his father, who shared his own passion of birdwatching
with his son.
Together, they would often go to Memorial Park to watch birds.
This was a great spot because the War Memorial statue in this park had once been damaged
in a storm and replaced with a birdbath for budgetary reasons.
Donald gave his son a gift to help him identify some of the bird species.
It was a book called MK Handy’s Guide to North American Birds.
Stan treasured this book and often brought it with him whenever he went out.
One day, Stan went to Memorial Park to go birdwatching.
On this occasion his father did not accompany him.
He heard a loud noise come from the Standpipe, the big water storage structure -- a landmark
of Derry.
The Standpipe used to be a popular location, there was a walkway near the top that families
would frequent to look out over the town and a walkway over the water known as The Gallery.
In 1930, some kids fell from the Gallery into the water during the night, and had nothing
to hold onto and no way to climb out.
They were found drowned the next morning, and the town council locked up the Standpipe
and did away with letting families visit.
That’s why Stan found it strange that the noise he had heard at the Standpipe’s base
looked to be a padlocked door that had been blown off.
He looked inside to see a narrow set of stairs in the dark and he could hear carnival music
echoing off the metallic walls.
He took one step inside.
The music got louder and more horrifying as squishy footsteps approached him.
Stan, a man of logic, called out to the footsteps, asking who was there.
A voice replied to him and said, “the dead ones.”
He realized that the door, which has seemed to be destroyed, was now locked shut behind
him and he was trapped.
They told him, “you’ll float too”.
The footsteps continued to approach, and Stan’s only coping mechanism is to hold out his bird
book and scream out the names of as many bird species as he could think of.
The door behind him opened with a scream and he fell back onto the outside grass, but before
he ran, he saw the purplish black jeans, small orange pom-poms and a white gloved hand beckoning
him in the dark, along with the kids who drowned in the Standpipe.
So in this instance, Stan is faced with would I would consider to be maybe the scariest
thing that any of the Losers Club members ever encountered, and he turns to the first coping mechanism,
escape.
By focusing on his passion, Birdwatching, he takes himself out of the moment, he basically
redirects his fear of It, making him a less attractive target, and also possibly hurting
It.
In June of 1958, his friend Richie Tozier brought him along to help the Losers Club
build a dam in the Barrens, and they all immediately became friends.
Stan and Ben discover that they had the same class together in 2nd grade, but Stan was
so quiet back then, he never said anything.
They end up getting in trouble for building the dam with a cop named Mr. Nell, since it
caused issues with the water systems in town.
Each one of the boys stepped forward to admit some responsibility until Stan was the only
one left, and then he too claimed to be in on it.
This is a small detail, but may be an early clue towards Stan’s reluctance to be in
on any of the Club’s conflicts.
He’s peer pressured again when they make the promise at the end of that summer.
Later that June, when some of the other kids go to see the werewolf movie, Stan has to
stay home and do chores all weekend because he destroyed a window while playing flying-saucer
with a plate -- to which I have to say, that sounds 100% worth it!
So Stan is basically grounded for a couple weeks and he shows back up around the time
that Beverly is telling the boys her story about her encounter with it: the bloody bathroom
sink in her apartment.
It was Stan’s idea for all of them to go back and clean things up, and after doing
so they bring the bloody rags to the laundromat to clean them, where Stan also offers his
50 cents to run the machines.
During this time, Ben tells of some of the other boys’ encounters with It, but Stan
is reluctant to talk about his.
He would eventually tell the story about what happened at the Standpipe, but tells the others
he believed it was a dream.
This is the next coping mechanism: denial, and it’s one that he uses more often than
any of the others, because he didn’t want to believe that they were in danger, and by
going into denial, he felt he didn’t have to accept it.
When Eddie suggests they go to the police, Stan is the most realistic about their situation.
“Right,” Stan said.
“Dead kids in the Standpipe.
Blood that only kids can see, not grownups.
Clowns walking on the Canal.
Balloons that blow against the wind.
Mummies.
Lepers under porches.
Chief Borton’ll laugh his bum off . . . and then stick us in the loony bin.”
This is Stan trying to distance himself from the group, not because he doesn’t love them,
but because he is the most afraid of It out of any of them, and he doesn’t know how
to properly deal with these emotions.
But the following month, he’d be forced to come to terms with the situation when he
experiences something so terrifying that hits an absolute breaking point.
On July 3rd, 1958, Stan and the other members of the Losers Club came to the aid of Mike
Hanlon by fighting off Henry Bowers and his thugs in the apocalyptic rock fight.
As Stan saw everyone gathering rocks, he had to press his lips together in order to have
the courage to stay and fight.
Stan ended up helping in the barrage of rocks that knocked Henry to the floor by nailing
him in the shin.
When Henry had been driven away, Stan invited him to shoot off firecrackers with them, and
Mike ended up joining the club, becoming the 7th and final member.
After this quarrel, the Losers create their own clubhouse in order to hide out from Henry
when necessary.
Mike tells his new friends about his encounter with one of the forms of It, a giant bird
that had attacked him at the remains of the old ironworks, and based on the description
of the bird, Stan thinks it’s a species that’s only been known to exist in South
America, causing him to go pale, especially when Mike tells about how big it was.
Stan is also the one to suggest that now that Mike has shared the story with them, they’d
all be able to see it, which may have been key in their eventual battle with the bird
form in the sewers of Derry.
Stan and Beverly go into town to get the hinges needed to complete their clubhouse’s door,
and after the construction is complete, on July 6th, Mike brought his father’s photo
album to the Barrens to show his friends.
The album had been used to document some historical photographs from Derry’s history, and was
filled with subtle appearances by Pennywise.
They land of one photo of Derry that comes to life, and Pennywise dances and flips around
the page.
Then he runs up to a lamppost in the foreground and speaks directly to the losers.
The plastic slot that the photo is cased in bulges out towards them as Pennywise cycles
through many of his forms, including the dead boys that Stan had seen in the Standpipe.
Remember, Stan had been finding ways to suppress his fear of it until this point, telling himself
each episode was a dream or hallucination, and he tries to do the same thing here.
He goes into a manic episode, snatches up the book and slams it shut, then holds it
closed on the ground while yelling the word “no” over and over.
The others force him to admit that he saw the same thing they all saw, another example
of his subjection to peer pressure, but when he finally does agree that what he saw was
real, he is able to smile and crack a joke about Bill’s stutter, because sharing his
fear with his friends is the healthy response that Stan should have been using all along.
Humor is also one of the coping mechanisms considered to be an adaptive mechanism; a
healthy response.
Bill, however, still senses some hysteria in Stan, which tells me that he still has
some demons locked away.
The Losers decide to conduct a smoke hole ceremony, which is Indian ritual where they
would sit around in a smoke hole and breath in the fumes until they had a vision that
was supposed to help them.
Someone had to stay up top to pull out whoever passed out, and Richie thought that Eddie
or Stan would be quick volunteers.
“Eddie said nothing.
Stan stood pale and thoughtful and silent.”
However, when the smoky air started to get heavy, Stan was the first one to climb out
of the clubhouse, perhaps a foreshadowing of him being unable to deal with the pressure
when It comes back in 1985, where he is also the first one out.
Closer to the end of that month, after Eddie's arm is broken by Henry Bowers and his friends,
Stan joins the others in visiting Eddie in the hospital, and Stan signs his cast across
Eddie’s wrist.
Not sure if that’s a sign of things to come for Stan, or just coincidence.
Stan was also there when the Losers investigated Beverly’s claims of having seen It kill
one of the bullies, Patrick Hockstetter.
When they arrive, they discover a note left by Pennywise in blood that reads, “Stop
now before I kill you all.
A word to the wise from your friend Pennywise.”
So I got a digital copy of the book, and looking at it on the screen like this makes
it look very much like it was written by a fourth grader in MS Paint.
But anyway, this sends Bill into a frenzy of anger and crying, and Stan has to grab
him by the arm to prevent him from hurting himself.
This is where they all silently agree to help Bill avenge his little brother.
On July 23rd, the Losers go to Bill’s house to make silver slugs that Beverly would later
shoot out of the slingshot at Pennywise.
To fool Bill’s parents, they act like they are playing Monopoly, and Stan, who would
later become a rich accountant, was the winner.
Two days later, on July 25th, the seven of them turned up at 29 Neibolt Street to confront
Pennywise.
Stan brought with his North American Birds guide in case he needed to protect himself
like he did before.
They come across a corridor where the wallpaper animates in a horrifying way and the room
shrinks in on them, causing Stan to cover his eyes and scream.
Bill punches up through where the ceiling appears to be to prove the room is not as
it seems and prove to the Losers that if they don’t believe in It’s manipulations, it
can’t hurt them.
Stan, however, argues that someone like him wouldn’t have been able to do that, Bill
was only able to because he was fighting for his brother, but Bill reminds him that he
already has, he did the same thing at the Standpipe.
Richie asks him if he’s a man or if he’s a mouse, to which Stan says “I must be a
man, so far as I know, mice don’t shit their pants.”
Stan once again uses humor to diffuse the situation and doing so actually physically
deters It, Ben has the feeling that the house is literally pulling away from them as they
laugh.
After the fight with Pennywise in the bathroom, where Beverly drives it back down into the
sewers with the slingshot, Stan cracks yet another joke, but the happy times only last
so long with the final confrontation of the summer looming in the near future.
Two weeks go by before the day arrives, the day that seven children in Maine join hands
to make a promise, a promise that would get two of them killed 27 years later.
It starts innocently enough.
Stan is out in town getting popsicles with Richie Tozier and Eddie Kaspbrak, and the
three boys are having a discussion about how Stan doesn’t keep Kosher.
They end up running into Bill, then Mike, before crossing paths with a panting Beverly
Marsh and Ben Hanscom.
They were being chased by the bullies, apparently Henry Bowers had snapped and was now doing
It’s bidding.
It was time for their big showdown with the show clown, and Ben led them to the pumping
station where the seven of them would climb down into the sewers, all while being chased
by Bowers and company.
Because they were being followed, Stan, who was the most afraid of It out of everybody,
was once again forced to stay with the group and he was hitting new levels of anxiety.
While traveling through one of the pipes, something splashes nearby, and Stan screams
and bursts into tears.
They light a match and discover it’s the dead body of Patrick Hockstetter, which It
had dragged into the sewers to feast on.
As they navigated, each one of the kids realized the sewer smell was being replaced by the
smell of their own fears, and for Stan, that was an awful memory from his early childhood.
“It smelled like clay mixed with oil and made him think of an eyeless, mouthless demon
called the Golem, a clay man that renegade Jews were supposed to have raised in the Middle
Ages.”
Horror movie fans may remember one of the very first horror films ever made, the 1920
German Expressionism picture titled The Golem.
Stan simply could not deal with being this uncomfortable, terrified, wet, lost, and filthy.
The group is attacked by It, this time in the form of a giant eyeball with tentacles.
Then, they reach an area that somehow resembles a cathedral and light seems to be coming from
out of the walls.
This is where the giant bird Mike had seen makes a return at dives at them.
Stan, the bird spotter, was literally the first to spot it.
It swoops in and scratches Eddie, ripping his shirt in doing so.
Mike took his buck knife and cut the bird’s talons as it came in to attack Eddie again,
and in retaliation, the bird left a long cut on Mike’s arm.
He dropped the knife and it disappeared into the dark.
The bird came back for them, and now Eddie and Mike were defenseless.
This is where Stan had his bravest moment.
He steps forward in front of his friends and screams out, proclaiming his belief in several
different bird species that he knows from his book, despite the fact that he’s never
personally seen them.
But then he calls out, “But I don’t believe in you, so get the heck out of here!”
With that, the bird disappeared into the dark, allowing them to continue onto the spider’s
lair.
When Stan first saw the spider, he shrieked like a baby, but when Bill engaged in the
metaphysical battle with It, Stan understood that the Ritual of Chud had begun.
After Bill had driven It away, he sensed a feeling of doubt on Stan’s face, unsure
that they had really finished it off for good.
After making it out of the sewers alive, Bill asks the others to make a promise.
Stan finds a discarded Coke bottle and smashes it open on a rock, and uses the shards to
cut each of their palms so that they can initiate a blood oath.
Stan makes a joke about cutting his wrists instead, a definite foreshadowing of his eventual
death.
The seven make the pact, that if it should ever return they would come back to defeat
it once more.
In the years that followed, the Losers would one by one leave Derry.
Stan was a very good student, and secured a scholarship to New York State University.
One night he went along with a friend to attend a sorority party at another school, and it
was there where he was introduced to Patricia Blum and the two quickly fell in love.
By Spring, the two were engaged at the age of 22.
Stan’s parents criticized his marriage, despite the fact that they, too, had married
extremely young.
Patty is working to get a job as a teacher, and Stan recommends that she apply for this
job in Atlanta.
She gets it, and although the pay is not good, the Urises move from New York to Georgia.
In August of 1972, Stan and Patty were married.
L'CHIAM!
Stan starts by getting a job driving a bakery truck for $100 per week, but in November he
got a job at a tax preparation company called H&R Block where he would make $150.
This doesn’t sound like much, but when that figure is adjusted for inflation to 2019,
it comes out at over $900.
Their combined income was over $17,000 a year, or roughly over $100,000 in 2019.
In 1973, they decided to say good-bye to the birth control pills to try to start a family,
but no baby came during the next two years.
Then in 1975, Stanley quit his job to start his own accounting firm.
In 1979, Stan and Patty moved to a suburb called Traynor, where a company called Corridor
Video… no, not them, that’s Corridor Digital…
Corridor Video actually dealt with literal videotapes, merch link in description, they
moved onto a piece of land nearby and turned into a huge client for Stan and eventually
earned him a full-time position at the company, making $30,000 a year, but more importantly
putting Stan in contact with some of the richest and most powerful men in Atlanta, who I can
only imagine are Ted Turner, Hank Aaron, Jeff Foxworthy and the magician.
As their income continued to grow, they focused more of their attention on trying to have
kids and went to visit a fertility specialist in Atlanta who told them there were no physical
problems preventing them from conceiving.
By 1983, Stan was making six figures, which when adjusted for inflation is equal to over
a quarter of a million dollars a year in 2019.
Okay, that’s enough math here in the Horror History classroom, the point is that Stan
was finally making the kind of money that Bill teased him about during that Monopoly
game, and other than their unexplained infertility, Stan had a very happy and comfortable life.
That all changed in an instant on the evening of May 28th, 1985.
There were only two members of the Losers Club who didn’t block Derry and the killing
spree that occurred there from Fall 1957 through the end of the Summer in 1958 from their memories.
The first was Mike Hanlon, and that’s only because he never left town.
The other was Stanley Uris.
Perhaps Stan took on so much emotional damage having gone up against the dead boys in the
Standpipe, the image of the clown in the photo album, the giant bird in the sewers and the
interdimensional spider in the sanctum, that he was simply unable to let his guard down
in the 27 years that followed.
Two weeks before the call that changed everything, Stan had discovered that his old childhood
pal Bill Denbrough was a very successful author, and Stan’s wife had begun reading one of
his books.
When Stan picks up the phone on May 28th, he’s also able to remember his old buddy
Mike Hanlon, but he almost immediately goes quiet, which I see as the realization that
there could only be one reason that Mike was calling.
It had returned.
Over the course of this lesson, I’ve discussed a variety of Stan’s coping mechanisms.
There are positive ones, known as adaptive coping mechanisms, these include support,
like when Stan’s friends are there for him and they talk about the issue; or humor, like
when Stan makes a joke to diffuse tension.
Then there are maladaptive coping mechanisms, the negative ones; like escape, when Stan
takes his mind to another place, such as his birds; or numbing, like when he tries to drown
out the horrors happening around him.
But there’s one maladaptive mechanism that Stan seemingly has not tried yet: Self Harm.
At 7PM, Stan decides to take a bath.
After some time behind the locked door, Stan was unresponsive, so Patty found the spare
keys and unlocked the door to find she was already too late.
The word IT was written on the side of the bathtub in Stan’s blood.
Stan was intelligent, but often quiet and out of his group of friends, he had the most
trouble learning to deal with the terrors that they encountered in the summer of 1958
at the hands of Pennywise.
For these reasons, the trauma he endured stuck with him in his adult years in a way that
none of the others would relate to and ultimately it ended up being his downfall.
That concludes today’s lesson on Stan Uris.
This has been another episode of Horror History.
Your homework is to let me know in the comments who I should analyse next episode and click
the playlist on the left to see Infertility TV’s analysis on how Black Widow, from the
Avengers could have gotten pregnant.
Remember to subscribe to CZsWorld for new horrors every week, RING that deathbell for
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Assuming we both survive.