IT (2017) has proven to be a refresher in the western horror genre.
It's still the number one film at the box office, approaching its third week in theaters.
So far it's garnered over $200 million and broken various all time records.
Considering the film’s success, it's safe to say that Part 2 will be in the works soon.
And speaking of Part 2s, welcome back to Darkology.
This video is part of a 3 part miniseries where I’ll be talking about the different
scare scenes in the new 2017 IT film adaptation and just what fears they explore.
Last week, we explored scares with Mike, Stan, and Ben.
This time, we talk about Eddie, Bev, and Richie.
As usual, spoilers ahead.
By the time we see Eddie first encounter IT, the film has already established that he’s
rather paranoid of germs and disease.
He’s always seen carrying a fanny pack rattling with pills and has reminder alarms set on
his watch for when to take them.
This results in IT manifesting itself to him as a leper.
In the scene, Eddie’s walking home alone, past the abandoned house on Neibolt street.
The focus on the house makes it feel as if it's watching him.
His alarm simultaneously goes off and he pulls out his pills.
The front door opens and something growls from inside.
A voice gurgles, “Eddie, what are you looking for?”.
Unsettled, he begins to walk away and clumsily drops his medicine.
As he frantically starts collecting his pills from the ground, a dirty hand in gauze picks
one of them up.
A person dressed in tattered clothes with no nose and a twisted, pulsating face of boils
and rot has crept up in front of him.
It asks “do you think this will help me, Eddie?”
We've all had moments where we've turned around or looked up to be caught off guard, finding
someone hovering unexpectedly closer than what we’re comfortable with.
Perhaps it was a friend trying to get a laugh out of a good jump scare, or perhaps they
just walked up extremely quietly without our notice.
The unexpected invasion of personal space is instinctively perceived as a threat.
Eddie falls backwards and in a moment of fight or flight, he crawls away whimpering as the
leper shambles towards him coughing and weezing.
Clawing at the space between them, the leper starts yelling violently.
The spectacle of a corpse-like being is already pretty horrifying, but the fact that it knows
your name is even worse.
And there’s something unsettling about a spectre asking a question.
Like when the ominous ghost in a story says “help me”.
Despite getting back on his feet, Eddie is so frightened that he falls over again.
When he turns around, the leper has disappeared and a strange clown is standing in its place.
Pennywise again addresses Eddie by name, asking where he’s going.
It taunts him with cryptic words of floating, laughing maniacally- only to vanish.
So what fears does Eddie represent here?
Eddie represents the fear of contracting a specific disease, something known as nosophobia-
“nosos” in this case being Greek for “disease”.
Eddie is what some might call a hypochondriac- but what does that mean exactly?
In the DSM-V this condition has been updated to “somatic symptom disorder” or “SSD”
and “illness anxiety disorder” or “IAD” which are similar but do have slight differences:
SSD is when someone is actually experiencing physical pain or fatigue and it causes extreme
anxiety that interferes with their daily life.
In this case, they’re not faking their symptoms, but no medical cause related to their anxiety
can be found.
An example of this might be someone thinking the pain from a toothache is a sign of an
impending heart attack.
With IAD, the person is overly concerned with having or getting a serious disease, but they’re
not actually experiencing any physical symptoms.
An example of this would be someone hearing the sound of their own digestive system and
believing that they have a disease, when really, they’re perfectly healthy.
It’s an often unrealistic fear, but may seem uncontrollable to the person experiencing
it.
In both cases, the extreme anxiety and fear generally makes it difficult to function in
everyday life.
And in both cases, the potential causes include family history and upbringing- something made
apparent in scenes with Eddie’s protective mother.
From what we see in the film, it’s more likely that Eddie suffers from illness anxiety
disorder.
And throughout the film, this is shown to a rather comedic effect.
The serious illness or death of a family member
can lead to the development of hypochondria, and in the book, Eddie’s father died of
cancer- leading his mother to become so overprotective that she lies about his health to manipulate
him.
If Eddie had access to the internet, he’d also likely suffer from cyberchondria, which
is basically when we review online search results for symptoms and our concerns get
even worse.
I’m looking at you, Web MD.
He displays subtle signs of OCD, though since he mostly focuses on disease, hypochondria
is a more accurate diagnosis.
While I wouldn’t go as far as to say he’s agoraphobic, Eddie is mildly paranoid about
the world around him.
He finds comfort in taking his meds and relies on taking his inhaler in moments of stress-
even though they’re placebos, which he later humorously misquotes as “gazebos”.
IT appearing in the form of a sick, corpse-like entity already plays on his fear of disease.
But the way it also shapeshifts into something logically impossible might make one question
their own sanity, especially someone with Eddie’s tendencies.
Seeing the leper suddenly turn into a creepy clown might have come off as a terrifying
hallucination.
And in this case, it’s difficult to imagine which scenario is scarier: is there a shapeshifting
monster living nearby, or has my mind betrayed me?
Before Bev’s first encounter with IT, the film establishes that she has a tense relationship
with her father.
When she comes home, she’s cautious hopeful that she doesn’t alert him to her presence.
He swoops in close, invading her personal space and it’s clear from the way she looks
down and becomes submissive when he caresses her hair that a past experience has made her
afraid of him.
Like Eddie’s mom, Bev’s dad is psychologically manipulative- but in a very different way.
This scene makes use of body language to convey a subtext not spoken verbally.
This is something known as kinesics.
When we look at the kinesics of the situation, the scared and pensive expression on Bev’s
face speaks volumes in contrast to the deep unbroken stare coming from her father, who
has just blocked her way.
Then we have proxemics: the matter of space between Bev and her father and what it means.
The physical distance between two individuals can speak volumes about the relationship between
them.
In the scene, Bev’s father is standing rather close to her, implying an asserted dominance.
But then he leans in even closer and pulls her in to smell her hair, and instead of backing
away, she just stands there, waiting for him to let her go.
This implies she’s been taught that running or fighting makes things worse for her.
Finally we have haptics: how the use of touch conveys a message.
The uncomfortable way her father caresses his daughter’s hair in tandem with the kinesics
and proxemics of the situation speak volumes about his innermost and darkest desires.
Despite not moving, Bev becomes teary-eyed.
With a hand on her cheek, he dismisses her, making her walk around him instead of moving
out of the way.
In the next scene, she cuts off her hair angry and crying.
It’s subtle, but we have enough information to suspect she’s a victim of sexual abuse.
Many victims of sexual abuse change the way they dress or cut off their hair because they
don’t want to welcome or invite unwanted attention.
Her father’s caress makes her hair an object of desire.
Her appearance is one of the few things in the situation she can control.
It’s not something often thought of in depth, but hair alone can be a sexual preference-
from color to cut, it can drastically change a person’s appearance.
In muslim culture, hijabs are worn to hide beauty, as beauty is something only experienced
at home and with a partner.
In contrast, western culture tends to dress for society.
Skip to a few scenes later and she’s found a poem from a secret admirer in her bag.
She locks herself in the bathroom to read it in peace.
And after reading it, she warmly smiles contemplating who it could be from.
In this private space with the love note, she’s comfortable and happy in the darker
space of her dad’s apartment.
Then a voice from the sink whispers her name.
The voice becomes several voices and she gets up to investigate.
Looking down the pipe, she asks, “who are you?”
IT whispers back, Veronica, Betty Ripsom, and Patrick Hockstetter- all kids who have
gone missing.
She extends a measuring tape down the drain, only to pull back a stringy wad of bloody
hair.
She looks at it in disgust when it suddenly latches on to her wrist.
More strands of hair extend out of the sink and coil around her.
Horrified, she starts screaming as the hair starts to pull her in while she resists.
She even screams for her father at this point, when a fountain of blood bursts from the drain,
blasting into Bev’s face and cascading onto every corner of the bathroom.
It lets her go and she backs into the corner crying.
Her father finally comes into the room and inquires.
Catatonic and stuttering, she realizes that he can’t see the fresh blood painting the
walls.
Instead, he squats down and says that her new hair makes her look like a boy.
After he leaves, she starts crying again, realizing she’s alone.
This scene is effectively frightening because it plays on several fears.
For one, it distorts reality.
You can’t even trust your sink in a room where you’re most vulnerable.
Then there’s erotophobia: the fear of sexual love or sexual abuse.
The way the hairs in the sink try to pull her in is invasive like the abuse she’s
suffered from her father.
Blood resembles a loss of innocence.
Earlier in the film, she’s seen awkwardly buying tampons.
She even tries to hide the tampons from her father, as if to not remind him of her budding
sexuality.
She’s scared of her own sexual maturity because of what it means when she comes home.
And IT knows that.
So what does IT do?
It sprays blood everywhere- effectively telling her, she can’t escape it.
The blood flying out is a symbol for the loss of her innocence.
This scene also plays on nostophobia: the fear of returning home.
The opposite of nostalgia, nostophobia can stem from a violent past or home life.
Growing up, parents are supposed to be the ones you can trust most of all.
They’re supposed to take care of you.
And what’s truly unsettling about this cornered feeling of powerlessness and hopelessness
is that, unlike extra dimensional clowns or ghastly apparitions, abuse is something that
happens everyday in the real world.
The darkness of this scene is thankfully lifted when Bev finds support from her friends, who
also see the blood and help her clean it up.
Richie is the last member of The Losers Club to encounter IT in the film; a scene that
takes place in the company of the other kids.
The words “denial” and “abnegation” are used to describe a psychological defense
mechanism presented by psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud.
It’s when a person is faced with a fact that is too uncomfortable to accept, and so
they reject it instead in spite of overwhelming evidence.
In Richie’s case, the fact that his friends all attest to seeing IT doesn’t seem to
convince him and he even makes jokes out of their paranoia.
However when they start detailing their experiences, he admits that he’s afraid of clowns.
His humor for the situation turns to horror when IT manifests in Bill’s projector later
that day.
As they all start to panic, his reality is shattered and he starts screaming, “WHAT
THE FUCK IS THAT?”
When Bill immediately proposes they go to where IT lives, Richie’s denial evolves
into minimisation- when someone admits the fact, but denies its seriousness.
Along with the other kids who are too afraid, Richie rationalizes that it's summer and they
should be outside having fun, not going into a creepy abandoned house.
When he inevitably finds himself exploring the Neibolt house, he comes across a missing
poster with his face and information on it.
He starts to panic.
Asking his friends if he’s gonna go missing.
He’s soon lured into an antique room full of objects covered in dust sheets and panics
when the door slams shut.
He turns around as the lights start to flicker, realizing that the dust sheets have disappeared
and in their place stand a collection of statues decorated into his personal fear- clowns.
He turns away again, only to find another clown statue blocking the door.
He shrieks in terror as the sound of a pacing heartbeat takes over.
He cautiously taps one of the statues and when it doesn’t move, he calms down some-
the pace of the heartbeat slowing down.
The coffin at the end of the room swings open and written on the inside in red is the word
“found”, alluding to the missing poster he found earlier.
As Richie slowly approaches the coffin, one of the clown statues out of his line of sight
slowly turns its head in his direction.
This plays on a combination of fears.
Coulrophobia is the fear of clowns, while pediophobia is the fear of dolls.
They both play on the concept of the uncanny valley- that something isn’t right about
them- as if there’s more going on beneath the surface.
Objects like statues, dolls, puppets, mannequins, animatronics- basically anything resembling
a living person- they’re all creepy.
Despite being perfectly inanimate, it always seems as if something is watching back from
those cold dead eyes.
As if something is moving while you’re not looking.
In the coffin, Richie finds a dummy version of himself, eyes completely blank and maggots
crawling in its cheeks.
Is he seeing a bad omen for what’s to come?
He slams it shut and like a jack-in-the-box, Pennywise pops out screaming.
Richie backs away in fright, eyes wide open as Pennywise closes in rapidly with his hands
outstretched, ready to strangle.
So why is Richie afraid of clowns?
The fear of clowns plays on a deep-seated primal instinct- pattern recognition.
Clowns are similar enough to humans with two eyes, a nose, and a mouth.
Where they differ is how extreme some of these features can become and how in this realm
of confusion, it’s difficult to gauge what expressions are genuine.
This instinctual reaction, this dip in our liking to something almost human but not quite
right- where we perceive something wrong about a clown, or a mannequin, or a CGI-rendered
human- that is the uncanny valley.
This negative reaction is especially true for clowns or beings that consistently exhibit
the same disposition- there’s something not quite human about it.
Now this isn’t to say that Richie or any of the other members of The Losers Club have
coulrophobia.
They’re clearly able to fight back against it, especially together.
But these dips in pattern recognition to the uncanny valley- they’re something that affects
us all on an instinctual level-
and IT being a creature that feeds on fear, must realize that it’s in the form of a
clown, that it will best break down the barriers of mental wellbeing…
...and draw out true fear.
Did you like that video?
If you did, be sure to leave a
like and comment below which member of The Losers Club you relate to the most.