It: Chapter 2 has finally pranced into theaters, bringing the long, bloody saga of the Losers
Club to a close.
But we're not leaving the circus just yet.
With a nearly three-hour runtime and a thousand page book to reference, there were bound to
be plenty of Easter eggs in It: Chapter 2.
Here are the ones you might have missed.
It: Chapter 2 had a lot of catching up to do.
While the first film focused exclusively on the kids, this one had the dual job of both
introducing the adult versions of the Losers and making you believe that they really could
be those children all grown up.
When we're introduced to adult Ben Hanscom, we see a board room with a bunch of men arguing
over the model of a building.
After the camera slides over the room, it finally focuses on one man.
It's Ben!
Except...it's not.
Ben, as portrayed by Jay Ryan, is on a Skype call with everybody in that room.
But it's a double fake-out, because that first guy was Ben all grown up.
Confused?
See, that actor was Brandon Crane, who played Ben Hanscom in the 1990 miniseries.
In a story all about childhood, loss of childhood, and facing the fears of your childhood, giving
an actor the chance to play both a child and an adult in an adaptation of It is basically
poetry.
Speaking of cameos, there was a special one that fans of Stephen King probably noticed,
but which might have flown over the heads of casual viewers.
No, not the one where director Andy Muschietti appeared in the background when Eddie visits
the Derry pharmacy.
We're talking, of course, about King himself.
The horror auteur showed up as the owner of Secondhand Rose, the thrift store where Bill
finds Silver, his childhood bike.
Like King's portrayal in the film, the proprietor in the novel is kind of a jerk.
"Sonny!
Come on over here, sugar buns."
But that's not the end.
In the film, the shopkeeper has a copy of Bill's book Attic Room on his desk.
After Bill notices the book, King repeats what everyone else says about Bill's books:
he doesn't like the ending.
It's a joke that's overused in the movie, but hearing the criticism coming from King
himself is a pretty great nod to the fact that a whole lot of readers don't like the
endings of King's books.
Because let's face it: they're not always great.
One character the films leave out entirely is Maturin, an ancient intergalactic turtle
that sort of helps the Losers defeat It during round one of their face-off.
In the climactic scene in the kids' timeline, Bill performs the Ritual of Chud with Pennywise
and ends up soaring through a cosmic realm beyond space and time, at which point he encounters
a big ol' turtle.
Maturin comes from the same dimension as the being known as It, and in fact created our
world by puking it out when he had indigestion.
So...good thing the Macroverse doesn't have Pepto Bismol.
While neither of the It films have dared to quite go into that level of cosmic craziness,
they've definitely dropped a few turtle Easter eggs.
It: Chapter 1 put a Lego turtle in Georgie's room, as well as a mention of a turtle at
the quarry where the kids go swimming.
In Chapter 2, we see a model of a turtle at Derry Elementary when Ben revisits the school
to find his token.
Are there more scattered around the film?
We wouldn't be surprised.
In an effort to double down on Bill's guilt at not being able to save his little brother,
Chapter 2 also brings in another kid named Dean to die right in front of Bill despite
his best efforts to save him.
The kid shows up three times in the film, but in the novel he only appears once, when
Bill is wandering around Derry and revisits the old sewer opening where Georgie became
Pennywise's lunch.
Bill notices the kid with his skateboard and urges him to stay away from the sewers because
there are killer clowns afoot.
If you pay close attention to the underside of Dean's skateboard, you can see that, although
it's a little roughed up, it once had the same design as the Overlook Hotel's carpet
in Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of The Shining.
When the adult Losers finally track Pennywise down to its underground lair and totally flub
the Ritual of Chud, the clown gets them all to scatter.
One by one, they all relive a twisted, surreal version of their childhood fears.
Beverly's nightmare takes on the form of a stall in a school bathroom, one that looks
a lot like the one where she got trash dumped on her in the beginning of the first film.
To her, the stall clearly symbolizes some sort of cage, because her tormentors from
over the years begin trying to burst through the door to taunt her.
They all have something relevant to say except crazy Henry Bowers, who jams his head into
the gap and simply shouts the most iconic line from The Shining:
"Here's Johnny."
Tim Curry's rendition of Pennywise in the 1990 miniseries sent many a kid to bed with
nightmares of toothy clowns coming out of the locker room drain.
Yeah, it's a little goofy these days, but you can only do so much with a made-for-TV
special effects budget.
While it's not the most fondly remembered Stephen King adaptation, the 1990 version
of It definitely has its own place in history.
For about 27 years, Tim Curry was the definitive creepy clown, and no modern adaptation worth
its salted kid meat is going to ignore it completely.
In It: Chapter 1, we got to see a clown with a striking resemblance to Tim Curry's Pennywise
in the scene where Richie explores the house on Neibolt Street.
And in the sequel, we got even more nods to the miniseries.
For starters, one of the most iconic lines made a return in the 2019 film.
During the flashback of young Ben Hanscom hiding from It in his locker after trying
to kiss Beverly, Pennywise pops up with one of the most well-known taunts from the 1990
version.
You know the one.
"Kiss me, fat boy."
And at the Canal Days festival, Bill chases a young boy into a clown-themed funhouse and
runs into a room full of swinging clown bags.
Look closely, and you can see that those clowns have the same pattern as the outfit from Curry's
Pennywise, right down to the orange pom poms and curvy eyebrows.
Stephen King's novel spent multiple chapters hammering home the point that although the
Losers grew up physically, they each carried remnants of their childhood into adulthood
with them.
In Eddie's case, he grew up into a man who couldn't quite bear to leave his mother behind.
So he married her.
Okay, not literally, but Eddie's wife Myra is physically, and sometimes spiritually,
a doppelganger of his mother.
She's big, needy, domineering, and fixated on her husband's welfare to the point of emotionally
traumatizing him.
Just like mom!
"My mom will have an aneurysm, okay, if she finds out we're playing down here.
I'm serious."
In It: Chapter 2, we only saw Myra Kaspbrak briefly, but sharp-eyed viewers may have noticed
a very, very specific detail.
Namely, she's portrayed by the same actress who plays Eddie's mother in both films, Molly
Atkinson.
So if you got a weird feeling in your stomach thinking that Eddie's wife looked a little
too much like his mom, you weren't wrong.
If you had to name two mainstream horror authors from the past few decades, chances are you'd
be quick to come up with two names: Stephen King, and Dean Koontz.
Both are prolific writers, and both have been writing published fiction for about the same
length of time.
Obviously, the two authors have taken notice of each other over the years, and while they
probably don't have the kind of rivalry fans think they do, they haven't been averse to
taking shots at each other over the years.
Maybe that's why King wrote Koontz into It as an orderly at Juniper Hill Asylum who watches
over an incarcerated Henry Bowers.
That scene where he's introduced involves an observation from the perspective of Henry
Bowers that, quote, "Koontz is the worst."
In It: Chapter 2, Koontz is alive and well, with an especially fitting appearance.
He's an employee at Juniper Hill, and you can spot him in the film as the guard watching
a dog video on his phone when Henry Bowers breaks out.
Because of course he is.
"Dogs are magical.
They're a lot more magical than elves."
In the book and, to a lesser extent, It: Chapter 1, It often takes the shape of movie monsters
to terrify the kids.
Ben Hanscom is scared of The Mummy, while Richie's fears take the form of the hairy
shapeshifter from I Was a Teenage Werewolf and the oozing peeper from a 1958 creature
feature called The Crawling Eye.
Because who wouldn't be scared of that?
But with updated times come updated scares, and it appears that these '80s kids found
some new monster movies to be scared of.
Something like John Carpenter's 1982 horror masterpiece The Thing.
For a refresher, The Thing is about a shapeshifting alien that plagues a research team in Antarctica.
It can take the form of anything it infects, but it has to go through hideous transformations
to get there.
In one of It: Chapter 2's more memorable scares, Richie, Bill, and Eddie come across Stan's
decapitated head in a fridge inside the house at 29 Neibolt Street.
Almost immediately, the head grows a bunch of freaky spider legs and Richie says, "You
gotta be f----ing kidding me."
It's a fitting tribute to the scene in Carpenter's horror fest, which sees one of the researchers
lose his head to the tentacled monstrosity, after which Palmer says, you guessed it:
"You gotta be f----ing kidding."
Later, The Thing seemingly gets referenced once again when that adorable Pomeranian behind
the "Not Scary" door shows up and turns into a twisted dog mutant that looks a lot like
the dog that got infected in The Thing.
Probably the creepiest sequence in the 2017 film was when the kids go exploring in the
house on Neibolt Street and run into a variety of clown-flavored horror spectacles.
Certainly the most memorable segment from that sees Richie and Bill faced with the "Scary
doors."
Thinking on their feet, they first run to the door labeled "Not Scary At All," and find
that, surprise, it's pretty scary.
Inside they see one of the missing girls hanging by her hands with everything below her waist
missing.
"Where the f--- were her legs?"
Well, it takes 27 years, but Richie eventually finds those legs.
When they're back in the Neibolt house as adults, Richie again comes up against the
three scary doors, and the first one he opens reveals a pair of torso-less legs skipping
towards him.
Guess it goes to show: be careful what you wish for.
Technically, this Easter egg breaks through the universe of the film and into our world,
which is even creepier.
Okay, so it's not that creepy, but it's still pretty cool.
Most King fans know that he's big on the number 27, and It in particular uses the number as
a main plot point; Pennywise comes back every 27 years.
It makes sense then that It: Chapter 2 saw a release date of September 6, 2019.
If you break 9/6/2019 down number by number, all the digits add up to 27.
That's not a coincidence, either.
It: Chapter 1, released on September 8, 2017, follows the same formula: all the digits in
the date 9/8/2017 equal exactly 27 as well.
Add to that the fact that the first film was released 27 years after the 1990 miniseries,
and, well, things are starting to get a little freaky here.
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