(Electronic music)
- (Jared) What’s up, Wisecrack – Jared here and today we’re going to talk about
clowns, and the IP that made them the stuff of nightmares.
- (Stage Manager) Krusty I have to warn you, people’s attitudes have changed about -
- (Krusty) Hey kids! (Laughs) - (kids screaming)
- (Jared) Yeah, except it wasn’t The Simpsons that did this to our collective cultural subconscious.
It was Stephen King’s It.
- (Pennywise) Well I’m Pennywise the dancing clown!
- (Jared)Originally published as a novel in 1986, then later adapted to a two-part mini-series
in 1990, It received a facelift recently in the form of two blockbuster films. The first
film got rave reviews, racking up a solid 85% on Rotten Tomatoes and smashing it at
the box office. Did Chapter Two repeat this success? We’ll let Stephen King answer that-
- Nah. I didn’t like the ending.
- (Jared) Yeah, it was disorientingly bad!
So what happened, Wisecrack? How could Chapter One hit it out of the park, while Chapter
Two struck out swinging? While we could point to a lot of things – we think the central
problem has to with the way horror films are structured. Welcome to this Wisecrack Edition
on It Chapter Two: What Went Wrong? And spoilers ahead for Chapters One and Two – oh and
the book as well.
Alright let’s dive in to a quick recap of the films. It Chapter One follows a plucky
gang of self-described losers as they navigate the challenges of growing up in small town
America. They get bullied, fall in love, and oh yeah, get tormented by this guy.
- (hissing)
- (Jared) As it turns out, the town of Derry isn’t quite like other towns. Kids are going
missing, including Georgie, the younger brother of our lead loser, Bill. The cause: one very
hungry clown named Pennywise. Bill tries to convince his friends to face this cackling
menace in order to save his brother, but the group disbands after a seriously messed up
encounter at Pennywise’s crack house of horrors.
- (Young Bill) Next time we’ll be better prepared.
- (Young Stanley) No! No next time Bill! You’re insane!
- (Jared) That is until Beverly gets kidnapped, which forces the team back together. They
then descend into the sewers, overcome their fears, save Beverly, and defeat Pennywise.
Well for now. Chapter Two picks up after 27 years, when Pennywise has come back and the
gang has to reunite. In order to beat Pennywise for good, the group has to collect items that
were important to them from childhood and sacrifice them in some suitably vague Native
American ritual. After the team collects their tokens, they
meet up to defeat Pennywise. Except that ritual? Yeah doesn’t work.
- (Adult Eddie) Did we do it? Did we do it? Yeah did we do it?
- (Adult Richie) We put the tokens in the thing!
- That’s good right? - (Adult Eddie) We did it right?
- (Pennywise laughs)
- (Jared) Instead, the team is forced to confront their childhood traumas again, until they
overcome them and arrive at the convenient realization that Pennywise – as a projection
of their fear – will shape shift into whatever they think of him as. As he shrivels into
a baby... clown... thing, the group rips out his heart and crushes it, thus freeing the
town of Derry from the torments of It.
Now, on paper, those films seem pretty similar. The group gets together, overcomes their fears,
and takes down a demonic clown. So why does this formula work in the first film, but not
the second? Well, we think it has to do with the way structure and timing work, both in
horror and in movies at large. As the master of thrills, Alfred Hitchcock, said: “There
is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it.” And it’s precisely this understanding
of timing, or lack thereof, that makes Chapter One so good and Chapter Two so bad. So let’s
dive in.
According to screenwriting guru Jon Yorke, a properly-constructed scene should structurally
mirror your archetypal three-act film structure. To Yorke, storytelling is ultimately fractal
in nature – kind of like a pattern that repeats itself regardless of the scale. In
his book Into the Woods, he writes: “Stories as a whole illustrate complete change; acts
show major change and scenes minor, individual moments. It’s in the latter – the single
cells of the organism – that a writer’s effort is concentrated, for each is a unit
of change.” And just as a movie is usually told in three acts, so can a scene usually
be divided into three main parts: First, our protagonist wants to do something, only to
be thwarted by another character or force of antagonism, before a choice is made and
one of these two opposing forces gives way.
Now it’s important to note that this tripartite structure isn’t a hard and fast rule; frankly,
there are as many ways to formulate a scene as there are Fast and Furious movies. That
being said, we’ve found that a good scare can usually be broken down in this way, while
a bad one usually rejects it. To see this in action, though, we need to examine some
key scenes from both movies.
Perhaps the most iconic scene of both films is the opening scare for Chapter One. In this
iconic moment, we see the three-part structure pretty clearly.
First, let’s start with the action: Georgie wants his boat back. To that he end, he answers
Pennywise’s seemingly harmless questions about his life and his friends.
- (Pennywise) I bet you have a lot of friends? - (Georgie) Three! But my brother’s my best
best. - (Pennywise) Where is he?
- (Jared) Throughout this exchange, we aren’t scared per se, but it’s easy to say that
tension is building. Of course, Georgie is rightly skeptical, that is until Pennywise
insists they’re not strangers.
- (Pennywise) Pennywise meet Georgie. Georgie, meet Pennywise.
- (Jared) This launches us into the second phase: reaction. Pennywise insists on building
a rapport and the two of them start actually getting on – much to our increased heart
rate and dread. They talk about the circus and popcorn -
- (Pennywise) Pop pop pop pop! - (Georgie laughs)
- (Jared) That is until Pennywise gets hungry. This is the halfway point of our reaction
phase, where momentum shifts and our stomachs really drop to the floor.
We then have to watch as Pennywise convinces Georgie to reach into the drain for his boat.
Georgie is going to have to make a choice. And that’s when the first real scare happens.
- (dramatic music) - (Guttural noises as Pennywise opens his
mouth & bites Georgie. Georgie screams)
- (Jared) Yeah, to say the least, it’s effective and propels us to our third and final component:
Turning point. The momentum has shifted, Pennywise has come out on top. As a one-armed Georgie
wails and tries to escape, the music crescendos, and we are left with one terrifying image.
Almost every successful scare in Chapter One follows this three-part structure.
Consider the scene in which Eddie strolls past the Well House. Naturally, Eddie wants
to get the eff out of there, while the Well House, well the house has its own ideas.
- (House) What are you looking for?
- (Jared) So Eddie tries to leave – and this is our action beat – but he ends up
fumbling his pill bottle. While scrambling to pick up his medicine, though, he’s greeted
by the force of antagonism. In this case, a leper. This is our reaction beat, and it
sends Eddie running. The only problem is that he’s now running in the backyard of the
Well House, and oh yeah, there’s a chainlink fence back there. This is our turning point,
where our protagonist and antagonist are pitted against each other. And that antagonist, well
that’s Pennywise. Now THAT’S scary. This payoff is all the more satisfying and scary
precisely because it was preceded by mounting moments of terror. Of course, just when it
seems Eddie’s about to go the way of young Georgie, he finds a hole in the gate and escapes,
though undoubtedly scarred for life.
But while Chapter One is clearly competent at structuring scares, Chapter Two is quite
a bit messier. Let’s break down the scene when grown-up Richie returns to his childhood
arcade to collect his token. While there, he has a flashback in which he recalls playing
video games with another kid, only to to have that kid call him out in front of Bowers as
gay
- (Kid) Dude, why are you being weird? I’m not you f***ing boyfriend!
- (Young Richie) Whoa. I-
- (Jared) Then Bowers shouts Richie out of the arcade, leaving him to wander the park.
Oh right, and Richie then gets chased by a demonic lumberjack statue.
- (Young Richie) I think I just s*** my pants.
- (Jared) If you’re wondering why this part wasn’t particularly terrifying, it’s not
because the brawny towel dude isn’t a little frightening. It’s because the film doesn’t
build into the scare. None of the action in the arcade primes us for this scare, so when
our lumberjack comes out swinging, it seems pretty much out of nowhere.
But it’s not like this lack of an effective three part structure is an isolated event
in Chapter Two. Whether it’s Bill reliving his trauma, or Eddie going for round two with
the leper, each scene reaches a scare in the turning point stage that has nothing to do
with the antagonist in the action or reaction stages. For example, let’s look at when
Ben reminisces about hiding out in a classroom with Beverly. Minus a small false scare here-
- (Young Beverly) Whoa!
- (Jared) The conflict of the scene revolves around Ben wanting to tell Beverly his true
feelings. We have the action in which Ben is worried about how they’ll get on; then
the reaction in which Beverly says it should be fine as long as the two of them can still
hang out. Then decision time is the turning point as Ben decides to lean in for the kiss
and gets rejected.
- (Young Beverly) You actually thought I could like someone as fat and gross and disgusting
like you?
- (Jared) And that’s where the film attempts to get scary. Out of nowhere, Beverly decides
to go all Ghost Rider, which leads to Ben sharing a locker with Pennywise. Confusing?
Yes. Scary? No. Sure, there might be a three-beat structure to this scene, but these beats don’t
build to the final scare, largely because beats one and two feel like they were ripped
from a teenage romance novel. Instead of these beats focusing on a potential scare, they’re
focused on the will they won’t they aspect of Beverly and Ben’s relationship.
Of course, there are other places in Chapter Two where the film seems to get this right,
only to later throw it out the window. Take the scene where Beverly revisits her childhood
home. After Beverly low-key vandalizes her old bedroom to find her token, she sits down
for tea with the apartment’s new owner, one, sweaty older woman in pursuit of a sinister
seeming, but unspecified end.
- (Old Lady) But you know what they say about Derry, no one who dies here ever really dies.
- (Jared) The conversation starts pleasantly, but quickly becomes uncomfortable when the
woman brings up death and starts fanning her corpse-like chest. This is the action phase.
Beverly, sensing something is wrong, then tries to excuse herself – the reaction phase.
Here dread is building, as we see Pennywise in a photo and the old woman shimmying naked
in the backdrop. One has to give: Beverly or our naked septuagenarian. Unsurprisingly,
it’s Beverly. The old woman comes out screaming like Baba Yaga and Beverly is on the run.
Now, yes, all of this fits Yorke’s formulation of action, reaction, turning point. The only
problem though is that this correctly structured scare was buried in a more confusing series
of scenes. It was preceded by a tense flashback of Beverly and her abusive father, and it
was followed up immediately by a strange conversation with Pennywise.
- (Pennywise) You haven’t saved any of them.
- (Jared) Taken together, this scare was lost in the mix of different conflicts and rising
tensions.
So I think it’s fair to say that the scene structure of Chapter One is one of the film’s
strengths, while structure in Chapter Two is one of its weaknesses. But now let’s
go back to Yorke’s concept of fractal storytelling. That is, this three-part structure repeats
itself not just in scenes, but also the film as a whole. Now of course, both films do have
a three-act structure. But what makes Chapter One so good and Chapter two so bad is the
spacing of these scares within their respective acts. Just as every fright needs an earlier
set-up in the scene, so too does every scary scene need a set-up in the act. Too many frightening
scenes in a row, and you run into a problem of diminishing returns. On other hand, if
there’s too long of a drought between your scares, you start to lose tension in the script.
Unsurprisingly, Chapter One suffers from neither of these problems, while Chapter Two suffers
from both of them.
To prove this point, let’s compare the first act of Chapter One to the first act of Chapter
Two. In Chapter One, the first act runs from the beginning right up until the gang realizes
they’ve all been terrorized by the same clown. Meanwhile, in Chapter Two, Act One
spans from the opening until Bev tells everyone they’re doomed to die and Mike proposes
his stupid ritual.
- (Adult Mike) The ritual of Chüd.
- (Jared) So how many scares were contained in each film’s first act? In Chapter One,
the answer is a healthy eight scares, or roughly a scare every eight or so minutes. In Chapter
Two, there are four scares, or a scare every fifteen minutes. And some of these scenes,
well it’s hard to say if they were actually frights. I mean honestly, is Pennywise showing
up to eat a drowning man really a horror scene, or is he just appended to a cliched scene
of violent small-town homophobia?
Even worse, only one of these scares actually happens to our main cast of characters, when
monsters emerge from their fortune cookies. (And if you were wondering, no, there’s
no action/reaction build up to it)
- (Adult Richie) What the f*** is that man?
- (Jared) Instead of building to periodic scares, the first act of Chapter Two is unusually
obsessed with comedic gags:
- (Adult Eddie) Ok I love you Mommy.
- (Jared) And exploring the interpersonal relationships between its characters. This
wouldn’t be so bad, except that it has the weird effect of further diluting what little
tension there is in the first act.
This general lack of frights in the first act of Chapter Two, however, only creates
bigger structural problems in its second act. typically, Act One is used to establish our
characters, along with their flaws and motivations. In Chapter One, we learn that Bill is obsessed
with finding his missing brother
- (Young Bill) The barrens… it’s the only place that that Georgie could have ended up.
- (Bill’s Dad) He’s gone Bill.
- (Jared) While we get to know about the rest of our ensemble cast through their run-ins
with Pennywise. Eddie is haunted by a leper and his fear of germs
- (Leper) Time to take your bill Eddie.
- (Jared) Mike is haunted by the fire that killed his parents, and Beverly is haunted
by her father and her nascent sexuality.
- (Beverly’s Dad) You worry me Bevvy
- (Jared) By combining character introductions with terrifying moments, Chapter One manages
to keep audiences engaged in its first act and masterfully sets up Act Two, where our
characters have to face the forces of antagonism head on. Unfortunately for Chapter Two, though,
the film didn’t give us these introductory run-ins with Pennywise until Act Two. That
means instead of watching our heroes fight back in the second act – like they did in
the Well House in Chapter One – we have to rewatch their character introductions.
Worse, because Chapter Two has to cram these moments all into its second act, the horror
feels formulaic and repetitive. Because let’s be real, jump scares aren’t great when we
watch them back to back to back.
With Acts One and Two lagging in terms of plot development, it’s no surprise then
that the third act of It: Chapter Two also falls flat. As Billy Wilder, the iconic screenwriter
from the Golden Age of Hollywood, said it best: "If you have a problem with the third
act, the real problem is in the first act." Because Chapter Two didn’t give our heroes
a proper introduction and goal in the first act, it has to play some massive catch up
in the second act. AS a result when we arrive at the third act – when our characters have
to make the choice to stare down our antagonist – we’re left feeling like not much has
happened. The team goes back to Derry, each one collects their own token, and then they
all meet at the Well House for the final battle.
- (Adult Richie) Let’s kill this f***ing clown
- (Jared) But without the build up in the prior acts, this turning point feels anti-climatic.
Our group hasn’t had to overcome any real opposition, so their decision to face Pennywise
doesn’t bear the same weight. Worse, because the ritual doesn’t even work in the first
place, we’re wondering why they didn’t just face off earlier and save us an hour
of time. And that face off? Yeah, we already watched the group beat the lights out of the
clown in the first film.
- (Young Bill) Now you’re the one who’s afraid.
- (Jared) Ultimately, It Chapter 2 is rife with poorly-structured scenes that, when combined
make for poorly-structured acts, that when combined make for very disappointed movie
goers. But let us know what you guys think in the comments below. Big thanks to our patrons
for supporting the channel and our podcasts. Don’t forget to subscribe and as always,
thanks for watching. Peace.