Pennywise is back to start a new cycle of horror that brings the Losers home in an effort
to defeat IT for good.
Yippee-ki-yay, movie lovers, I'm Jan and in this video we're diving deep below Derry to
discuss the ending of IT Chapter Two, the fate of the Losers and the evil clown, and
the secret Maturin turtle easter egg in the Ritual of Chud that everyone missed!
Keep watching for details about a special Pennywise giveaway!
And, of course, spoilers ahead!
When the young Losers defeated Pennywise at the end of the first movie, IT went into hibernation
underground; however, its influence over Derry remained strong.
27 years later, Derry feels "a lot more hopeless, as if [the town's] making its last dying gasp
before fully succumbing to IT," says screenwriter Gary Dauberman, and this is brutally evident
early on when a group of thugs beat up Adrian Mellon in a vicious hate crime, throwing him
into the river.
This signals the return of Pennywise who feeds on the injured Adrian.
Scrawling bloody messages has always been part of IT's MO, but now the killer clown
no longer does that to scare away the Losers, instead he uses gory missives to get them
to return home.
After waiting and planning vengeance, Pennywise is desperate to do away with the Losers for
good and pay them back for foiling IT's plans during the previous cycle, leaving IT hungry.
"Now you're the one who's afraid.
Because you're gonna starve."
Over time, IT has become more cunning, more sophisticated in manipulation, and therefore
deadlier, as we see in Chapter Two during the scene with young Victoria, which director
Andy Muschietti views as a "mirror scene of what happened with Georgie".
"Why are you crying?"
"No one wants to play with me anymore.
Play a game with me, would ya?
On the count of three.
One..
Two.."
For actor Bill Skarsgard, present-day Pennywise has "a strange bond" with the Losers because
although "he instils fear in humans, [...] he'd never understood what that was until the Losers,
and then he felt it for himself."
Because most of the Losers left town, they gradually forgot the events they went through
in Derry.
But despite their geographical distance from IT and the fact they've repressed many of
the terrors they endured as children including the abuse, bullying, bigotry, death of a sibling,
and endless insecurities, their past still casts a heavy shadow over their present.
Bill can't find closure in his writing or real happiness with the wife who isn't the
woman he wants her to be.
Bev's gone from living with an abusive father to an abusive husband.
And Eddie hasn't been able to throw off the shackles of an overbearing parent and is married
to Myra, a woman who is much like his mother.
And fun fact, Eddie's wife Myra is played by the same actress Molly Atkinson who played
his mother in the first movie.
The wounds left by IT may not be as fresh as they were 27 years ago, but the trauma
the young Losers experienced then still marks their everyday lives in unconscious ways and
is brought painfully to the surface when they get a call from Mike, the only one who stayed
in town and never forgot Pennywise.
Each member of the childhood club suffers a traumatic reaction to Mike's call, with
Bill suddenly feeling pain in his hand from the blood oath he made with the others as
a child.
Out of those who left, Stan has the most harrowing reaction.
And I'll discuss that together with his letter to the others later in the video.
The Losers' Chinese restaurant reunion brings memories of Pennywise flooding back and their
freaky fortune cookie hallucinations cause a rift in the group.
Mike, however, manages to persuade Bill to go back to the library where he reveals he's
been investigating the history of Pennywise and how IT came to Derry in the first place.
Mike shows Bill an 18th-century Native American artefact that belonged to a group of holy
men that lived outside Derry and who were beyond the range of IT's influence.
Mike secretly spikes Bill's water with a root that allows him to see a vision of IT's arrival
on Earth via a meteor that crashed underground in the spot where Derry was later built.
Bill sees IT's original form, the deadlights, emerge from the cave and float up to the surface
where they reform into a bird, then shapeshift into various monstrous creatures with mouths
full of teeth that devour the people in its path.
A crucial detail that Mike also learns from the Native Americans is a rule that "all living
things must abide by the laws of the shape they inhabit."
This will be critical later for the final showdown as it means IT can be killed for
good if it transforms into something weak and vulnerable enough.
There's also a very cool easter egg in this scene which is a twist on the cosmic turtle
from Stephen King's original novel when Mike calls the root the native American tribe gave
him "their sacred Maturin".
It's an interesting detail that's very hard to catch as Mike says the name very quickly
and the mention of Maturin's name seems to indicate that the cosmic turtle is trying
to help the Losers by revealing IT's weaknesses.
There's a few other turtle easter eggs in the first movie.
And in Chapter Two, a turtle also shows up on a desk when Ben revisits an old classroom.
And when the camera turns in that scene, it looks as if a globe of the Earth is sitting
on the turtle's back.
Which is pretty appropriate because for those who don't know, Maturin is a benevolent interdimensional
entity from King's Macroverse that created the universe by vomiting it up.
The scene also introduces us to the Ritual of Chud which the original natives of the
area learned as a technique to attempt to contain, even destroy IT.
We see them standing around a four-sided pyramid container which works to trap the deadlights.
That container is the artefact that Mike has in his possession, and he explains to the
Losers that the ritual requires they each sacrifice a token from their childhoods and
burn it in the container.
To collect their tokens each Loser spends the day reliving old memories and confronting
past horrors.
For Bev, this means returning to her childhood home where she retrieves the postcard with
the poem Ben sent her.
"Your hair is winter fire, January embers.
My heart burns there, too."
And she also encounters Mrs Kersh transforming into a giant, grotesque witch and an apparition
of a man turning into Pennywise.
Bill recovers the paper boat from the drain where his little brother was taken as a child
and is reminded of the guilt he's been hiding about the day Georgie died.
Richie's token is a coin from the arcade where he used to play games as a kid and where,
in a flashback, we discover he was bullied by Henry Bowers and his cousin who called
him gay.
Richie ends up back in the park by the Paul Bunyan statue which Pennywise brings to life
to attack him while he taunts him about hiding his sexuality.
Eddie's token is his inhaler which he picks up from Mr Keene's drug store where he meets
the creepy old pharmacist again and a now grown-up Greta.
He also has a horrifying encounter [in the basement] with a Leper monster like the one
that attacked him as a child outside the Neibolt house in the first movie.
Ben's token is the yearbook page that Bev signed for him in Chapter One, and Mike's
is the rock that Bev threw at Henry Bowers to save him from the bully.
The Losers also include Stan in the ritual by adding one of the shower caps he bought
for the young Losers to use in their clubhouse in order to keep their hair free of spiders,
which feels like foreshadowing of their climactic battle with IT.
The Losers then commence the main part of the ritual by burning the tokens and chanting
the phrase "turn light into dark".
This summons the deadlights into the artefact; however, the container immediately swells
up with a huge red balloon which fills the space until it bursts, revealing Pennywise.
The clown taunts them that their silly ritual will never work as when the Native Americans
tried it they all died.
Pennywise then reveals that Mike knew that all along and hid the truth from the others
by scratching out the artefact's drawing of the deadlights killing the tribe.
Mike explains the mistake the Native Americans made was that they didn't believe they could
defeat IT, but Pennywise starts attacking the Losers, and once again they're split up
and sent off to endure a psychic battle of wills with IT who confronts each one with
some of their personal fears.
Beverly is thrown back into the school bathroom stall where, as a child, she was bullied by
Greta and other girls who poured watery trash all over her.
This time, the stall fills with blood evoking the blood-soaked bathroom scene from the first
movie.
As the stall fills, Bev is tormented by various abusers banging on the door including her
violent husband, her abusive father, the sleazy Mr Keene, and her childhood bullies.
And Henry Bowers even shows up for a quick "Here's Johnny!" easter egg from The Shining.
In the meantime, Ben has been flung into the underground clubhouse he built as a child.
As it fills with dirt, Pennywise traps him inside and taunts him that he'll die alone.
This is torture for Ben because, as we learn early on in Chapter Two, he's been something
of a loner since his Loser days and he's extremely claustrophobic, living alone in a house full
of floor-to-ceiling windows so he can always see plenty of space around him.
In that scene, we also saw the adult Ben advising his firm's clients to stop putting more walls
into a new retail building that they were designing.
When we cut back to Beverly, she's almost drowning in blood and being tormented by her
father yelling and asking if she's still his little girl.
Bev eventually overcomes the shackles of guilt and shame her father imposed her, and kicks
the door in his face, finally rejecting him and the violence against her that he represented.
When Ben calls out that he loves her, they're both able to break through their illusory
prisons and reach out to each other.
This time, it's Bev who pulls Ben out from the dirt which is swallowing him up, and saves
him in a reversal of the first movie where he pulled her out of the Deadlights trance.
For Bill, his test is to face a vision of his dead brother Georgie in the flooded basement
of his childhood home.
At this point, Georgie reveals that Bill wasn't really sick and blames his older brother for
his fate.
"You lied and I died!
You lied and I died!"
Bill manages to overcome the guilt and blame that Pennywise is trying to project onto him.
And he shoots the younger version of himself in the head with a cattle bolt-gun, in a call-back
to how he shot Pennywise masquerading as Georgie in the first movie.
The other Losers' personal tests aren't as intense, with Eddie and Richie going up against
the "scary" doors.
Richie opens the "Very Scary" door only to find Betty Ripsom's mutilated legs running
up to him, which harks back to the first movie when he discovered Betty's shoe in the sewer
and it's also a nod to the "Not Scary At All" door that Richie opened with Bill in the Neibolt
House where they found the upper half of Betty Ripsom's mutilated body.
"Where's my shoe?"
Behind Eddie's door is a cute Pomeranian dog which turns into a huge monster, an easter
egg to the dog transformation scene from The Thing.
As for Mike, he doesn't seem to have a personal test, or it might have been cut for time from
the final movie.
After these various battles of wills, the Losers then go up against IT who has turned
into a horrific Lovecraftian-type Pennywise-spider or crab hybrid.
Richie runs up to the monster, but it traps him in the deadlights, just like Pennywise
did with young Beverly in the first movie.
Eddie sees Richie trapped, and summons up the courage he previously couldn't muster
when Richie was being attacked by the Stan-spider monster, which is another easter egg to The
Thing.
Now Eddie takes a metal railing spike that Beverly gives him and which she also used
to attack Pennywise in Chapter One, and he remembers what she told him:
"Take it, it kills monsters.
If you believe it does."
Eddie finally overcomes his fear and self-doubt, throwing the spear into IT's mouth [and deadlights],
causing the giant spider-clown to fall back on the huge spikes in the cavern, severely
injuring the creature.
It's heart-breaking when Eddie believes he's finally triumphed over the monster only for
IT to stab him through the chest, mortally wounding him.
Before he dies though, Eddie tells the Losers how he almost killed the leper in the pharmacy
basement; how when he choked it, he made the monster small and feel so weak.
The other Losers then realise their only hope of killing the giant Pennywise-spider is to
make it much smaller and therefore weaker.
With this, the Losers make their final stand against Pennywise.
Like real-life bullies, many of Pennywise's tactics employ fear, intimidation, and isolation
to make its victims feel weak.
So the Losers turn the tables on IT, calling it names: a stupid clown, a headless boy,
an imposter, a mimic, a bully, a stupid mummy, and so on.
As they do this, the Losers imprint their will on the monster and shrink IT down into
a tiny baby-sized clown.
Although IT is an alien form, it has to abide by the rules of the shapes it inhabits, and
with Pennywise now weak and decrepit, Mike reaches down and pulls out IT's beating heart.
Then together the Losers crush it, killing the evil entity for good.
This moment shows that with mental strength, courage and unity, the Losers could go up
against the evil that IT represents and defeat it once and for all.
IT's death brings about the collapse of Pennywise's lair as the evil beast's power fades away,
and the Losers escape just as the whole of Neibolt House falls into the sinkhole below,
in a nod to how in King's novel, most of Derry itself was destroyed after IT was killed.
After the trauma of the battle with IT and Eddie's death, we get a bittersweet throw-back
to the first movie when the five surviving Losers return to the quarry and Beverly jumps
into the water followed by the remaining four members of the club.
This sad moment where we feel the loss of both Eddie and Stanley was actually foreshadowed
back in the first film where you can see a very similar shot of Bev, Bill, Ben, Mike
and Richie together in the water while Eddie and Stanley are separated from the main group.
Next in the film, we see the consequences of defeating IT for good are even more far-reaching
than the Losers might have imagined.
As they walk into town, Bev discovers that the deep scar on the palm of her hand from
the blood oath they took as children has completely disappeared, as also happens in the book.
Her recurring nightmares of them all dying if they left town before facing up to Pennywise
are now at an end, and she's proven the killer clown wrong in his taunts that her actions
haven't changed anything.
The disappearing scars fit in nicely with what producer Barbara Muschietti has said
about the film's message, that the [pain of the] past is "a scar that becomes leather
[…] At some point, you have to face it.
You won't be able to finish your life if you don't get rid of that trauma.
[The Losers] get courage through unity.
Pennywise is a master of division.
He basically wants to divide and conquer.
Their victory stems from remembering who they were as kids, and what they were able to do
when the scar was fresh."
Mike also discovers later when he's looking back at old newspaper cuttings that reported
his parents' death in the fire that the headlines have changed.
Originally, the headline emphasised that Mike's parents were drug addicts putting blame on
the victims rather than the perpetrators of the atrocity.
After IT's death though, the headline has changed to a more neutral report of two locals
dying in a house fire.
By destroying the evil beneath, it's as if the monster's malignant influence on the town
is disappearing.
What's more, this time even after the Losers leave Derry, they no longer forget what happened
and their memories remain intact.
When Mike talks to Bill on the phone, he wonders if it's just because IT is dead, or if it's
because they now have more they want to remember than forget.
Before the film ends we also discover that Stanley wrote a letter to the Losers before
taking his own life.
The letter explains how Stan believed that what he did gave the Losers the best chance
against IT as he knew he was too terrified to go back to Derry.
Stan tried to repress his memories of Pennywise in his life, but when Mike calls, Stan tries
to push back with questions hoping to buy time, but it seems like he was always expecting
this moment and he simply says, "It's come back, hasn't it?"
Although all the Losers were terrorised by Pennywise as kids that summer, Stan perhaps
suffered the worst when he was almost eaten alive after IT separated him from the rest
of the group in the sewers.
Pennywise had his huge razor-sharp jaws wrapped around Stan's face and for him that memory
was just too terrifying and he couldn't face IT again.
Always the most rational member of the group, in his letter, Stan explains that he made
what he saw as the most logical move, and took himself off the board.
By bringing the number of Losers alive down from seven to six, in his view they could
remain united, which they wouldn't have done if he'd lived but hadn't returned to Derry.
In this version of the story, Stan is somewhat redeemed as we hear him say the words "I swear,
Bill" in his final moments, which in a way meant he fulfilled the promise he made at
the blood oath.
An additional Chapter Two scene of young Stan giving his Bar Mitzvah speech also stops adult
Richie from abandoning the Losers, and Richie thanks Stan for showing up for him in his
time of need.
Stan also acknowledges in the letter that's he's lived his whole life being afraid and
encourages everyone else not to be this way and instead be proud of who they are and who
they want to be.
This last point seems especially pertinent to Richie who we see re-carving R+E on the
bridge, an indication that after Eddie's death, he'll no longer hide his sexuality.
But the point also relates to the other Losers.
Mike finally decides to leave Derry for a new life, and Bev and Ben are now together
in a happy, healthy relationship, with Bev's endless nightmares replaced with beautiful
dreams.
For Bill, defeating IT for good means he's been able to move on from the ending of that
screenplay he couldn't finish, and he's now actually writing the first chapter/beginning
of a new story.
In fact, that story we see on screen is a passage from Stephen King's novel IT.
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Yippee-ki-yay, movie lovers!