Killers who don't kill you

I saw my first trailer for Terminator: Dark Fate last night, and I was reminded what makes a terminator such a scary killing machine.

When it gets in range of its target, it absolutely, positively kills that target.

Or whiffs while trying its damnedest, anyway.

It'd be quite a different story if the terminator had its target pinned in a corner, transformed the end of one of its arms into a very long knife, and then, inches from the face of its target, withdrew, saying "Not today, John Connor."

That's the biggest problem with Pennywise in the It movies. It's almost never "today."

I'd have to go back and count, but between the two movies, there can be no fewer than two dozen moments when Pennywise is within inches of one of the members of the Losers Club, but that loser escapes with his (or her) life. And it's not because the ceiling collapsed, or because one of them closed a door just before one of his appendages could slither through it.

No, it's because at the last minute, Pennywise said "Not today, Bill Denbrough."

Yes, Pennywise does kill Georgie Denbrough, or that poor girl under the bleachers, at his first opportunity to do so -- after toying with their fragile psychologies for a few minutes first, of course. He's certainly capable of converting a kill. But I don't buy the argument that his interactions with our main characters are just sadistic amuse bouches for himself before he plans to go in for the kill. Really, he just doesn't plan to go in for the kill -- not today, not tomorrow, and not next Thursday either.

It's really difficult to fear something that fritters away all its best opportunities, because you don't know when you should actually be scared. It's easy to draw the contrasts, as my colleague John Roebuck of ReelGood did in his It Chapter 2 review. The terminator is one, but so is this:

"Pennywise is successful in his murderous enthusiasm in some instances, when in others he is not, with few discernible differences between each scenario. When the capacity of a primary antagonist is uncertain, there's isn't a substantial foundation for fear of it. Think about the alien in Ridley Scott's Alien. The only reason a crew member aboard the Nostromo survived an encounter with it was through luck or ingenuity, not because the alien simply didn't kill them or because they ran to the next room."

That's actually John quoting his own review of the original It in his It 2 review, if we're trying to be as accurate as possible.

So this observation doesn't originate with me, nor does it probably originate with John. But it is a significant detriment to the effectiveness of not only this film, but other modern horror films as well, so I thought it was worth giving it my own particular spin.

The same issue exists in The Curse of La Llorona, which is just one recent case that exemplifies an entire trend in modern ghost story movies. La Llorona presents herself to our main characters a number of times, because you can't have an entire movie about a boogeyman (or boogeywoman) and only show her once or twice. (Not in the post-Jaws era, anyway.) But she of course doesn't kill those characters -- not on the first time, and not on any subsequent times either (spoiler alert). She does kill some other characters earlier on -- you have to establish her capabilities, of course -- but because The Curse of La Llorona opts for a low body count, it necessitates a number of set pieces that peter out inexplicably into non-fatal episodes.

Having said all this, I actually like the two It movies. I gave the first one four stars out of five, and was heading that way on the second after the first hour, ending up at the slightly lower 3.5. That might say more about my own generously skewed star rating system than the actual qualities of these movies, but that's a discussion for another time.

The thing I appreciate about these movies is the way Andy Muschietti stages Pennywise as a concept, not as an actual killer. Although I don't think this is what they were going for, I appreciate It and It Chapter 2 on the level of abstract art, on different ways to visualize an insane clown who might be capable of anything ... setting aside my concern that he's actual capable of nothing.

Some spoilers ahead for the set pieces in It 2.

When I think back to the very long experience of the second It movie, I think of isolated inspired ways to visualize Bill Sarsgaard's expertly conceived embodiment of evil. They're more like snapshots of possible terror than a memory of that terror converted into something tangible. I think of his glowing eyes on the banks of that river as he takes a bite out of the gay bashing victim. I think about the wall-eyed glee of the image above, which presages a further unfocusing of the eyes accompanied by a demented drool. I think of the way his expression goes blank as he starts to bash his head against the wall of glass that separates him from a potential victim. I think of that scene where he's talking to [I don't remember who] and says "Don't you want to play with the clown?" As he turns to look after the fleeing child or adult, his face starts to stretch and skew, as M.C. Escher might have painted him.

These things work for me, though I understand they don't work for everybody. The Filmspotting guys specifically mentioned how they were not taken with two of the more obviously digital scares in It 2, the scene where the fortune cookies turn into creepy crawlies and the scene where the nine-foot-tall naked old woman harasses Bev. I was, in fact, taken with these. I give credit to the vision of a visual stylist who can give me something just a little different from the things I've seen before, and do it with a certain panache, and I consider both of these to be examples of that. Some people don't, and that's fine.

But if you don't, I can see how It Chapter 2 really doesn't leave you much to savor at all.

In a way, watching Pennywise not kill people is a problem lessened if you've read the book. It's been 30 years since I've done that so I'd have to ask a more recent reader to be sure, but I believe Stephen King actually created the template Muschietti followed for the clown's sprees of not killing. King's book is also a book of set pieces, and since it's told largely from the perspective of our main characters, those episodes almost invariably have to be non-fatal in nature.

Knowing who's going to die and who isn't going to die is a contributing factor to a certain lack of fear as well. I remembered that one of the Losers Club was going to die, and approximately when it was going to happen in the story, so any close call before then was going to result in survival, unless Muschietti decided to deviate from the book (which I figured he wouldn't). This is not a problem unique to It, of course. Anyone who's read any book knows which characters are going to die when, and does not fear their deaths prior to that moment while watching the film adaptation. And as anyone who's read the book or seen It 2 knows (and again, spoilers), one of the Losers Club dies by his own hand in a non-Pennywise-related incident, further limiting the number of potential Pennywise-caused deaths.

This character kills himself due to the fear of Pennywise, which is a pretty powerful idea in the book. It just makes it a little harder for us, the viewers, when that fear is based on a number of interactions in which a clown went "Boogedy-boo!" and then left the room without further incident.