Offering more slowly simmering menace and dread than haunted-house scares, “It” finds its shocks in the terrors of childhood and its heart in the way the seven kids here band together to face them.
This adaptation of Stephen King’s 1986 novel is set in the the heart of King country, in the creepily quiet town of Derry, Maine. One rainy October day in 1988, little Georgie Denbrough (Jackson Robert Scott) takes a paper boat — lovingly made by his older brother Bill (Jaeden Lieberher), in bed with a cold — out to float in the gutter. The boat falls into a storm drain, where’s it’s recovered by a strange figure: a scary-looking clown who calls himself Pennywise (played by Bill Skarsgard).