The Story in Brief
In Derry, Maine, something ancient and malevolent surfaces every twenty-seven years to feed on children, preferring to take the form of Pennywise the Dancing Clown. In 1958, seven outcasts — Bill Denbrough, Beverly Marsh, Ben Hanscom, Richie Tozier, Eddie Kaspbrak, Stan Uris, and Mike Hanlon, collectively known as the Losers Club — encounter It and drive It underground through the power of their friendship and belief. In 1985, It resurfaces, and the Losers must return to Derry to finish what they started as children.
Stephen King's 1986 novel is one of the great American horror epics — over a thousand pages, structurally ambitious, alternating between the Losers' childhoods and their adult returns, and concerned as much with the nature of memory, friendship, and the specific texture of small-city American life as with horror. Andy Muschietti's 2017 film takes only the childhood half of the story, moves it from 1958 to 1989, and delivers one of the finest King adaptations of recent decades, anchored by Bill Skarsgård's genuinely disturbing Pennywise and a young cast of extraordinary quality.
The film became a cultural phenomenon, grossing over $700 million worldwide and becoming the highest-grossing horror film of all time until its own sequel surpassed it. It proved that King's most ambitious work could be adapted with intelligence, craft, and genuine terror.
| Character | In the Book | In the The Movie |
|---|---|---|
| Bill Denbrough Jaeden Martell |
The stuttering leader haunted by his brother Georgie's death, driven by guilt and the need to understand what took him. | Martell captures Bill's quiet determination and the weight of survivor's guilt without overplaying the stutter. |
| Beverly Marsh Sophia Lillis |
The lone girl in the group, abused by her father, tough and vulnerable in equal measure, the emotional center of the Losers. | Lillis gives Beverly agency and strength, making her more than the object of the boys' affection while keeping her vulnerability intact. |
| Richie Tozier Finn Wolfhard |
The wisecracking voice artist who uses humor as armor against fear and his own insecurities. | Wolfhard leans into Richie's motormouth comedy while hinting at the loneliness underneath, though the film softens some of his crueler edges. |
| Eddie Kaspbrak Jack Dylan Grazer |
The hypochondriac smothered by his mother's Munchausen-by-proxy, terrified of germs and illness but braver than he knows. | Grazer makes Eddie's anxiety both comic and genuinely sympathetic, nailing the character's nervous energy. |
| Ben Hanscom Jeremy Ray Taylor |
The overweight new kid who loves the library, writes poetry for Beverly, and knows Derry's dark history better than anyone. | Taylor gives Ben sweetness and intelligence, making his crush on Beverly tender rather than pathetic. |
| Mike Hanlon Chosen Jacobs |
The homeschooled Black kid who becomes Derry's historian and the one who calls the Losers back as adults. | The film reduces Mike's role significantly, giving Ben much of his historical research, which weakens Mike's importance to the group. |
| Stan Uris Wyatt Oleff |
The rational, orderly Jewish kid who struggles most with the irrational horror of It and pays the ultimate price as an adult. | Oleff captures Stan's need for order and his quiet terror when that order breaks down. |
| Pennywise Bill Skarsgård |
An ancient, shapeshifting entity that feeds on fear, taking many forms but preferring the guise of a clown. | Skarsgård's Pennywise is physically alien and deeply unsettling — the lazy eye, the drooling, the wrongness of every movement makes him the definitive screen version. |
Key Differences
The dual timeline becomes two films
King's novel alternates between 1958 and 1985, building both timelines simultaneously so that the adult Losers' return is haunted by the specific weight of what we already know about their childhoods. This dual structure — and the thousand pages required to sustain it — gives the story a scope no single film can match.
Muschietti splits the story across two films, with the 2017 film covering only the childhood timeline (moved to 1989) and Chapter Two handling the adult return. This is the right call structurally, but the compression still loses the novel's specific rhythm of moving between past and present, where each timeline illuminates the other. The novel's power comes from the constant interplay; the films must build each half separately.
Bill Skarsgård's Pennywise is genuinely alien
Skarsgård's Pennywise is a genuine creative achievement and the film's horror engine. Where Tim Curry's beloved 1990 television version played Pennywise as theatrical and seductive, Skarsgård plays him as something that has learned to imitate a clown without fully understanding what humans find funny about clowns.
The physical wrongness — the lazy eye, the drooling, the way his limbs bend — makes Skarsgård's Pennywise more consistently frightening than King's written version, which sometimes loses terror through overexplanation. The projector scene, the painting lady, the leper — these visual horrors deliver concentrated scares that the novel builds more slowly. Skarsgård's performance is the definitive screen Pennywise.
The Losers Club's chemistry is the film's greatest asset
The child cast — Jaeden Martell, Sophia Lillis, Finn Wolfhard, Jeremy Ray Taylor, Chosen Jacobs, Jack Dylan Grazer, and Wyatt Oleff — create a group whose friendship feels lived-in and genuine. Their banter, their loyalty, their willingness to face horror together — all of it lands because the actors have real chemistry.
The novel's Losers are equally well-drawn but benefit from King's thousand pages of interiority. We know each of them deeply by the time the first confrontation arrives — their home lives, their fears, their specific wounds. The film gives us less time but uses it extraordinarily well. Both versions of the Losers Club are among horror's finest ensemble creations, but the novel earns its depth through sheer accumulation.
Derry's history of complicity is mostly absent
King's Derry is one of his most fully realized fictional towns — a place with a specific history of violence and complicity, where the townspeople's willingness to ignore what happens to children is as much a horror as Pennywise itself. The novel includes extensive interludes tracing Derry's history: the Bradley Gang shootout, the Black Spot fire, the Kitchener Ironworks explosion, each revealing how the town has always looked away from atrocity.
The film's Derry is a well-designed small town with creepy architecture and autumn light, but it lacks the novel's historical weight. The adults are neglectful or abusive — Beverly's father, Eddie's mother, the pharmacist who knows Eddie's medication is a placebo — but the systemic complicity that makes Derry itself monstrous is reduced to atmosphere. The film is a more focused horror; the novel is a more complete portrait of a town that enables evil.
The cosmic mythology is almost entirely omitted
King's novel eventually explains what It actually is — a creature from outside the universe, ancient beyond comprehension, locked in an eternal battle with a benevolent cosmic entity called the Turtle. The Ritual of Chüd, a psychic battle fought on the metaphysical plane, is how the Losers truly defeat It. This cosmic mythology is King at his most ambitious and most divisive; readers either find it thrillingly strange or frustratingly inexplicable.
The film largely omits the cosmic framework, keeping Pennywise as a local mystery rather than a universal one. There are hints — the deadlights, the floating children — but the Turtle is absent, and the final confrontation is physical rather than metaphysical. The film is a more grounded, more accessible horror. The novel is a more unwieldy and more interesting one, willing to risk incoherence for the sake of mythological ambition.
Read the book if you have the stamina for a thousand pages of King at his most expansive — it is the fuller, richer, more mythologically ambitious experience. You'll get the dual timeline structure, the complete history of Derry, the cosmic mythology, and the interiority of each Loser in ways the film can only gesture toward. The novel rewards the commitment it demands with one of King's most complete visions of childhood, memory, and the specific texture of American small-town horror.
Watch the film if you want one of the finest horror films of its decade and the definitive screen Pennywise. Skarsgård's performance and the young cast's chemistry make the 2017 adaptation essential viewing, and the concentrated scares land harder than the novel's slow-burn dread. Both are worth your time; the novel is the deeper dive, the film is the sharper blade.
Should You Read First?
Read the book if you have the stamina for a thousand pages of King at his most expansive — it is the fuller, richer, more mythologically ambitious experience. You'll get the dual timeline structure, the complete history of Derry, the cosmic mythology, and the interiority of each Loser in ways the film can only gesture toward. The novel rewards the commitment it demands with one of King's most complete visions of childhood, memory, and the specific texture of American small-town horror.
Watch the film if you want one of the finest horror films of its decade and the definitive screen Pennywise. Skarsgård's performance and the young cast's chemistry make the 2017 adaptation essential viewing, and the concentrated scares land harder than the novel's slow-burn dread. Both are worth your time; the novel is the deeper dive, the film is the sharper blade.
King's novel earns its thousand pages — Derry's history, the Losers' interiority, the dual timelines, the cosmic mythology — in ways that no two-hour film can replicate. Muschietti's adaptation is one of the best King films ever made: a concentrated, brilliantly cast horror that delivers Skarsgård's genuinely frightening Pennywise and a young ensemble of extraordinary quality. The book is the fuller experience. The film is the more frightening one. You float down here with both.