The critics are raving about It just as hard as the fans of the horror movie genre and the records at the box office are proof. The latest adaptation of Stephen King’s terrifying novel may have impressed you with the scary monster clown or the sweet relationship between the young children but one very weird scene could have changed the film’s tone entirely.
The creative heads on the film decided to not include a sex scene that proved very controversial when King’s novel was released in 1986. Why was it controversial? Because it was an orgy between the book’s teen female lead Beverly and the six pre-teen boys of The Losers Club.
Beverly realises that in order to escape Pennywise, the Dancing Clown, the kids all need to be ‘together’. Of course, the film accomplished that by making the characters all stick together as they hunt down the clown, the book took a very literal turn. Beverly suggests that they all have sex together in the sewers of Derry to seal their ‘connection’. Here’s an excerpt from the book:
In 2013, King made a post on his website explaining why he included the scene in his book. “I wasn’t really thinking of the sexual aspect of it. The book dealt with childhood and adulthood --1958 and Grown Ups. The grown ups don’t remember their childhood. None of us remember what we did as children--we think we do, but we don’t remember it as it really happened. Intuitively, the Losers knew they had to be together again. The sexual act connected childhood and adulthood. It’s another version of the glass tunnel that connects the children’s library and the adult library. Times have changed since I wrote that scene and there is now more sensitivity to those issues.”
Screenwriter Gary Dauberman talked to Entertainment Weekly about why the film decided to not include the scene: “Besides Georgie in the sewer [the It opening], I think it’s the one scene that everybody kind of brings up and it’s such a shame. While it’s an important scene, it doesn’t define the book in any way I don’t think and it shouldn’t. We know what the intent was of that scene and why he put it in there, and we tried to accomplish what the intent was in a different way.”
{{/usCountry}}Screenwriter Gary Dauberman talked to Entertainment Weekly about why the film decided to not include the scene: “Besides Georgie in the sewer [the It opening], I think it’s the one scene that everybody kind of brings up and it’s such a shame. While it’s an important scene, it doesn’t define the book in any way I don’t think and it shouldn’t. We know what the intent was of that scene and why he put it in there, and we tried to accomplish what the intent was in a different way.”
{{/usCountry}}Variety asked King whether what he said on his website in 2013 were indeed his words, he said, “That sounds like my statement... To it I’d just add that it’s fascinating to me that there has been so much comment about that single sex scene and so little about the multiple child murders. That must mean something, but I’m not sure what.”
So people, maybe we cannot always complain how the film isn’t ‘like the book’.
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