“Can’t sleep, clown’ll eat me. Can’t sleep, clown’ll eat me.” — Bart Simpson
Only Stephen King could conjure an evil clown from outer space who feasts on children in the sewers beneath an otherwise peaceful Maine small town. The book “It” became a miniseries in the early ’90s, with Tim Curry as Pennywise the clown, but the time came for the beastly bozo to get the big-screen (to be read: R-rated) treatment in a two-part saga that ran nearly five hours.
For our money, the first film is the scarier of the two, considering that Pennywise menaced our heroes when they were still preteens — which is the precisely right age for them to be terrified while finding their inner strength to fight back.
Sweden’s own Bill Skarsgård is demonstrably nightmarish as Pennywise. And in another connection to the King universe, Bill’s brother Alexander recently played Randall Flagg, aka the Dark Man, in the miniseries “The Stand.”
Watch on Amazon Prime Video: It, rent for $3.99
