It

Our Verdict on It

Stephen King's It is one of the longest novels ever written by a major American author. It is also one of the most thematically traditional. Seven children in a small Maine town face something ancient and evil, and they defeat it through friendship, courage, and the refusal to let fear make cowards of them. Andy Muschietti's 2017 film captures roughly half of that novel, and it captures most of what matters.

The setup is quick and brutal. Georgie Denbrough is six years old and chasing his paper boat down a rain-flooded Derry street when it disappears into a storm drain. What comes up out of the drain is Pennywise the Dancing Clown, and Georgie is gone before the title card. That opening sequence is one of the most effectively disturbing scenes in mainstream horror of the 2010s. It earns the R rating in its first four minutes and tells you exactly what kind of movie this is going to be.

The film then jumps forward to summer 1989. Bill Denbrough cannot stop believing his brother Georgie survived and is being held somewhere in Derry. The other Losers Club members are drawn together by shared outsider status: Ben the new kid, Beverly the girl with the abusive father and the slut reputation she did not earn, Richie the motormouth with the glasses and the sharp tongue, Eddie the hypochondriac with the overprotective mother, Stanley the rabbi's son who does not want to believe in any of this, Mike the Black kid who is home-schooled by his grandfather and has never found his place in Derry's social structure. They are misfits who become a community.

That community is the film's real subject. Pennywise is the mechanism that forces these seven children to depend on each other, face their fears, and discover that collective courage is the only thing that can defeat what is hunting them. That is a deeply traditional message. King has always understood that horror functions best as a moral delivery system: the monster outside is a metaphor for the monsters within and the monsters adults put in children's paths. Derry's adult population is largely absent, neglectful, or predatory. The children must save themselves.

Bill Skarsgard's Pennywise deserves whatever credit it has received. He does something genuinely difficult: he creates a villain who is both funny and terrifying, whose humor is itself a weapon, and whose physicality is strange enough to read as genuinely alien rather than simply costumed human. The decision not to replicate Tim Curry's iconic 1990 TV performance was the right one. Skarsgard does not compete with Curry. He finds something different: a Pennywise who moves wrong, talks wrong, and seems to be enjoying himself in a way that has nothing to do with human joy.

The child performances across the board are remarkable. Sophia Lillis gives Beverly a complexity that most adult actors would struggle to sustain: she is simultaneously victimized, resilient, frightened, and defiant. The chemistry between all seven Losers is convincing in a way that large ensemble child casts rarely achieve. You believe these kids know each other, protect each other, and would go into a nightmare sewer to fight an ancient shape-shifting monster together.

Muschietti's direction is stronger in atmosphere than in structure. The film builds effective dread in its quieter sequences. The projector room scene, where Pennywise emerges from a home movie in increasingly terrifying escalation, is a masterpiece of controlled horror staging. The Neibolt house sequence generates genuine sustained dread. Where the film struggles is in its final act, where the horror becomes more conventionally spectacular and loses some of the intimate psychological texture that makes its early sections so effective.

From a values standpoint, It lands on the traditional side of the ledger for straightforward reasons. The film's moral architecture is classical: seven children face existential evil and defeat it through courage and loyalty. Bill's obsession with finding his brother is driven by love and guilt that he did not protect Georgie. Beverly escapes an abusive domestic situation by choosing her chosen family over her biological one, which is presented as entirely correct. The adults of Derry are either absent or threatening. The film does not celebrate this: it mourns it. The message is that adults are supposed to protect children, and when they fail, children must find other ways to protect each other.

The progressive signals in It are real but limited. Beverly's abuse narrative carries feminist overtones that are standard in contemporary genre fiction. Mike Hanlon's integration into the ensemble has a modest diversity-signaling dimension. Neither is ideologically heavy. The film's core is too traditional in its fundamental values to be read as a progressive text.

For a film about an ancient shape-shifting clown that feeds on children's fear, It has a genuinely heartfelt emotional center. That is Stephen King's gift to the material. Muschietti and his collaborators had the craft to translate it to screen.

Woke Tropes & Content Analysis

Formula: Weighted Score = Severity × Authenticity Multiplier × Centrality Multiplier

🔴 Woke Tropes

Trope	Severity	Authenticity	Centrality	Score
Abused female protagonist / male predatory father	3	Moderate	Moderate	3
Racial diversity ensemble / inclusive Losers Club	1	Low	Low	0.7
Corrupt/absent institution / police/adults as threat	3	Moderate	Moderate	3
Bullying as social commentary	1	Low	Low	0.7
TOTAL WOKE				7.4

🟢 Traditional Tropes

Trope	Severity	Authenticity	Centrality	Score
Children's friendship / chosen family as moral community	5	High	High	6.3
Courage overcoming fear / facing the monster	4	High	High	5.04
Brotherly love and guilt driving protective action	3	High	Moderate	2.1
Innocent children threatened / adult failure to protect	3	High	Moderate	2.1
TOTAL TRADITIONAL				15.5

Score Margin: +8 TRAD

Content Breakdown

Is It Safe for Kids?