So I saw "IT" a few days ago and first off, holy shit that film was good. Fucked me up. If my chief fear wasn't civilization collapsing in my lifetime due to climate change, I would be just waiting for Pennywise to pop out and kill me. He targets kids because their fears are simple and easy to emulate, so I'm probably safe for those reasons.
Anyway why am I talking about "it" when I'm supposed to be talking about this comic book? I watched a great interview with Stephen King where he talks about the current film and he said some things about horror stories I think I knew deep in my heart, but never really thought about.
He said that in all of his stories he strives to create fundamentally good, decent people, because when you do that, the audience/reader actually gets scared. We don't want people we like to get hurt, to be tortured, to lose people they love.
It's so obvious when he says it out loud, but it got me thinking that you could break the entire horror genre down into 2 categories. Films where you want the characters to die, and ones where you don't. We have Stranger Things and IT on one side, and then we have Saw/Hostel/Every Teen Horror Movie Ever on the other.
Sometimes you go to a horror film because you want to see shitty people get punished, so the question is why do we like horror films where we DONT want the protagonists to get hurt? I don't have an answer for you honestly, because I saw IT 2 days ago and was viscerally uncomfortable the entire film. That being said I want to go back and see it again ASAP. Maybe it's just appreciation for something executed so well?
I am haunted by the opening image of a white gloved hand reaching out from a gutter and dragging a kid back in as he tries to crawl away (very reminiscent of an old nightmare I used to have...well played film...)
Anyway I made all of my protagonists likeable (I hope). They're not perfect, (especially Mookie) and Margaret and Hazel come off as frustratingly chipper or naive. They all have hopes and dreams though, and I believe that they are all good people when the chips are down. That will be tested, and maybe it will change, but for now I'm glad that I took a page from King's books (puns!) and put together a team of characters whom readers will hopefully be rooting for. Sure Mookie is scamming a bunch of strangers into unwittingly being in his film for free, but Mookie just love cinema enough to do what it takes to succeed! Even if he's interacted with the local mafia, and definitely broken the law, I find something scrappy and endearing about him. As long as nobody gets hurt we tend to appreciate a good hustle. Course I'm a film maker myself, so I'm probably biased towards him...
Theresa Chiechi's (The Artist) website is here: http://www.theresachiechi.com/
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