• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

New pic of Pennywise from "IT" (2017)

Status
Not open for further replies.

mhayes86

Member
IMO part of what makes Tim Curry Pennywise so creepy is how normal the costume looks compared to Curry's face and mannerisms

Agreed. Having this version intentionally made to look evil isn't really doing anything for me. Tim Curry made Pennywise creepy, not the outfit.

I'll wait and see how it turns out, but at the moment I am not down to clown.
 

DireStr8s

Member
v4toOKE.gif


AAIIIEEEE!
 

Obscura

Member
looks fine

his look has very little to do with how good of a film this will or won't be

Half of what makes the original watchable is the look of Pennywise. The other half is the performance.

I'm in the try hard camp. As has been said, when you try to make a clown scary it illicits the opposite reaction. Could be saved with a great performance though.
 

Fury451

Banned
Not working for me. I like some of the concept of what they're going for, but while "try hard" is overused, this does look like it's trying hard to be scary.

I never liked IT or the adaptation, but (this has been mentioned already) what worked about Pennywise Curry (besides it being Curry) was that it was a fairly basic clown look, with just a few details that made it "off".
 

Lan Dong Mik

And why would I want them?
hmm, I'm gonna need to see footage, but yeah, pretty much agree with most of you guys. It is looking a little too tryhard.
 
Could just be a creepy version of the clown for promotional use and when the bad shot happens in the movie, and maybe there's a more normal less outwardly sinister version that's also used.
 

Gilzor

Member
My guess is that he's going to be showing up a lot in set photos soon, so they wanted to get ahead of that potentially controversial "reveal" of potato-cam quality shots and release his look in this way. Also, I feel like this is specifically how he's going to look when he attacks someone -- like at the end of the Georgie scene in the TV adaptation when you see his teeth -- rather than at all times. Because if he does look like this most of the time, they've really overdone it and misunderstood part of Pennywise's tactics.
 
My guess is that he's going to be showing up a lot in set photos soon, so they wanted to get ahead of that potentially controversial "reveal" of potato-cam quality shots and release his look in this way. Also, I feel like this is specifically how he's going to look when he attacks someone -- like at the end of the Georgie scene in the TV adaptation when you see his teeth -- rather than at all times. Because if he does look like this most of the time, they've really overdone it and misunderstood part of Pennywise's tactics.

I assume this is an adaptation of the book, not the miniseries which I haven't seen in ages. I'm not a fan of this costume, but it wasn't Pennywise's tactic in the book to look innocent/docile to lure people in. If anything it was the opposite.
 

Gilzor

Member
I assume this is an adaptation of the book, not the miniseries which I haven't seen in ages. I'm not a fan of this costume, but it wasn't Pennywise's tactic in the book to look innocent/docile to lure people in. If anything it was the opposite.

I might be misremembering things from the book versus the TV movie then. But I thought in the book it was made clear that it's clown form was to appeal to children. Am I remembering that wrong? Or was the clown form more menacing like this new pic?
 

itwasTuesday

He wasn't alone.
tumblr_n56cw5j8Hc1rp0vkjo1_500.gif


okay... sure.. make a new one. whatever. that's fine... i'm sure you'll totally capture the essence or do something new.

For all it's hate, at least Zombie's Halloween was a different take on the story.
 

Keri

Member
I'm also not a fan of the costume. It looks like they took too much inspiration from the Elizabethan era, to the point were it looks like the clown is dressed as William Shakespeare, which is too ridiculous to be scary. Bill Skarsgard was really good in Hemlock Grove, so I'm sure we'll get a good performance from him, but putting him in this costume is pitting the odds against him.
 
I assume this is an adaptation of the book, not the miniseries which I haven't seen in ages. I'm not a fan of this costume, but it wasn't Pennywise's tactic in the book to look innocent/docile to lure people in. If anything it was the opposite.

It was, which is why him being an ambusher is stupid since he wouldn't need a clown form at all if that's his MO.
 

Gilzor

Member
It was, which is why him being an ambusher is stupid since he wouldn't need a clown form at all if that's his MO.

The "innocent/docile" clown look is what I think I inferred from descriptions like this:

"There was a clown in the stormdrain. The light was far from good, but it was good enough so that George Denbrough was sure of what he was seeing. It was a clown, like in the circus or on TV. In fact he looked like a cross between Bozo and Clarabell, who talked by honking his (or was it her?-George Denbrough was never really sure of the gender) horn on Howdy Doody Saturday mornings-Buffalo Bob was just about the only one who could understand Clarabell, and that always cracked Georgie up. The face of the clown in the stormdrain was white, there were funny tufts of red hair on either side of his bald head, there was a big clown-smile painted over his mouth. If George would have been inhabiting a later year, he would have surely thought of Ronald McDonald before Bozo or Clarabell. The clown held a bunch of balloons, all colors, like gorgeous ripe fruit in one hand. In the other he held George's newspaper boat..."

"Then the clown’s face changed. And what little George Denbrough saw next was terrible enough to make his worst imaginings of the things in the basement look like sweet, angelic dreams; what he saw destroyed his sanity in one clawing stroke. And George knew no more..."
 
For anyone interested in the non-Pennywise aspects of IT, they also released what seems to be the first official cast photo from the Loser's Club (Richie, Finn Wolfhard from Stranger Things):


I'm not sure I'd read too much into the "missing since July 4th" stuff, I'd bet they release photos of the rest of the Loser's Club with similar styling.

The "innocent/docile" clown look is what I think I inferred from descriptions like this:

Oh yah as far as the look of the clown I definitely agree.

I was just referring to specifically how he hunts the kids, which in the book is based more around terrifying the shit out of his prey. The book sees him take a lot more forms other than the clown (iirc the 90s series only has a handful), specifically targeting the fears of his targets.
 
D

Deleted member 1235

Unconfirmed Member
should be a non threatening looking clown that immediately turns very very threatening. not .... a scary demon that looks vaguely like a clown! How's he going to trick a kid then rip his arm off if he's just terrifying from the outset?
 

Matty77

Member
For anyone interested in the non-Pennywise aspects of IT, they also released what seems to be the first official cast photo from the Loser's Club (Richie):



I'm not sure I'd read too much into the "missing since July 4th" stuff, I'd bet they release photos of the rest of the Loser's Club with similar styling.
I could be misremembering but I think there was a point in the book where IT made one of the kids see missing posters with the losers club's faces on them, or something like that.
 
I want to say it was during one of the adult portions of the book, but I hope to god the scene of Pennywise with razor blades as teeth chomping his own lips to shreds makes it into the adaptation.

KEE-RUNCH!
 

Gilzor

Member
I was just referring to specifically how he hunts the kids, which in the book is based more around terrifying the shit out of his prey. The book sees him take a lot more forms other than the clown (iirc the 90s series only has a handful), specifically targeting the fears of his targets.

Totally - which I hope they get into in the movies too. I'd love to see more of the flashback stuff (like the massacre in the town square, etc) now that they have the budget and two movie's worth to get it all done in.

That's also why I said "part of Pennywise's tactic" because I remember he had many forms, and many ways of terrorizing his victims.
 
I'm not really feeling this design at all for IT anyway. It's missing the point of Pennywise which was basically a standard clown used to lure children to it not away from it.

It's design doesn't invoke the uncanny valley effect that make clowns appear scary by appearing happy and jolly all the time. Which makes you can't help, but feel that something beneath the surface lies something far more sinister.

I mean this is far more terrifying to me than the photo in the OP.

inside-bozo.jpg


It helps that they were actually real clowns meant to look appealing to children, but come off as anything but to anyone older. Hopefully in the movie proper they manage to make it appear more trustworthy than obviously evil like it's being portrayed in the OP.
 
Totally - which I hope they get into in the movies too. I'd love to see more of the flashback stuff (like the massacre in the town square, etc) now that they have the budget and two movie's worth to get it all done in.

That's also why I said "part of Pennywise's tactic" because I remember he had many forms, and many ways of terrorizing his victims.

Oh man, I would love to see some of that flashback stuff. I'd imagine if anything they'd include adult Mike's interludes with the 2nd film. I'm not actually too keen on the split between one movie being kids, the second being adults. So many of the original adult scenes are almost just framing devices for them slowly recalling their childhood, I imagine they'll have to tweak a lot to make that work as one separate film independent from the kid storyline.
 

jonezer4

Member
Looks exactly how I imagined Pennywise would look when run through a modernizing reboot machine. With all the subtlety of a sledgehammer.
 

Cedric

Member
As someone who hasn't seen the movie "It" and didn't grow up around people who did, I don't really see a problem with this design. It's also weird seeing all this talk about how the design for the original clown worked because "he looked like an ordinary clown". From my point of view Tim Curry's It doesn't look at all like a "standard" friendly clown.
 

Dirca

Member
This would be a stupid change, particularly as the main kid is already named Bill. But I'm guessing it's a mistake on the part of that site.

I think you're right, other sources have him playing a young Henry Bowers:

http://www.dreadcentral.com/news/172771/stephen-kings-first-image-losers-club-nicholas-hamilton-joins-cast/

Also included in the link is a photo of all the Loser's Club actors together.
Ok, good, thanks for the link. Hopefully it was a typo. I hate when movies make changes like that for no real reason. I do see we are also getting a proper Patrick Hottsetter. I wonder if the movie will have him
kill his baby brother
or include "that" scene with him and Henry
 

Sullichin

Member
I do think it's worth keeping in mind that the original film was only mediocre, due to the amount of stuff from the book it had to exclude due to the running time. I mean the ending of the film was just ridiculous because it jettisoned the context of the book completely.

I still think that It would be best produced as a tv series - there is enough material in the book to cover at least three, if not a full five seasons. That would give plenty of time to build the characters and create something character driven rather than plot driven, along the lines of Bates Motel, only with a supernatural edge.

I would be very surprised if they kept the
child gang bang
in the movie. I think it should be in there in some context though. It's important. There's no need for it to be graphic.

I am bummed that the kids / adults are in separate movies, and that the kid's timeline has shifted from the 50s to the 80s. The time period felt so important to the mood of the book. I also agree that a story this big would be better as a TV series, but one that's on netflix or HBO and doesn't have the limitations the original did.
 
Jesus the frilly costume. He looks like he was adapted from an Amano illustration, and he also looks like he's a 14 year old cancer patient. Pennywise is supposed to charm children at first with a balloon ("it floats!"), but for this they went full ugly. It just makes you want to cringe, like you're looking at a weird kid doing tryhard JRPG cosplay.

What the hell is with the forehead scaling, is he a fucking Klingon now?
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Top Bottom