Can someone who has read the book explain the rules or constraints that IT has to abide by, because if there's one thing both the miniseries and movie completely fail to communicate, it is WHY IT behaves the way it does. I was hoping the movie may make it clearer but it's every bit as obtuse to me as it was before.
I have read before that the book explains that he likes to 'salt the meat' through invoking fear in the kids first. That makes sense and is reasonably convenient justification as to why he doesn't just kill all the kids outright at the very first opportunity.
However, even this seems inconsistent. Why does he not try to scare Georgie before killing him? He lures him but doesn't outright scare him like he does the other kids. Why is this the case? He also doesn't seem to shapeshift to represent any sort of deep rooted fear with Patrick - why is this? Why is he interested in representing deep rooted fears for some of the kids, in order to scare them, but not others?
Also, why does he appear so incompetent at killing some kids but not others? With Georgie and Patrick he is absolutely ruthless and barely gives them any chance to escape. He is, as far as I can tell, capable of jumping OUT of any object he wants, changing INTO any object he wants, and basically popping up whenever and wherever he pleases. With these powers he should be able to both scare the kids AND ensure that they never escape, because how could they ever compete with that?
Yet scene after scene in both the miniseries and the movie, it just shows the kids casually escaping. Now of course for narrative purposes they have to stay alive, but they don't even seem to have to do all that much to escape him. If the movie showed them outsmarting him, or acquiring knowledge they use to defeat him, that would be fine. But it doesn't. For most of the fear sections, they just run out of the room or run for ten seconds and IT just gives up. Why? He is simultaneously portrayed as incredibly powerful and capable of nearly anything, and ridiculously useless.
If there is some justification given for this in the novel, it is completely ignored in both screen adaptations as far as I can tell.