EW the Ultimate Guide to Stephen King Read online

  THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO

  STEPHEN KING

  Contents

  Jack Nicholson in The Shining.

  SEND IN THE CLOWN

  Stephen King’s horror empire continues to expand with the two-part adaptation of It

  Fright Club

  The Losers are all grown up in the terrifying It Chapter Two

  It Comes Back

  Director Andy Muschietti explains what’s new in Derry

  Fear ITself

  2017’s film dives deep into the town of Derry in search of Pennywise

  From Page to Scream

  How the filmmakers storyboarded It’s terrifying action

  It All Connects

  Characters and places turn up again and again in King’s twisted web—here’s how

  THE KING OF FRIGHT

  A deep dive into King’s greatest hits

  Carrie

  It’s the novel and film that started it all

  25 Scariest Moments

  We rank the horror maestro’s most terrifying scenes

  The Shining

  Inside the Stanley Kubrick classic

  Misery

  Kathy Bates’s turn in the two-hander with James Caan launched her screen career

  Hell Hath No Fury

  A powerful, troubling thread that ties King’s heroines together

  The Mist

  Frank Darabont’s bleak monster thriller has become a cult fave

  BEYOND THE HORROR

  King has chronicled humanity’s less fearsome side—and inspired a generation

  Stand by Me

  Rob Reiner’s coming-of-age masterpiece

  What About the Children?

  Actors who once portrayed children in King’s R-rated films speak out

  Secrets Best Left Buried

  King speaks with EW about Pet Sematary

  The Shawshank Redemption

  Morgan Freeman and Tim Robbins in lockup

  The Green Mile

  The late Michael Clarke Duncan’s defining role

  Long Live the King

  Filmmakers and novelists pay homage to the writer’s giant influence and legacy

  Visual Index

  The expansive Stephen King publishing empire

  By the Numbers

  One last salute to the prolific author

  Some of the articles here appeared in a 2017 special edition (cover above), which was on newsstands prior to the release of It Chapter One.

  Send in the Clown

  INSIDE THE TERRIFYING 2017 AND 2019 IT FILMS

  ILLUSTRATION BY ROBERT SAMMELIN

  A Very Scary Sequel

  IT CHAPTER TWO

  Fright Club

  ALL GROWN UP, THE MEMBERS OF THE LOSERS’ CLUB ARE CALLED BACK HOME TO CONFRONT THE TRAUMA OF THEIR PAST IN DIRECTOR ANDY MUSCHIETTI’S TERRIFYING IT CHAPTER TWO.

  By Joe McGovern with reporting by Anthony Breznican

  The Losers, reunited. From left: Richie Tozier (Bill Hader), Beverly Marsh (Jessica Chastain), Bill Denbrough (James McAvoy), Eddie Kaspbrak (James Ransone), Mike Hanlon (Isaiah Mustafa) and Ben Hanscom (Jay Ryan).

  AS SHE STARED AT THE TWO PHOTOGRAPHS, Jessica Chastain was puzzled. It was the fall of 2016, and the Oscar-nominated actress had received a message from her friend Andy Muschietti, the director of Chastain’s 2013 sleeper hit Mama. Muschietti was in production on the long-awaited big-screen adaptation of It, based on Stephen King’s classic 1986 novel about a shape-shifting monstrosity that terrorizes a small town in Maine, preying mainly on children because of their acute sense of fear.

  “Andy sent a side-by-side picture of me and Sophia,” says Chastain, referring to young actress Sophia Lillis, who Muschietti had cast in It as Beverly, the sole female member of the teenage Losers’ Club. The seven outcasts band together to take on the creature, which most often adopts the shape of a sinister sewer-dwelling clown called Pennywise. “And he was like, ‘What do you think?’ I was like, ‘I don’t know. What is it?’ ”

  It, as it happened, was about to be the basis for their latest collaboration. For the second chapter of his horrifying adaptation of King’s novel, Muschietti needed a new cast of adult actors to play the grown-up versions of the members of the Losers’ Club. Although the 1,100-plus-page book alternated between following the characters as children and adults, Muschietti had eliminated the grown-up plotline to focus only on the kids’ story the first time around. The gamble paid off. Audiences freaked for It, which soon became the most successful King adaptation ever (earning more than his top four biggest hits combined) and the highest-grossing horror movie of all time.

  Now it was time for the adults’ part of the tale. Within months of the first movie’s release, Chastain was cast to play Beverly in It Chapter Two, set 27 years after the events of the first film. A sexual-abuse survivor, Beverly is now a successful fashion designer in Chicago when she gets word that the demagogic force has come back to her hometown. (A gay man played by Canadian filmmaker Xavier Dolan becomes the victim of a deeply unsettling hate crime and It’s first fatality.) The news cracks open memories she’d locked away. “I love fashion designers,” says Chastain, “but, yes, Beverly’s job is a metaphor for her very strong exterior. She’s hiding something, obviously, from a lot of people.”

  Chastain, whose record of playing strong women includes leads in Zero Dark Thirty and Molly’s Game, admits, “You have to be careful not to be the girl who’s standing around for the men to carry through the story.” (In a much-discussed scene in King’s novel, teenage Beverly has sex with all six of her friends—a sequence that the author himself admits has not aged well.) But the actress trusted Muschietti and his sister Barbara, a producer on both It films, and the bench of talent who were cast as her fellow Losers.

  They include James McAvoy as Bill, now a successful horror novelist living in Los Angeles, and Bill Hader as Richie, who grew up to be a fast-talking radio deejay. (Both actors costarred with Chastain in the indie The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby.) Eddie (The Wire’s James Ransone) owns a limo company in New York, Ben (Jay Ryan of the CW’s Beauty & the Beast) is an architect in Nebraska, Stan (Andy Bean) runs an Atlanta accounting firm, while Mike (former football pro and Old Spice pitchman Isaiah Mustafa), now a librarian, is the sole member still living in Maine and the first to know when It is back. None of the seven have had children of their own.

  “That’s an interesting thing in the book as well,” says McAvoy, pointing out the “little Freudian” traits that link the characters, even though they’ve all lost touch after 27 years. “You come back to your old town, and you’re going to have epiphany moments. That’s what makes the story interesting as a universal experience, even beyond the supernatural experience. We’re the safest people we could be around, and we also remind each other of the most horrible things.”

  The adult actors took cues from their teenage counterparts, who also appear in flashbacks in the second film. “Finn [Wolfhard] gave me a good road map for how to play Richie,” says Emmy winner Hader (HBO’s Barry) of his jokester character. Kiwi actor Ryan received something even more special from Jeremy Ray Taylor, whose Ben endures bullying over his weight in the first movie: a letter from teenage Ben to adult Ben. “It was all about how ‘I hope I’m not lonely when I’m an older man, and I hope I have the guts to reveal my feelings,’” says Ryan. “It was all this teenage fear, told with such incredible sweetness, and I just needed to harness that feeling to play Ben.”

  Even for the adults, there is plenty of reason to feel fearful, however—It is out for revenge. “The arc of the first movie is that he, for the first time, expe
riences fear himself,” says actor Bill Skarsgård, who plays the villain. “It fuels hatred and anger toward the kids, who will be adults in this one, so I think there might be an even more vicious Pennywise. He’s really going after it.”

  Which is saying something. In the first chapter, whether poised quietly in a storm drain or leaping from a projection screen like a demonic ape, Skarsgård delivered a performance in the role that was a geyser of terror—and a pop-culture touchstone, as the character was evoked in politics and a million social media memes. Now that he has cause to be mad as hell, look out.

  While making the first film, Muschietti deliberately sequestered Skarsgård away from the child stars in order to capture a genuine reaction when he appeared. This time around, the 6-ft.-4 Swedish actor was allowed to socialize with his adult costars. “But seeing Bill in the makeup really brings out our inner child,” says Ryan. “Watching him up close is really quite astounding. Even to us adult characters, he’s still so towering and intimidating.”

  But Pennywise is only one of the fear factors in It Chapter Two. Chastain revealed that one sequence contains the largest amount of blood ever used in a horror-film scene. There will be more glimpses of Pennywise’s mythical Deadlights, seen briefly by Beverly in the first film when the clown’s mouth opened like a wood chipper. Asked to describe the film’s visual style, cinematographer Checco Varese says with a sinister laugh, “Imagine you’re in a small sailboat surrounded by thunder and lightning.”

  Of course, horror films stoke the attraction-repulsion center of our brain. We pay good money to be on that little sailboat in the storm. In an ironic twist worthy of King, Skarsgård found himself haunted by his creation. After the first film wrapped production, he reveals, “I was home, done with the movie, and I started having very strange and vivid Pennywise dreams. Every night he came and visited.”

  That is what’s scariest about monsters. They might be defeated, but they never really go away. Regardless of what happens at the end of It Chapter Two, expect a rush of blurry orange Pennywise sightings when you open your eyes outside the theater. And when you close them.

  Beverly, Mike and Ben face their fears.

  Pennywise might have been defeated by the Losers once, but It’s back now—and searching for revenge.

  The Losers’ Club originally numbered seven. Not everyone makes it back to Derry as an adult.

  Director Andy Muschietti with the young cast of It Chapter Two.

  Above: The adults retrace the steps they took as children, starting with an abandoned house, and end up in the sewers (below) yet again.

  Q&A

  INTERVIEW

  IT COMES BACK

  Director Andy Muschietti explains how his second film set in Derry lives up to its frightening predecessor. BY ANTHONY BREZNICAN

  Director Andy Muschietti on-set of It Chapter One, with Bill Skarsgård (Pennywise) in background.

  Do you feel like you have more resources this time around, after the success of It Chapter One? How did that change things?

  There’s two groups of Losers. [The movie is] bigger in terms of scope and size. I could get more things. I was pretty limited on the first one, so I had to basically bite my tongue and just do the best with what I could. This is a bigger movie; I still have limitations, because of course it doesn’t matter the budget that you have, it’s always less than you want. But in general I feel more comfortable than the first one. I have more toys. Tools.

  What would you tell people to expect from this film? You’re taking the rest of the book, but you’re adding to it as well.

  I think people who love the first one will love the second one. The emotional journey is probably doubled. The stakes, they are doubled. It’s a movie that plays in two timelines, and so it plays with nostalgia a lot, even more so than the first one. My aspiration is that you engage emotionally with the Losers as 40-year-old people, and you remember them as they were, with all the feelings of loss and love and nostalgia that happens in the story. Unlike the first one, this [movie] deals with the fear that people have in their adult life, so I think people will relate a lot with what the Losers are going through.

  What scares an adult that’s different from what scares a kid?

  I think Stephen King said it, but being a child is learning how to live, and being an adult is learning how to die.

  Learning how to let go.

  It’s about change; it’s about fear of accepting the things that you don’t like in life. Fear of death, fear of depression, fear of exposure, of accepting your identity, fear of going crazy, fear of mental illness. Fear of death is at the bottom of it. This is basically the fear that these people carried through 27 years. That’s why they didn’t change. That’s why I think It is a deeper story, because basically it talks about trauma, the traumatic experiences that are engraved in our souls. If you don’t face them, then they consume your spirit and your soul. That’s what’s at the bottom of It. In this second [film], you see some relapsing. Fears that you think the Losers overcame in Chapter One actually got worse.

  It’s a very grown-up thing to want to solve a mystery or understand a tragedy. Is that part of being a grown-up Loser, figuring out what actually It is?

  The journey is about understanding yourself. That’s what’s great about the story, because you might think that it’s about understanding It to overcome your fears, and it’s ultimately about understanding yourself and overcoming and facing your own fears. So it really doesn’t matter what It is, because It only preys on your insecurities. And It is of course a metaphor for fear itself. That entity doesn’t exist in real life, except for what you give it.

  Does Pennywise change because of the fall at the end of It Chapter One? That’s the first time It feels fear.

  That makes [the creature] have an insight, but it doesn’t make him a better person! [Laughs] It just makes him worse. He basically wants revenge. It makes him angry. He’s not a learning creature.

  The Losers prepare for a scene.

  All You Have to Fear

  Fear IT Self

  THREE DECADES AFTER STEPHEN KING’S CHILD-SNATCHING CLOWN FIRST INSPIRED NIGHTMARES, PENNYWISE CAME BACK, READY TO FEED ON THE FEARS OF A NEW GENERATION. By Anthony Breznican

  IT HAS NO NAME, NO FACE. IT IS INFINITE, ageless, immortal. It feels only hunger. But It has a favorite form. And ever since Stephen King first published his epic 1986 novel with the two-letter name, clowns just haven’t been the same.

  In 2017’s It Chapter One, director Andy Muschietti introduced a brand-new audience to the devilish Pennywise the clown, but the terrifying thriller also managed to serve as the crown jewel in a renewed interest in King’s work. The godfather of horror influenced countless fellow novelists and contemporary filmmakers and screenwriters with his imagination-busting, genre-spanning range of tales, and those admirers are in the midst of returning the favor. Not only are new novels published every day that owe him a debt of gratitude, but his classic work is being resurrected on the screen with this movie as well as the recent Pet Sematary, director Mike Flanagan’s upcoming Doctor Sleep, TV adaptations of Mr. Mercedes and Castle Rock—and even more on the horizon.

  King has been publishing consistently for more than four decades, with barely a blank spot in his bibliography apart from his recovery from a near-fatal crash in 1999, when a careless driver ran him over while the author took a walk on a rural Maine road. In recent years King’s output has redoubled. But It . . . It is a landmark among King’s work, one of the most chilling (and widely read) books he has ever written. And it’s still hungry for more.

  ANYONE WHO GREW UP READING KING knows about the shape-shifting super-natural presence dwelling in the sewers of Derry, nourishing itself on fear and anger. The creature likes to assume the identity of a yellow-eyed harlequin that calls itself Pennywise. In the 1990 TV miniseries, he was brought to terrifying life by Tim Curry, a freakishly hard act to follow.

  For 2017’s big-screen adaptation, Bill Skarsgård (son of
Stellan, brother of Alexander and costar of TV’s Hemlock Grove), managed to step into the creature’s comically oversize shoes with aplomb and immediately curdled blood around the world. He even gave director Muschietti the creeps. “He started doing things in the audition that were like . . . what?” the filmmaker recalls. “His face contorts in very weird ways. He has these eyes that are the scariest thing. He can be very scary.”

  The eyes. Yikes. Even though Skarsgård is wearing amber lenses, he has a real-life trick that schoolkids might use to make one another’s skin crawl. When Muschietti told the actor that he intended to employ visual effects to make Pennywise’s eyes move independently of each other, Skarsgård declared, “I can do it!”

  The filmmaker waggled his fingers in front of his eyes, indicating pinwheeling pupils. “I was like, ‘Whoa. I never saw someone do that voluntarily,’” he said.

  Ahead of the movie’s release, the filmmakers spoke to EW in the production office on the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank. Muschietti’s sister Barbara Muschietti, a producer of It, jutted out her jaw and contorted her mouth. “[Skarsgård] does something with his lip that’s freaking impossible,” she said. “I don’t know if people are aware what a great actor he is. Meet him in person and he’s stunningly handsome, but he doesn’t care. He’s completely unaware—and if he is aware, he doesn’t give a s---. He’s very brave.”

  Andy Muschietti agrees, saying many actors were scared off by Pennywise. “This is a role that a lot of people would turn down because they don’t even want to try, since Tim Curry’s performance was iconic,” Muschietti said. “But [Skarsgård] said, ‘Let’s just do it.’”

  MOST PEOPLE WHO PLAY ANTAGONISTS always search for the humanity in the role. They often claim their character isn’t even a “villain” but rather misunderstood or misguided. Skarsgård says the key to Pennywise was ignoring all that empathy. This is a monster, not a man.