The Eater of Worlds - and of Children: Reviewing IT

(A version of this article was published at The Talking Book, 2/10/17)

Many have praised the child actors in It - and with good reason; few have praised the film for being especially horrifying. The consensus growing that It is a ‘great modern horror’ seems to be more down to the former than the latter.

Does a horror even have to be scary to be great? The gut reaction is that how scary a film is can’t be the measure of how good it is because what you find scary is not what I find scary (even if we do have a lingering, if confused, sense that a comedy not being funny to us still makes it bad).

Most people jump at sudden noises and sights. And a given film can have better or worse jump-scares, it can trick your expectations to make a jump that bit scarier: the scare coming after the beat you expected it on or from this negative space and not that. But jumping is still instinctual. You didn’t learn from horror films to be scared when something jumps out at you.

Your fears, though, you had to learn from somewhere. If fears are subjective — and they must be, not even pain is universally feared — then no single film can feature what each person in the audience is going to find scary. But even with a niche fear of yours (wigs, cherry stones, toast eaten from the wrong side, at one time…