It · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A projector clicks through family slides in a garage. Ordinary pictures, the kind every family kept in a carousel. Then the carousel starts advancing by itself, faster than a hand could push it, the same frame stuttering, and something inside the photograph has moved. The kids are still standing in the beam when it comes out of the wall.

Hold onto that, because it is the film's architecture in one set piece. Derry is a surface, and the surface has something living under it.

Gilles Deleuze had a name for films built that way, and it isn't "horror." He called it naturalism, and he split it into two halves that only make sense together. The derived milieu is the world as given: a real place with real furniture, here a late-1980s Maine town rendered with almost boastful tactility — bikes, arcade cabinets, New Kids on the Block posters, the Barrens, the Kissing Bridge, a summer that looks like the best one you ever had. The originary world is what that place is a crust over. Not a different location. The same one, seen as raw appetite: standing water, a sewer, a rotting house on Neibolt Street, a thing that eats children on a schedule. Deleuze found this in Stroheim and Buñuel, where a drawing room turns out to be the lid on a swamp. Muschietti puts the swamp under the storm drains and lets the plumbing do the connecting. Beverly's bathroom erupts in blood; the sink is the seam.

Chung-hoon Chung, imported from Park Chan-wook's formally ravishing cinema, shoots the two worlds as two temperatures. Warm, lush, honeyed above. Cold and green below. That's what Deleuze means by an affective colour: a colour that soaks up a scene and becomes its feeling. You know which world a shot belongs to before anyone speaks.

This is also why Pennywise doesn't behave like a villain. A villain wants something you could refuse him. Deleuze's impulse-image is a creature of pure drive — hunger with a face, moving on a fixed downward gradient — and that is exactly the creature the film builds: It feeds on terror and manifests as whatever each child dreads. Bill Skarsgård plays the drive rather than the personality. The high drifting voice, the eye that wanders off its target, the smile that curdles a half-second after it forms: Deleuze would call that face a potisign, an intensive face, where feeling gathers in separate features straining toward a threshold instead of composing into an expression. Tim Curry's Pennywise was hosting a show. Skarsgård's hasn't finished deciding what shape to be.

And here is what the lens actually buys you. In naturalism, human characters are symptoms — the originary world speaking through them. So Henry Bowers with his knife, Beverly's father in the apartment, and the Derry adults who look at seven terrified kids and see nothing, are not a subplot running alongside the monster movie. They are the same drive at a smaller scale. The film keeps insisting on this and criticism keeps calling it theme; Deleuze lets you call it structure. Derry doesn't have a monster. Derry is how the monster surfaces.

Grief works the same way. Naturalism runs on fetishes, part-objects torn loose and overcharged, and this film has two great ones: a yellow raincoat that Bill cannot let go of, and the lair's collage of floating bodies, children reduced to hanging pieces of themselves.

One more formal choice, inherited from E.T. and The Goonies: the camera sits at kid height and crops adults at the waist or leaves them out entirely. That's the relative out-of-field made structural. The adult world is present the whole film, about six inches above the top of the frame, and it never comes down. A staging habit turns into the movie's moral claim.

Against that, the Losers. Deleuze calls a group filmed as one affective unit a dividual, and the ensemble grammar here comes straight from Stand By Me: overlapping cross-talk, walking-and-talking blocking, kids individuated by how they interrupt each other rather than by solo scenes. Jason Ballantine's braided cutting keeps seven legible while each one meets a bespoke terror alone. That braid is the argument. Fear works by isolation, so the cure is arithmetic — stop being seven.

Which brings up the strange thing about It, if you know the last fifty years of horror. Modern horror mostly lives in what Deleuze called the crisis of the action-image: characters who perceive perfectly and can do nothing, who can only watch. It refuses that. It runs the oldest shape in narrative cinema, the large form: an encompassing situation (Derry itself, its history of vanished kids — Deleuze's synsign) presses down until a decisive collective act transforms it, force against force, in a lair, at the bottom. That should feel antique in 2017. It doesn't, because the film makes the sensory-motor circuit its actual subject. To be a child in Derry is to see everything and be unable to act on it. Growing up means closing that gap. The horror arc and the coming-of-age arc aren't bolted together; they're the same movement, described twice.

The film is weakest where it trades in what Deleuze called the mark — the object you've been trained to read, the customary chain, quiet-then-loud. Wallfisch's music-box motif has taught you the chain by minute twenty. That's what the jump-scare complaints are really about: a mark is habit, and habit is the opposite of an encounter. The projector scene works because it's a demark, a familiar ritual going wrong in a way your reflexes can't pre-solve.

Its debts are legible and worth naming. Kubrick's The Shining for the gliding camera stalking children through architecture and a score that punctures silence with volume. Craven's A Nightmare on Elm Street for the predator tailored to one victim's private psychology — Muschietti's move is to lift that logic out of sleep and into a town, so you don't have to close your eyes to be found. The 1990 miniseries for the greasepaint the new performance deliberately distorts.

What it did next is mostly economic, and the reading should say so plainly: roughly $700 million, a September record, proof that R-rated non-franchise horror could open like a tentpole, an accelerated Stephen King boom. But there's a formal legacy too. It demonstrated that a monster could be a milieu rather than an opponent, and that a mass audience would still accept the full action-image if you made fear the thing that blocks it.

Watch it again and watch the frame line, where the adults get cut off. Watch the drains. Then ask whether the ending is a victory or an interval — the cycle has twenty-seven years to reload, and in naturalism the originary world never loses. It waits.