The construction of fear in It: reflections on Andy Muschietti’s film, in the light of the fantastic genre

Abstract

In 2017, Stephen King’s literary work It (1986) was made into a film by the hands of filmmaker Andy Muschietti. Born in Argentina in 1973, Muschietti gained notoriety in cinema due to the horror film Mama (2013). Muschietti has declared his passion for King’s work since he was 14 and acknowledged the challenge of adapting that novel of over a thousand pages for the screen. This article aims to make a reflection on the construction of fear in the film It (2017), in the light of studies in the fantastic genre. We build on the literary scholarship of Lovecraft (1973), Todorov (1981), Bauman (2008), França (2017) and Araújo (2018), among others, as well as Aumont (1995) and Messias (2016) in the field of film studies. We argue that, looking for tropes of the fantastic genre and considering a film to be a piece of text composed of sounds, images and shots, we can analyze how uncanny elements and other devices are deployed in It to build up the sensation of fear in the viewer.