The “really disturbing” scene that was cut from the remake of ‘It’
The horror genre exists on a pretty clear hierarchy of taste, with commercially acceptable titles like Steven Spielberg’s Poltergeist, Ari Aster’s Hereditary and Robert Eggers’ The Witch thriving far away from the hardcore underground flicks that amuse and entertain a select group of twisted fans. Yet, sometimes the two ends of the spectrum meet in the middle, with Andy Muschietti’s adaptation of the Stephen King novel It terrifying fans upon its release in 2017.
Based on King’s 1986 tale and inspired by the 1990 miniseries of the same name, Muschietti’s film updated the story for modern audiences, taking several cues from Netflix’s Stranger Things and its depiction of young characters. Set in the late 1980s, the story follows a group of bullied children who work together to defeat a fantastical, shape-shifting creature who routinely kills the town’s young people.
Whilst the monster takes several forms, it mostly appears as a very creepy clown named Pennywise, played by Bill Skarsgård in the film, with this ethereal being fueling much of the film’s terror with his terrifying glare and vicious persona. Dispatching children with cruel violence, the movie has several memorable moments of visceral gore, but none of them would have compared to what Muschietti originally had in store.
Speaking on the Playback podcast, Skarsgård revealed that the production team had originally shot a scene exploring Pennywise’s origin that “turned out really, really disturbing”. The scene, which was later leaked before being removed from sight online, showed the monstrous clown taking a baby girl from her mother and devouring it in front of her face.
Understandably, the scene didn’t perform too well when it was shown to the studio, with it later being removed for being a little too graphic.
Despite this, the script from this moment was leaked online, with a snippet of the speech from Pennywise before the attack reading, “I will seek out thy bones and consume thy souls until nothing is left but the weeds! Or you will occupy yourself otherwise and not interfere. I will take her, and you will live, and those of thy other children – in whom I take no interest. And you will thank ME fever and frost did not damn you to the soil.”
There is indeed a moment in the original novel by Stephen King that told of Pennywise eating a child’s leg, but it seems the movie crew took this concept to the next level.
In a previous interview, King recalled how he came up with the iconic villain, stating: “I had an idea when I was in Colorado that I wanted to write a really long book that had all of the monsters in it…But then I thought to myself, ‘There out to be one binding, horrible, nasty, gross, creature kind of thing that you don’t want to see, [and] it makes you scream just to see it.’ So I thought to myself, ‘What scares children more than anything else in the world?’ And the answer was ‘clowns’. So, I created Pennywise the Clown.”
As the disturbing clip of Pennywise as a baby killer isn’t available, take a look at the trailer for the 2017 movie below.
