People were talking about it.
Yes, it’s a movie where a killer clown murders helpless kids, but many people have gotten caught up over the omission of a scene from the book.
In the book, it is implied that the clown is only hunting down the kids in the town of Derry, so one of The Losers Club comes up with the idea for them all to have sex, thereby moving past the innocence of their childhood and into the realms of being an adult.
The new movie’s co-writer Gary Dauberman has already spoken about the scene in an interview with Entertainment Weekly.
“Besides Georgie in the sewer,” said Dauberman. “I think it’s the one scene that everybody kind of brings up and it’s such a shame. While it’s an important scene, it doesn’t define the book in any way I don’t think and it shouldn’t. We know what the intent was of that scene and why he put it in there, and we tried to accomplish what the intent was in a different way.”
Stephen King himself actually addressed the issue on his website stephenking.com, where he wrote:
“I wasn’t really thinking of the sexual aspect of it,” King wrote. “The book dealt with childhood and adulthood – 1958 and Grown Ups. The grown ups don’t remember their childhood.
“None of us remember what we did as children – we think we do, but we don’t remember it as it really happened.
“Intuitively, the Losers knew they had to be together again. The sexual act connected childhood and adulthood. It’s another version of the glass tunnel that connects the children’s library and the adult library.
“Times have changed since I wrote that scene and there is now more sensitivity to those issues.”
But that’s not the last thing King said on the issue. When contacted about it by Vulture, King responded with the following.
“That sounds like my statement,” he said. “To it I’d just add that it’s fascinating to me that there has been so much comment about that single sex scene and so little about the multiple child murders. That must mean something, but I’m not sure what.”
