Stephen King’s ‘It’: Gritty Missing Person Posters Revealed, What They Say About Plot

More set photos and production info for the upcoming film adaptation of Stephen King’s It are being revealed in a steady stream now, and Fansided reports that the most recent items to be unveiled are some eerie missing person posters depicting the children snatched in Stephen King’s classic horror epic by Pennywise, the main antagonist who often takes the form of a sadistic clown. The horrifyingly real-looking posters instill a feeling of gritty dread and bode very well for the film on the whole.

The missing person posters were first revealed by YouTube content creator and big-time Stephen King fan Casey Oingo in the recently-posted fifth part of a video series he is creating that showcases images of the It set. The video depicts everything from trailers inhabited by the crew to alleys used during the shooting and mentioned in Stephen King’s book to signs hung behind the scenes on set, but the posters are by far the most exciting detail shown.

Part of the reason the posters are meaningful to Stephen King aficionados is because, as the Fansided piece points out, they are just so authentic-looking and relatable. Most people can definitely relate to seeing missing child posters as children or parents and thinking about the very real monsters that inhabit our everyday lives. The posters are truly scary in that they remind us how omnipresent evil is, but they are also fascinating in a morbid, not-to-be-spoken-of sort of way. Those everyday horrors that lurk under the surface of “normal” life were and are one of Stephen King’s favorite themes to invoke in his writing, and It, one of his most popular works, was laced with allusions to such themes.

The missing persons posters drawn up for the movie, which is directed by a huge Stephen King fan in Andy Muschietti, are obviously kept looking as true to life as possible in an effort to preserve that feel of real, gritty terror.

The Stephen King-esque style of scare that is invoked by the posters is very good news, as far as the many King-heads out there are concerned, because it lends more credence to the idea that the tone of the movie will be similar to the tone of Stephen King’s 1986 classic, a tone that combines childhood nostalgia and coming of age tales with shameless funhouse horror. If Muschietti and the crew can capture even half of the fantastic success Stephen King could, the film will be a success.

It has already been suspected that the plot and imagery of the upcoming adaptation will be more similar to Stephen King’s 1,140-page tome than was the 1990 TV miniseries adaptation of the same book. This conception is mostly thanks to the fact that photos from the set show the upcoming film will contain many, many elements discussed in detail in the book, but left totally absent from the 1990 remake. Some examples include the Oshawa haunted house that is presumably meant to represent Stephen King’s haunted house at 29 Neibolt Street and the Paul Bunyan statue in Derry, Maine. Both items were discussed by The Inquisitr, and they both seem to point to the idea that next year’s movie will do Stephen King’s brainchild a lot more justice than the TV miniseries did in terms of locations and plot points.

Although Stephen King fans have been able to rest easy knowing the plot of the movie will stay more faithful to classic Stephen King, however, there has been a lot of worry expressed by sites like Cinema Blend that the film might screw up in capturing Stephen King’s signature tone, just like the 1990 version did. The missing children posters do something in allaying those fears, though. They are relatable, they are undeniably creepy, and, most importantly, they suggest an air of not holding back when it comes to expressing cruel truths, something Stephen King does very well and from which the miniseries shied away.

It looks like next year’s cinematic rebirth of the Stephen King-penned Pennywise the monster and the Losers Club just might do justice to their source material.

The movie is set to be split into two parts, and part one hits theaters on September 8, 2017.

[Photo by iStock]