San Diego Comic-Con 2017 is just getting started, although usually Wednesday – the Preview Night – is a little dead. Not so this year, as New Line Cinema brought three of their biggest upcoming horror titles to a wide audience. First, they started things off with Andy Muschietti’s IT, for which we were shown two clips and a new trailer. Then, a quick tease of the just-completed THE NUN, the latest film in the ever-expanding CONJURING universe. Finally, the crowd was shown all of ANNABELLE: CREATION, which will be released in just a few weeks.
Let’s get right to… IT.
Stephen King sent in a video intro giving his blessing to IT. The first scene shown gave us a look at The Loser’s Club hanging out together in their underwear. That’s right, everybody is stripped down to their tighty-whities. The scene starts with five boys – Bill, Ben, Richie, Stan and Eddie – looking over a fairly precarious cliff toward the water below. After hocking a few loogies, the boys begin to dare each other to jump in, with no one making the first move. From behind them come Bev (Sophia Lillis), who strips down to her underwear, runs right past them and jumps in. The boys, having been shown up by a girl, then man up and jump.
Then we get a montage of the kids playing in the water, with a few meaningful glances between Bev and Bill (Jaeden Lieberher) sprinkled in. Then a very amusing sequence where the boys all stand around gawking at Bev as she lays in the sun; she takes a glance their way and they all attempt to act casual (not very convincingly). Richie looks through Ben’s bag, which has a few books on the history of Derry within it. Ben (Jeremy Ray Taylor) then admits he’s been doing some research into the town recently, and has discovered a lot of people end up missing over the years, children especially.
The next sequence was the epic rock fight sequence between the Losers Club and Henry Bowers’ gang. Anyone familiar with Stephen King‘s novel and/or the TV mini-series knows that Bowers (Nicholas Hamilton) is the bane of our protagonists’ existence, consistently threatening and bullying them all summer. In this scene, they decide to take a stand after finding Bowers and his cronies torturing Mike Hanlon (Chosen Jacobs) near a creek. As his face is being pushed into the water, Mike sees Penywise (Bill Skarsgard) lurking in the nearby bushes, holding the severed arm of a child and waving it at him. Pretty unsettling stuff.
Bev throws a rock at Bowers, getting him right on the skull. After making an obscene comment about Bev, Bowers incurs the wrath of the Losers, as they begin pounding him with rocks. His friends eventually run away, but he is left laying on the creek. Before leaving, Richie says something to the effect of “Go blow your dad you mullet-wearing bitch!” (Not an exact quote but close.) The rock fight scene has Anthrax music playing over it, which makes it intense and actually rather funny.
We were then shown the new trailer for IT, which should be released online soon. I won’t go into it much, but I will say that it shows more Pennywise than we’ve seen up to this point. Expect it online either this weekend or early next week.
Next up we were shown a very quick teaser for THE NUN. In it, Taissa Farmiga walks around a stone convent on a foreboding night into a roomful of hunched over figures. They all stand up and turn toward her in creepy fashion. Naturally, she gets a great big scare before all goes to black. Really, this lasted about a minute, minute and a half, tops, and I doubt it will be released online. That said, perhaps a teaser for the film will be playing before IT when that opens on September 8th.
Oh, and there lots of creepy Georgie-looking dudes wandering around the theater before and after the screening. It’s kind of disconcerting seeing an old guy “portraying” a young kid, especially when he’s banging his head into a standee.