Greetings, and welcome back to Horror Business, the podcast that on which everything floats…and now that you’re here with us, you’ll float too.

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We apologize in advance for the sound quality of this episode at times, as we had an issue with the Skype connection.

This episode we are joined by Brendan Foley of Black Sun Dispatches and our first returning guest John Wren of The Mandate (both of which are available at www.cinepunx.com) to help us tackle Andy Muschietti’s recent cinematic interpretation of Stephen King’s magnum opus: It.

We begin by talking about what horror related things we had done lately. Brendan talks about his recent rewatching of An American Werewolf In London for Cinapse’s Two Cents feature, and John talks about his rewatching of the Evil Dead trilogy. Justin is lame as hell and hasn’t done anything, but Liam discusses watching Paranorman with his daughter!

We open up by discussing our first introduction to Stephen King’s novel and the 1990 miniseries. Justin has already talked about his feelings on It in this piece he wrote for Cinepunx and the review he wrote for It as well as the episode of Test Patterns he wrote into the matter, so we don’t need to hear from him at all on the matter. Brendan talks about reading the book for the first time in middle school and how it was his introduction to horror, but also admits to not revering the book the way many King fans (like Justin) do. He discusses the shortcomings of some of King’s longer works, and how often King does best when he’s writing short and streamlined works. John talks about how he read the book relatively early on as well, as it was introduced to him by an uncle who got him into Stephen King. He talks about how in his opinion It is the best representation of Stephen King, and how the book actually magnifies many of King’s strength as a writer. Justin briefly talks about how the weird cosmic Lovecraftian stuff at the end of It was actually what sold him totally on the book, and how Bill Denbrough’s dream at the end of leaving Derry for the first time is an incredibly powerful scene for him. There is some discussion on King’s style vs. Lovecraft, in that King falls short of Lovecraft in that he explains too much and it loses some of it’s impact. Liam tells a very tender and personal story on his introduction to It that you need to listen to and won’t be summarized here. He also talks about how he realized only recently how deeply the book affected him as a person. There’s talk about how Muschietti’s version of the film failed to grasp the deep racism that is present in King’s novel and how that racism is essential to Henry’s relationship with Mike Hanlon.

We begin the actual discussion of the movie with John talking about how this movie went above and beyond his expectations. John briefly discusses his distaste for remakes, and how Muschietti went about remaking It the way they ought to be done. We talk about how John came around on this movie, and how one of his biggest problems with the film was the lack of Eddie Corcoran’s death. We talk briefly about the effectiveness of Eddie’s death in the book. We talk about some of the stuff Muschietti changed from the book,