IT Chapter Two brought the stories of the Losers Club and the title creature to an end, but in the process, it made one of the book’s dumbest parts even worse. Stephen King’s IT was famously adapted into a miniseries in 1990, with Tim Curry playing the terrifying Pennywise the Dancing Clown, but it wasn’t until 2017 that IT made the jump to the big screen. Directed by Andy Muschietti, IT became a two-part adaptation, with the first movie covering the Losers Club’s first encounter with IT as kids and the second part reuniting with them now as adults, as they faced the title creature one final time.
IT Chapter Two saw the shapeshifting creature taking new and scarier shapes in order to get to the now adult Losers, but it also took more victims, among them Eddie Kaspbrak, who died in the sewers while the group tried to defeat Pennywise. Just like in the book, IT took its final shape in the sewers' scene, though not its real shape, as that one is quite difficult to define, so it took the closest shape to it that the human mind can comprehend. This is one of the most criticized parts of the book because of how silly it is, and unfortunately, the movie made it even worse by making one change to IT’s shape.
IT Chapter 2 Made IT's Silly Spider Form Even Worse
IT Chapter Two made a couple of changes to the Losers’ final battle against Pennywise, and it sent the whole group to the sewers to perform the Ritual of Chüd one more time. Thanks to the ritual, the Losers were able to trap IT’s true form, the Deadlights, in a sealing jar, but after a giant red balloon emerged from the jar and exploded, Pennywise reappeared, taunting them for failing to trap it. Pennywise then took the shape of a spider-clown hybrid and attacked the Losers. In the novel, IT also takes the form of a monstrous giant spider, though a female one laying eggs, but this transformation, while explained in the book, has been criticized as anticlimactic and silly, especially after everything IT had transformed into before that moment. The movie made it even worse by featuring a giant spider with the head and torso of Pennywise, making it quite laughable and not very scary. The miniseries stayed true to the book and transformed Pennywise into a giant spider, and while it wasn’t terrifying either, at least it didn’t have a clown head.
Why IT’s Final Form Is A Giant Spider
IT takes the shape of its target’s biggest fear, but explaining the creature’s real shape is complicated. IT originated in a void outside the regions of the macroverse, and it's from a species called Deadlights. These are writhing, radiant, orange lights that are a mysterious and deadly eldritch form of energy, and anyone who faces the deadlights either goes permanently insane or doesn’t survive the encounter. In the novel, Bill Denbrough got close to the Deadlights through the Ritual of Chüd, and described them as writhing, destroying orange lights and IT as an endless, crawling, hairy creature made of that same orange light.
Although IT and IT Chapter Two showed the Deadlights, in the novel IT takes the shape of a giant female spider as that’s the closest to its real shape that the human mind can comprehend, and this also hinted that IT might be a female entity. The clown-spider hybrid shape in IT Chapter Two didn’t have the desired effect on the audience, and instead of making this part of the novel better and more terrifying, it was a big step back.
