Director Andres Muschietti isn’t shying away from one of the most graphic and iconic scenes from Stephen King’s “It” in his upcoming film adaptation: Georgie’s death scene.
“Well, the Georgie death is pretty gruesome,” Muschietti told Collider in an interview this week, referencing the forthcoming horror remake. “It’s a bit of, this is how it happened. But you have to know something, which is, maybe that you shouldn’t publish it, but in this story, [spoiler warning!] there is no confirmation that Georgie is dead. He’s attacked by Pennywise, and he’s missing an arm, and he tries to get away from the sewer, like he’s dragged into it again, leaving a trail of blood, but his body is never found. And that’s what prompts Bill, that’s basically Bill’s motivation in the story, is finding Georgie alive.”
In King’s famous novel, Georgie follows his paper boat flowing down the stream during a rain storm in a yellow coat, only for it to fall into a sewer. When he tries to find it, Pennywise the Clown appears and teases him with the boat. When Georgie reaches down to grab it, Pennywise rips Georgie’s arm off, which leaves him to bleed to death.
The actual death scene was omitted from the 1990 TV mini-series. In the scene, Pennywise shows up in the sewer and offers Georgie the boat as well, but the actual death is left out — probably because it is incredibly gruesome.
Muschietti recently discussed another big scene from the book — one he decided to leave out of his movie: The big group sex scene in which the Losers lose their virginity as a group to become strong enough to fight Pennywise in Derry’s sewers. It was left out of the TV adaptation as well.
“Well, I think the whole story is a bit of a– approaches the theme of growing up, and the group sex episode in the book is a bit of a metaphor of the end of childhood and into adulthood,” he also told Collider. “And I don’t think it was really needed in the movie, apart that it was very hard to allow us to shoot an orgy in the movie so, I didn’t think it was necessary because the story itself is a bit of a journey, and it illustrates that.”
“It” arrives on Sept. 8 and stars Bill Skarsgard as Pennywise.