[dark music]
- I like supernatural, I like monsters...
[suspenseful music]
- "Alien" was the first movie
that I legitimately thought I had a disease afterward.
- [screams] - [screams]
- [moaning]
- John Carpenter's "The Thing" is the greatest monster movie
ever made.
- [snarls]
- The world of "A Quiet Place" felt very real.
Even an audience member, what you're drawn in with
is that you can't make a sound.
♪
- [roars]
- I don't think of King Kong as a monster
because you love him.
The real monsters are those bastards shooting him.
- [roars]
- It's a complete metaphor for the tribulations
of the black male in American white society.
- [laughing]
- Monsters are a different thing to different people.
- [breathing heavily]
- Some people are afraid of that huge ugly monster,
and some people are afraid of the existential monster.
- [laughs] - [screams]
- But if you can't kill it, well, there's no real story.
- [roars]
- [screeches] - Oh!
- [roars]
♪
- [screams]
[scary music]
♪
- [screaming]
♪
narrator: Horror is a big tent
with room for a circus full of attractions.
- Aah! [gunshot]
narrator: Outrageous slashers...
Apocalyptic comedies...
[roaring and gunshots]
Cringe inducing body horror...
♪
- [roars]
narrator: But many of us first came to the genre
for the monsters.
- Aah! [kids screaming]
- When you're a kid, you want monsters,
and the more monsters the better,
and if they've got zippers up their back,
that doesn't matter
as long as they're-- as long as they're monsters.
- [roaring]
- Later you get a little bit more discerning,
and you start to realize maybe the less you see the monster,
the scarier he might be.
narrator: There may be no better example
of the power of slowly revealing a monster
than Ridley Scott's "Alien."
[dramatic music]
- "Alien" was the first movie I saw
that I legitimately thought I had a disease afterwards.
It made me so incredibly anxious and uncomfortable.
- [hissing]
- It was all about the mouth inside the mouth.
That shiny slick chrome dome
with the mouth that comes out.
Krikik! Chhhk!
Pfft! Ugh.
- Get out of the room!
narrator: "Alien" grew out of a film called "Dark Star"
made by two promising USC film students,
John Carpenter and Dan O'Bannon.
O'Bannon took his comedic premise,
bedraggled astronauts doing battle with a monster
in a beaten up spaceship,
and turned it into one of the scariest screenplays
of all time.
- [screeching]
narrator: "Alien" tells the story
of a commercial starship crew
diverted from their mission
by a mysterious order from their employers
known only as The Company.
- Seems she has intercepted a transmission of unknown origin.
She got us up to check it out.
- A transmission? Out here?
- Yeah.
narrator: The film's main characters
are beleaguered Captain Dallas,
no nonsense Warrant Officer Ripley,
and Ash, the science officer with a hidden agenda.
- They come upon these eggs on a planet,
and while exploring, one of them is infected.
- [screaming]
- The creature,
which would come to be known as a facehugger,
you know, has attached itself to his face,
nobody knows what's going on,
and then of course, all hell breaks loose.
[high pitched tone] - Good God.
[sizzling]
- The crap's gonna eat through the hull.
- The performances in that movie are phenomenal.
I mean, the famous chestburster scene,
it is--I think the reason it's so potent
is because of the lead up to it feels so natural,
making it feel so familiar to you.
- The food ain't that bad, man.[laughs]
- You've been in a restaurant, you've been in a diner,
you've seen somebody, maybe someone started choking,
or someone has a heart attack.
That panic, it taps into that, and then it takes it into,
"What if a thing burst out of the..."
[laughs]
- [screams] - [screams]
- It takes it to this other level,
which is, um, so brilliant.
- [screeches] - Aah!
Oh! [moans]
Oh, God!
- It's obviously this kind of perverse
gender reversed birth scene, right?
- [squeals]
♪
narrator: The crew learns the hard way that,
an insect, the monster undergoes
a dramatic metamorphosis,
and to their bosses, it's a valuable commodity.
- [screaming]
- They have no way
of understanding what they're up against.
The corporation is hiding it from them.
The only person on the crew who understands
is the--the robot, the AI guy, you know,
whose lying the whole time.
- The company views its employees
as expendable, but...
the creature, which is not even a person
or being of any kind,
is more valuable than the people
that they have employed.
- There is an explanation for this, you know?
- [mutters]
narrator: "Alien's" dark view of labor relations
was a challenge to the status quo,
as was the film's disturbing production design
which powerfully associated sex with death.
H.R. Giger's biomechanical designs
played on the audience's deepest sexual anxieties.
- There's this Freudian term "Overdetermination."
An object in a dream
may have 15, 20, 1,000 different meanings.
"Alien" is probably the--the greatest example
of a movie that's overdetermined
in every possible direction,
because you have this space ship
that is basically shaped like
the lower half of a woman's body
with this vast vaginal opening in it,
and inside this vaginal opening are these eggs
that pop open and reveal these marauding penises
that impregnate people through their mouths
and make them burst open
and give birth to further marauding penises.
This is the essence of overdetermination.
There's-- How do you pick this apart?
narrator: The film's sexual politics,
subversive for its time,
are embodied in the figure of Ripley,
played by "Alien's" breakout star, Sigourney Weaver.
- "Alien," 1979,
had a female hero. An unexpected female hero.
- Who gets to go into the vent? - I do.
- No.
- Ridley Scott sets up the movie
where Dallas is the hero until Dallas is killed.
- Wait, the other way! [beeping]
[static] - Dallas?
- So that movie completely flips
in a way most movies couldn't even have imagined back then.
Ripley becomes the iconic hero.
[fan thumping]
narrator: By the end,
only Ripley is able to escape the doomed spaceship.
[explosion]
But the greatest test of her heroism is yet to come.
- I think it is one of the most terrifying scenes
in any movie is that last part of "Alien."
♪
- When she's alone in the--in the escape pod,
she's gonna go to sleep, it's gonna be fine,
and then she realizes the alien's in there,
and that it's in the wall.
- Aah!
- It's like getting in your car
and realizing there's a big python in the backseat,
and you turn around,
and the thing just starts to kinda uncoil,
and at some point, it's gonna realize
I'm in--in the car with it. [laughs]
And this is not gonna be good.
What do I do?
- [heavy breathing]
- You know, it's just one of those wonderful, like,
so well-conceived moments of horrific suspense.
- [screams]
- And what a beautifully paced film.
It was so slow and patient and quiet
and still,
and uh, always that-- that trembling horror
beneath the surface.
♪
narrator: One alien trapped on one spaceship
is frightening enough...
- But what if a horde of alien monsters
overran Earth?
[humming] [zapping]
- [screams]
narrator: Monsters from outer space invading planet Earth.
- [roars]
narrator: They've been a staple of horror movies
since the 1950s.
- [screaming]
narrator: And just when you think it's all been done...
someone comes along
and breathes new life into the genre.
narrator: Someone like John Krasinski
with his wildly successful film,
"A Quiet Place."
- [screaming]
- The plot of "A Quiet Place"
is that a new invasive predatory species
has attacked the human race.
[uneasy violin music]
- [growls]
- And these new creatures hunt us
and have exterminated, probably most of us
and they have done it through sound.
[tense music]
♪
So the only way humans are going to survive
is if they stay quiet,
and we follow a family which is trying to survive
on the fringes of the planet,
trying to carve out an existence in a farmhouse
in a world where we are no longer
the top of the food chain.
[beeping tune]
- [snarls]
- You're immediately thrown into this world
where you got John Krasinski, Emily Blunt, and their family
who are just-- They've got a ritual now.
Like, they have a ritual to their day to day life,
and I think the movie does it so brilliantly
showing you they only have to step on
these parts of the road, they can't step on that.
♪
- It's such an immersive film,
that what-- even as an audience member,
what you're drawn in with is that you can't make a sound.
[tense music]
- [grunts]
- Even the people eating popcorn next to you
are making you jump.
♪
- What I admire so much about "A Quiet Place"
is that everything that happens
and the whole--the whole setup of the movie is--is organic.
- [screeches]
- The idea of sound
being the enemy really.
So having a deaf character in the movie is genius
because conflict is immediately established.
[no sound]
narrator: For much of the film,
the monsters are only seen at a distance.
- [roar]
narrator: They're mysterious and unstoppable.
♪
- [snarling and roaring]
- When you can't see them clearly,
your imagination goes to work.
What must they be like?
How revolting are they?
- [snarling]
- "A Quiet Place" creature, at the end of the day,
was an extremely fast, you know,
a blur of-- of just limbs going by.
So we looked at all sorts of creature forms,
proportions, to try and find the right one for John.
I saw those elements that he happened to like,
these long attenuated front legs
and kinda like that hyena low squat with the hind legs.
- [snarls]
narrator: To survive, the film's heroes
have to find the monsters' hidden weakness.
- There needs to be an Achilles' heel.
If you can't kill it, then well, there's no real story.
The Achilles' heel of this creature
was the fact that it was a giant ear.
[loud ticking]
[timer ticking]
[rings]
- [snarls]
- Having this Achilles' heel allowed there to be a way
to have a narrative arc that we have this discovery,
and we have a weapon now to hopefully take them down.
[feedback tones]
- [snarls]
- And there's such an emotional charge at the end
when Emily Blunt and her daughter
discover how to take these things out.
I saw the movie at South by Southwest
and when she cocks that shotgun,
the entire audience lost their minds
because what Krasinski did so well
is just take you on a very strong emotional journey
and made it a great creature feature as well.
narrator: "A Quiet Place" had a message about humanity
that is now more relevant than ever.
- What will save us in the end from destroying ourselves
is our ability to adapt.
Most species cannot do that. We can adapt to a new paradigm
especially when survival is on the line.
- [snarls]
narrator: The aliens in "A Quiet Place"
were forces of unstoppable evil.
But one of the most famous monsters of all time
is neither good nor evil-- he's simply Kong.
- [roars]
- He was a king in the world he knew,
but he comes to you now a captive.
Ladies and gentlemen,
I give you, Kong, the eighth wonder of the world!
- [roars]
- [screams]
narrator: From his star making first appearance in 1933...
To his latest incarnation
as an enormous hairy superhero...
- [roars]
King Kong has captured the imagination
of every monster lover.
[crowd screaming]
What explains his enduring appeal,
and why, despite its dated special effects,
is the original "King Kong"
still considered one of the greatest monster movies
of all time?
- The original 1933 Kong is-- it's the Beatles.
You know? It's Elvis Presley, it's...
This is what this is.
This is the best version of this thing.
narrator: The story is simple.
A movie producer takes a film crew
to an uncharted tropical island
and discovers the ultimate special effect.
[suspenseful music]
- [screaming]
The towering ape-like monster
the natives call Kong.
- [roars]
- We came here to get a moving picture,
and we found something worth more
than all the movies in the world.
narrator: He captures Kong and takes him to New York
intending to exploit him for profit.
Kong escapes but is undone
by his affection for a dazzling starlet.
In the early 1930s, no one had ever seen anything like it.
"King Kong" was a smash.
- Even though it was made in 1933,
the effects,
the stop-motion animation of the King Kong character
by Willis O'Brien is just really incredibly entertaining.
You know, he fights a giant snake.
He fights an Allosaurus.
He fights pterodactyl.
There's all kinds of great shots
of people being crushed by King Kong's foot.
He's eating people.
- Aah!
- He's destroying things.
So it's really a movie that really delivered.
- There was something dark about it.
The black and white just makes it otherworldly,
and it's the weird sexual edge of it
with Kong and, you know, Ann Darrow.
None of the other movies ever came near it.
- [screaming]
- When you look at the white woman in peril,
which was such a big deal
back in the era when "King Kong" was made,
this idea black male energy as a menace
and as a menace specifically to white women,
and "King Kong,"
it seems kind of obvious that there are racial undercurrents.
- [screams]
♪
[crowd screaming]
- It's complete metaphor
for the tribulations of the black male
in American white society.
- [speaking German]
- Ah!
[laughs]
- I know a lot of people watched "Inglourious Basterds"
and after that card game,
people went back, and they rewatched the film
in a way that they never had before.
- I'm sure there's quitea few subtextual writers
who've written about itbefore "Basterds."
- I'm not saying that you were the first one
to write about it. - Yeah, yeah.
- But you were the first one to put in a pop culture movie...
- Put it in a pop culture... - That has nothing to do
with King Kong or subtextual slavery.
- Yeah, yeah.
- You're just watching this war movie,
and suddenly you get this nugget of information
that really stuck with a lot of people.
[horrific musical sting]
narrator: Kong of 1933
was created using stop-motion animation.
Small figurines were fabricated, posed,
and photographed one frame at a time,
by cinematic pioneer Willis O'Brien.
- The true auteur of "King Kong"
is Willis O'Brien.
Because if you look at
the original posters of "King Kong,"
Kong is far more a monster
and like, he has teeth, that like--
almost like a saber-toothed tiger.
- Yeah, canine teeth, yeah. - The canine, rrr!
Willis got rid of all of the monstrous touches,
and the whole idea
was to make him as human as possible,
and so we respond to Kong,
not as monster, but as a true character.
That is why
that movie not--not justa movie about a giant monkey.
It's a character that hassurvived since the '30s
as a pop cultural icon.
- [roaring]
- [screaming]
narrator: "King Kong" was so iconic
that no one dared to remake it
until maverick producer Dino De Laurentiis
mounted a production in the mid-1970s.
[dark music]
- My relationship with King Kong is--
started really with-- with the '70s "King Kong"
with Jeff Bridges and Jessica Lange.
That was amazing to me as a kid.
- "King Kong" is mostly played by Rick Baker
who is an incredible makeup artist.
One of the great guys
and built this incredible ape suit
and really played the character of Kong.
- He wore the mask, and of course, the eyes were his
with contact lenses, and I think that was really key.
You know, everything else, the facial movements,
all of that was done via animatronics.
[crowd screaming]
narrator: In 2005, director Peter Jackson
released a lavish remake of "King Kong"
using photorealistic digital effects.
- [growling]
- I had the time of my life
working on Peter Jackson's "King Kong."
[grand music]
It was his, like, love letter to this old masterpiece.
narrator: Jackson's Kong was in a way
played by another man in a suit--
a motion capture suit worn by actor Andy Serkis.
Serkis's performance was painted over by a computer
then placed in digital environments.
The technology had changed,
but the story followed the same tragic arc.
- [roars]
[dramatic music]
- I don't think of King Kong as a monster
because you love him.
♪
- [roars]
- He's--he's got--he's got a sweetness to him.
You kind of root for him,
and the real monsters are those bastards shooting him.
- Well, gentlemen, the airplanes got him.
[somber music]
- Oh, no.It wasn't the airplanes.
It was beauty killed the beast.
♪
- Fly, fly! Three...
- But no monster with good box office truly dies.
- [roaring]
[both screaming]
- [roars]
- "Kong on Skull Island." Like, I watched it,
and I thought, "These fight scenes when he's fight--
are so spectacular..."
"But I feel like I don't care
that I'm watching it at the same time."
Like, it looks incredible,
but I think it just looks so incredible
that it's, you know, it's kinda like...
sometimes you see an old black and white photo
that's out of focus,
and there's just something about it.
- Each remake of it comes out
and within ten years it is made obsolete.
[suspenseful music]
Because all their special effects have moved on,
and now it's a whole different thing.
But the original "King Kong" always will be a go-to
to both film fans, children seeing the movie,
anything.
- [roaring]
narrator: It took decades for other giant creatures
to challenge King Kong's place on the monster throne.
When they came, they came in droves.
- [roaring]
narrator: The Japanese have a word for them...
[crowd screaming] - [roars]
narrator: Kaiju.
Giant monsters.
[dramatic music]
Oversized and unstoppable, the spawn of the atomic age
have rampaged across movie screens for nearly 70 years.
- You know the atomic bomb brought World War II to an end,
but on one level, it didn't.
It was just the beginning of new anxieties
and new fears
and the prospect of an even more terrifying war to come.
This was where the very new and original
kinds of, uh, fright films of the 1950s
came from--atomic anxieties.
- Five, four, three,
two, one.
♪
narrator: To Japanese audiences,
the nightmarish imagery of Ishiro Honda's "Godzilla"
was a jarring reminder of a national trauma.
It was made just after nine years
after atomic bombs leveled the cities of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki.
- [roars]
♪
[crowd screaming]
narrator: The film begins
when an H-bomb test rouses Godzilla...
- [roars] - [screams]
narrator: A radioactive monster
addicted to mass destruction.
Haunted scientist, Dr. Serizawa,
has invented a device that could stop the monster
but he's afraid his invention
will be turned into another super weapon.
- [speaking Japanese]
- It was a very somber film,
and there was nothing campy
about that very first Godzilla film.
It's a very disturbing film, even today.
narrator: In the end, Serizawa kills the monster and himself
taking his lethal invention to his grave.
- [speaking Japanese]
- This was a movie that really caught the zeitgeist of Japan,
postwar Japan,
and it's interesting that none of the other Godzilla pictures
are as serious as the first one.
- [roaring]
- They're all kind of stepping on tanks, you know, basic.
narrator: "Godzilla's" enormous popularity
at the box office brought the monster back to life
for a series of entertaining
but increasingly outlandish sequels.
- With sequel after sequel
and reappearance after reappearance,
uh, Godzilla ultimately became
a kind of a creature of-- of fun.
- [roaring] - [roaring]
- Only then to be, uh,
resurrected as a terrifying monster again.
So it's like there's a pendulum swing
with--with monsters.
narrator: Godzilla used the figure of the monster
as a stand-in for manmade disaster.
♪
[crowd screaming]
The same can be said of "Cloverfield."
- [roars]
- "Cloverfield" is probably one of my favorite monster movies
of recent memory.
[group screaming]
Take "Godzilla" but filter it through a found footage movie
and make it feel very grounded and feel very real.
[crowd screaming]
narrator: "Cloverfield" tells the story
of a group of friends trying to survive
a giant monster attack on New York City.
[crowd screaming]
The shaky handheld footage is unmistakably similar
to the videos shot during the terrorist attacks
of September 11th, 2001.
[crowd screaming]
The Cloverfield monster was an all CGI creation
conceived by producer J.J. Abrams
and designed by producer Neville Page.
- J.J. didn't really specify at the beginning anything
other than he wanted it to be large and terrifying.
It's a newborn, and this infant is horrified
and afraid of this new world that's going on around him,
and that gave us motivation to crash into buildings.
As it's turning around, it's clumsy.
It's just starting to develop its ability to walk.
- They just hit! They hit it with--
Oh, my God!
narrator: Tapping into the memories of the chaos
of the 9/11 attacks
grounded "Cloverfield" in real life horror.
- Oh my God.
narrator: And it gave audiences a safe way
to deal with national trauma.
- As a film maker, as a storyteller,
writer, or whatever it is,
you will be fed with the emotions
of the world you live in at the time,
and it will come out somehow creatively.
Definitely the horror movies in general
and possibly also monsters more specifically
are a product of their world.
narrator: In the paranoid world
of John Carpenter's "The Thing,"
anyone can be a monster in disguise.
- Aah!
[horrific musical sting]
narrator: In the early days of movies,
monsters were distorted versions of humans,
actors concealed under incredible makeup.
narrator: By the 1950s,
the state of the art was the full body monster suit
as well as the giant creatures made out of papier-mâché.
♪
[horrific musical sting]
[both screaming]
In the 1980s, there was another seismic shift.
New materials let special effects artists
upgrade the rubber monster suits with robotic parts
leading to amazing creations
like Stan Winston's "Pumpkinhead."
And the queen mother in James Cameron's "Aliens."
♪
The era's crowning achievement
was John Carpenter's "The Thing"...
- [snarling]
narrator: What many consider
the greatest monster movie of all time.
12 men stationed in an Antarctica weather base
find themselves under siege
by a shapeshifting monster.
It infiltrates the base disguised as a friendly Husky,
but this is a very bad dog.
[dogs barking]
[scary music]
- The creature effects were so mind blowing
and so outrageous
because there were no rules to the monster.
[dogs barking]
- So the first time that the dog goes into the kennel
and splits open and just starts turning into the--
I didn't even know where to look or what to think.
- [roars]
narrator: Special effects wizard Rob Bottin
created an ever-changing monster.
[skeleton crackling]
An alien shape-shifter that absorbed bits and pieces
of life forms from around the galaxy
and can imitate anything it touches.
- [bellows]
- What's great about that film
and the creature designs in "The Thing"
is the fact that
it's trying to evolve in a very short period of time,
and each version, it's a bit of a mess.
- [roaring]
[chirping]
[screeching]
- And that's also what lends itself to be so horrifying
because if it came out as a fully resolved creature,
I don't think that would've been anywhere near as scary
as these mutations that you felt the pain of it,
even an alien,
that it's assimilating these people.
You felt the pain that it's not quite figured out how to be,
uh, fully resolved.
- [gagging]
narrator: Trapped in a nightmare,
the men are consumed by fear and paranoia.
[overlapping yelling]
narrator: Any one of them
could be the monster in disguise.
- It all kinda deals with the fear of conformity
but also trusting people.
I think that's a thing that a lot of people fear,
you know?
- Trust is a tough thing to come by these days.
- "The Thing," for a film
that has some of the best monster effects of all time,
even by today's standards,
still the most tense scene
revolves around them giving a blood test.
- You see, when a man bleeds,
it's just tissue.
[tense music]
But blood from one of you things
won't obey when it's attacked.
- Because you haven't seen, like, a massive, um,
shapeshifting monster in your lifetime,
but everybody's cut their thumb.
Everybody knows what that feels like.
♪
- They're seeing who's the monster,
and that's a beautiful analogy of, you know, life,
like, you know, the banality of evil.
You could--the monster could be sitting right here.
Ted Bundy looked like a normal guy.
- Palmer now.
- The climax is in such a great shock
where they're holding the Petri dish.
It wasn't until I watched it for the third time
that I realized,
"Oh, this is like a fake hand that he's holding,"
and it's a fake hand because a monster is gonna go whaaaa
out of the Petri dish.
- We'll do you last.
- [screeches]
♪
- I've always been a big proponent of special effects
that are practical, that happen on the set.
In "The Thing" the chest that splits open
really sort of amazed everybody
standing around.
- Clear. - Clear.
- [bellowing] - [screaming]
- As a result, you get a reaction I think,
from the--from the characters and the actors
that is a lot more significant
than if they were just looking at a green object.
[dramatic music]
narrator: For an aggressively violent film,
"The Thing" ends on a note of quiet paranoia--
two men about to die,
neither one sure if the other is the monster.
- Won't last long though.
- Neither will we.
narrator: "The Thing" is now considered a classic,
but the film's horrific imagery did not go over well
in 1982.
- Well, "The Thing" had the unfortunate bad luck
to come right after "E.T.,"
and people were looking for lovable aliens,
and they certainly didn't get any in "The Thing."
I just remember how devastated everybody was
that the picture didn't-- not only didn't it open,
it got bad reviews.
People were saying, you know,
"This is--this is practically pornography,
this is so violent."
Honestly, it's stood the test of time
and now, you know, people have a chance to appreciate it.
- Aah!
narrator: Today the ever-improving quality
of digital effects makes it possible
to bring even stranger monsters to the screen...
- [cries]
narrator: Drawn from the darkest parts of our psyches.
- [roars]
- Stop following me!
- I'm gonna--I'm gonna get you outta here.
narrator: Two recent films, "It Chapter Two..."
- [screams] - [screams]
narrator: And "Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark..."
Are the state of the art of modern monster movies.
- [screams]
narrator: Both tell supernatural stories
about human fear,
and both blend practical effects with computer graphics
to push creature design to the limit.
- [shrieks]
- I know it's kind of in vogue to sort of crap on CG
and just go to practical,
but not all practical effects look great, you know?
So it is finding the balance between the two,
but when you solely rely on one or the other,
I do think they kind of need each other.
narrator: Adapted from the popular children's books,
"Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark"
follows a group of teenagers who break into a haunted house
and discover a book that seems to write itself.
- Oh, my God.
narrator: Over the next five days,
the unlucky teens fall victim
to a rogues' gallery of monsters.
- It has all these amazing creatures
that Stephen Gammell drew for the books,
and we just really made sure
that what we put in the movie was that.
- [screams] - [screams]
- We didn't want to reinvent the wheel here.
narrator: One of the most innovative monsters
in the film is the Jangly Man...
a creature that assembles and reassembles itself.
♪
- The Jangly Man was really tough because we had to, like,
he was gonna be so twisty and body parts
and coming together and doing all this and that.
So the combination of real effects,
an amazing contortionist,
and some digital enhancements.
- [snarls]
- To create what we were hoping for--an iconic face
and design, then make that come alive,
and there was a lot of challenges to that.
- [screams]
narrator: The monsters in "Scary Stories"
are all grotesque embodiments of teenage anxiety.
- Aah, aah!
narrator: From being suffocated
by a mother's love...
- [heavy breathing]
narrator: To being disfigured
by the world's angriest pimple.
- [moans]
[screaming]
narrator: Confronting the fears of youth
is also the central theme of "It Chapter Two,"
the sequel to Andy Muschietti's 2017 adaptation
of Stephen King's "It."
- [screeches]
- [screams] - Give me fat boy.
[screams]
narrator: The now adult members of the Losers Club
return to the town of Derry, Maine
to do final battle against their childhood nemesis.
- Your dirty little secret...
narrator: Pennywise the clown.
- One-nuh...
narrator: Bill Skarsgard once again
plays the demonic shapeshifter Pennywise.
- You're supposed to say three.
narrator: With the help of CGI,
his body constantly twists and morphs
into terrible new shapes that match his victims' fears.
- [screams]
- I go practical as much as--as I can,
but there's a limit,
and like, a lot of people complain about CG,
but CG can be great
if you bring an original design
and it's, like, executed properly.
- [grunting]
- I tend to draw a lot.
All the creatures that appear in my movies, I sketch first.
- [groaning]
narrator: One creature effect calls back to a famous monster
of the movies.
- I love horror movies.
I love--I grew up loving monster movies
and loving those kind of-- those kind of films,
and I was like, well, if you have a, you know,
head that turns into a spider,
I mean, that's from "The Thing."
- [snarls]
- And Andy was like, "Yeah, yeah, I know, yeah."
And we talked about it, and I was like,
I should say... - You gotta be [...] kidding.
- And I remember we watched it on my phone,
you know, to make sure we got the line right,
and I said it in the right cadence.
You gotta be [...] kidding.
- [laughing]
[screaming] - [roars]
- You're a weak old woman.
narrator: At the epic conclusion
of "It Chapter Two,"
the Losers Club finds the monster's Achilles' heel,
and they turn their own fears against him.
[all chanting]
- That's what both "It" movies are.
It's about people living in fear
and what the horrible things we do as--as human beings.
Pennywise is
the representation of fear.
[horrific musical sting]
- [cries]
- [laughs]
- That's why we make movies.
We want to people to see these movies
and try to understand
that that's the worst thing we can do, live in fear.
- [snarls] - [screams]
- [snarls]
- [screams]
- [grunts]
narrator: The monsters of the movies are from outer space...
- [snarls]
narrator: The creations of magic...
or the products of science gone wrong...
[thunder rolls]
But whatever they look like and wherever they're from,
at heart they are all walking, crawling,
or slithering representations of our very human fears...
- [roars]
narrator: The fears we must face and defeat
less they consume us all.
- [roars] - [roars]
- [snarls] - [screams]
[horrific musical sting]
[eerie music]
♪