Why does IT take the form of a spider? Spiders are one of humanity's ancestral fears, guaranteeing It at least a reflexive fear response from any human that it comes into contact with.
Why does it matter (in the book, anyway) that none of the Losers have kids? Because having children means having to put aside your own interests to focus on your children. Bill, Beverly, and Eddie are emotionally locked at the ages they were in 1958, Bill because he's still grieving for Georgie and hurting over his parents' distance from him, Beverly because her abusive husband regresses her to the age she was when her father was abusing her, and Eddie because his overbearing wife is a carbon copy of his overbearing mother. Ben, Mike, and Richie have made a living out of their childhood pastimes instead of outgrowing them. And Stanley, who did grow up, couldn't handle the impossible reality of what he'd gone through, and killed himself. This even applies to Henry, who didn't have the opportunity to have children, and stayed emotionally stuck as a twelve-year old; he's able to be empowered by IT because of his childlike ability to understand that it's not really his dead friends he's talking to...
The Losers are only able to beat her as completely as possible after she's laid her eggs; her mentality is very much that of a cosmically spoiled brat for most of her appearances. But at the end, she rushes back to directly engage the Losers, even knowing how they can beat her, because she can feel Ben crushing her spawn.
The full dramatic irony of the Losers' club: they really are losers. They lost each other. But they lost each other because they won.
IT is the most Dark Tower of the non-Dark Tower books. The Losers' club is a Ka-Tet and their cyclic battle with IT is a prime example of how Ka* the DT universe's form of fate works; the same events have a tendency to recur during both their encounters in 1958 and 1985, they can feel the force of the White when they form the circle, they can share Khef when they are together, and towards the end they feel Ka-Shume. IT itself is a creature from Todash space with its true form, the Deadlights, circling the outside of the Tower.
IT could be viewed an Evil Counterpart to the Christian Trinity. There's the "Father" (IT's Giant Spider form and its ultimate physical manifestation), the "Son" (Pennywise, who is IT in "human" form), and the (in this case, unholy) Spirit (the deadlights, IT's non-tangible form).
So, why now, 1957—1985? IT has been around for millions of years. Why has this mysterious "Other" drawn the Losers together to finally fight IT and take IT down? Because, at this time and no other, IT can't simply pack up and leave Derry—IT has its children to hatch and nurture. Derry has become its true haunt ("a feeding place for animals," plural), and the place where Its children will feed. Its bond to its children is the perfect weapon to use against IT. And IT believes it can't be killed—even more reason that IT will stand and fight (and lose) instead of running away and getting away. IT is at its moment of greatest weakness, its moment of greatest fatness and complacency. So now is the perfect time. Any sooner would be too soon; any later would be too late (IT's children will hatch, feed and possibly branch out. Imagine hundreds, thousands, millions of ITs. The entire world is their haunt. Goodbye, human race).
The Turtle made the universe when it got sick to its stomach and vomited up creation itself. It sounds silly when you lay it out, but really think about what that means: this unfathomable thing is unfathomable because humans are of a size comparable to IT and the Turtle as bacteria. Sentient bacteria with thoughts and emotions and lives, scurrying about in a pool of celestial vomit, breeding and breeding and breeding and developing the capacity to bond with each other in a way that makes them capable of harming the creatures that made their home by accident. Of course the Spider fears the Losers once it realizes it's vulnerable. Wouldn't you be just a little terrified if you were hip-deep in viral bacteria and you realized your hazmat suit had a hole in it?
Why is Patrick only afraid of leeches, and nothing else? Because what he's really afraid of is being diminished. He thinks he's the only real person in the world and all other beings in the universe exist to either provide for or entertain him, and when his perceived realness is threatened or challenged, he immediately goes on the offensive and kills whatever's responsible. To Patrick, who sees all life as being centered on him, leeches exist solely as monsters with no purpose beyond sucking out his blood and his realness along with it. He kills his brother because he thinks the new baby might also be real and he doesn't want to share the world with another real boy, but with leeches, they're stealing his realness directly.
Apart from mentioning that "Moose" Sadler is named after the character in Archie Comics, Stephen King also included Archie's main love interests as three of the 1957-1958 victims - Betty (Ripsom), Veronica (Grogan) and Cheryl (Lamonica).
Derry is not a real town in Maine. However, Belfast, Bangor and Newry are - looks like Stephen King was just continuing the trend of naming Maine towns after Northern Irish ones!
IT has whatever vulnerabilities of its form, most notably with the werewolf retaining its weakness for silver. Presumably, then, IT's particularly vulnerable when IT impersonates a mere human. This is one of the reasons IT keeps reverting to Pennywise's clothes when someone realizes IT's ruses — once people realize IT's IT, IT no longer has human vulnerability, even when IT has a human's shape.
Richie Tozier actually seems to serve a very useful function for The Loser's Club. As a child, he tends to be the one to Mode Lock IT whenever IT appears. It was he who was convinced that IT was the Teenaged Werewolf, and he who saw IT as The Crawling Eye. IT was locked into the form, and vulnerability, that Richie chose for IT. And as an adult, was still the most childlike of the Loser's Club, meaning that his immaturity allowed him to fight IT in the Ritual of Chud when Bill couldn't. Or, as Richie so eloquently put it when IT railed at him that the Losers were all too old to defeat IT, "Hey bitch, you're never too old to rock and roll."
In the TV Movie, the first person IT kills on screen is a little girl who sang Itsy Bitsy Spider. Later on it shows that IT's true physical form on earth is that of a giant Spider. IT took the song personally.
Bill's "magic stones" story in the miniseries. "They released the magic stones, defeated the dragon, and ran out of the cave". Eerily similar to how the movie ends - except the "magic stones" are silver earrings and the dragon is a Giant Spider, of course.
The sex scene in the sewer. Yeah, it's questionable whether it should have been there at all, but there's several layers to why it's there. For starters, from a metaphysical perspective, it makes sense that, if the bonds between the Losers are fraying, rebuilding them would be necessary, and this is a way to do that. But going deeper, yeah, it's a thing 11 and 12 year old kids shouldn't be doing, and that's the point. Beverly herself seems to grasp that at least once. With all the emphasis on childhood credulity, childhood imagination, childhood magic the narrative mentions, it's easy to see the idea that the kids "spent" their childhood on defeating IT, thus afterward they literally have to "grow up too fast." It can also be symbolic of how the trauma of being haunted by and finally facing IT affected them all, stealing away their childhoods, and paradoxically how that childhood trauma "froze" them in that state, preventing them from truly becoming functional adults. They simultaneously had to "grow up too fast" and never really grew up at all. Might still not be the best way to reinforce the thematic points, but it does reinforce them.
It constantly talks about how people will float down here. When people die, their bodies become bloated with rotting gasses, causing them to float when in water. It's whole spiel about floating and balloons is a sick joke noting the way that dead people sort of become balloons filled with gas. It speaks volumes about how he sees humans as just objects defined by their weakness and mortality and inevitable fate.
Eddie's wife will likely never know what happened to her husband. Unless the Losers contacted her offscreen, she has no way of knowing that he was killed. In spite of how annoying and neurotic she was, she did seem to love Eddie, and for all she knows he just suddenly walked out one day and never came back.
Beverly, at around eleven years old, is penetrated by six boys one after another in a row in a sewer. At eleven. How incredibly painful that must have been by the end.
When IT takes Georgie's appearance, IT's locked into that form, more vulnerable than any others IT takes over the course of the book. This is itself a taunt on Bill, though, since Bill would have to kill helpless Georgie all over again to take advantage of IT's weakness.
The Losers still had troubles after defeating IT as children. We know that Ben eventually managed to win his battle with obesity, but Beverly had been the subject of her father's interest for some time, and was actively trying to escape him when IT was pulling his strings the day of that last childhood battle with IT.
The release of the new feature film is 27 years after the made-for-t.v. movie, right in line with It's cycle of hibernation.
The titular character of Rose Madder was also a giant spider behind the illusion of a human form. And She also had a child. Is this creature It reaching out from the deadlights? Or is It not the only one of It's kind in the universe, and just the only one that fell to Earth? Even more horror sets in if you take this to its logical conclusion, IT is not IT, IT is the Deadlights, if Rose Madder is another part of IT, that means that they are both akin to something similar to "fingers and mouths" for the Deadlights, how many more "spiders" live in the world? that means the Losers Club only defeated possibly a tiny, tiny portion of the Deadlights (maybe even just giving the Eldritch Abomination equivalant it a hangnail).
It is usually taken for granted by both the characters and the audience that whenever It takes on the semblance of a former victim, or victims, that it is just another one of It's disguises. What is never addressed is the implication that it may be more than just that.
Patrick Hockstetter's story is uniquely horrible. For everybody else, It has to assume some kind of alternate form to be the thing they fear most, but what Patrick fears is what It is all about. He's afraid of being reduced, of not being the only real being in the world; the leeches that attack him aren't scary because they're gross, they're scary because they're feeding on him, stealing away his reality and consuming it for their own sustenance, and he's one of the rare few victims who actually stays alive long enough to regain consciousness while being eaten. You might not exactly feel sorry for him because of what a godawful little bastard he was (and for It to kill him probably saved New England a whole lot of trouble down the line), but Its very existence was Patrick's greatest fear and he ran afoul of It before he'd even made it out of middle school.
Richard Macklin's My God, What Have I Done? moment at the trial could mean he wasn't really "himself" when he abused his stepsons, but he was under IT's poisonous influence. In this case, imagine how he felt when he realised what he did to Dorsey...
The Losers didn't actually spend all that much time together—just a single summer, really, and in Mike's case, less than that. It is mentioned that they spent some time together after defeating IT the first time, but not long after they pretty much began leaving Derry one after another, and at no point were all seven back together again, including as adults. Sure, they had a strong bond for a time, but isn't this like missing a bunch of kids you knew at summer camp when you were twelve?
Aside from the fact that trauma-bonding is a thing, and what they experienced in 1958 was *incredibly* traumatic, it's strongly implied - in the book, at least - that there's a greater force drawing them together specifically to face and destroy IT; possibly the Turtle, possibly the enigmatic Other that exists above both the Turtle and IT. A combination of the two explains not just the speed with which they grow close during that initial summer but also the 'seed' that connection plants, which would hopefully be enough to draw them back to Derry despite the passage of time and the "encouragement" of IT. It's also pretty obvious that all of the Losers, in one way or another, never grew out of the kids they were: Once their memories start returning, they feel that intensified friendship/loyalty to each other with the same strength they did back then.
Beverly deduces that the whole town of Derry knows something is amiss because an old man wouldn't help her. Note that this is only an issue with the movie.
