Stephen King says it’s “fascinating”there’s still so much interest in the controversial It sex scene, but little discussion of the work’s multiple child murders.
In a statement to Vulture, King confirmed his previous comments about the scene, in which the book’s pre-teens engage in an orgy as part of the story’s climax.
“I’d just add that it’s fascinating to me that there has been so much comment about that single sex scene and so little about the multiple child murders. That must mean something, but I’m not sure what,” King said.
King last commented on the Itsequence in 2013. “I wasn’t really thinking of the sexual aspect of it,” King wrote in a post on his official site’s message board via his office manager Marsha DeFillipo. “The book dealt with childhood and adulthood — 1958 and Grown Ups. The grown ups don’t remember their childhood. None of us remember what we did as children — we think we do, but we don’t remember it as it really happened. Intuitively, the Losers knew they had to be together again. The sexual act connected childhood and adulthood. It’s another version of the glass tunnel that connects the children’s library and the adult library. Times have changed since I wrote that scene and there is now more sensitivity to those issues.”
In the sequence, the Losers’ Club’s only female member, Beverly, has sex with each of the boys as a means of unification after they defeat Pennywise the clown. In turn, that helps the group escape the Derry, Maine sewers where they’ve become trapped. While it’s a major part of King’s 1986 novel, the scene doesn’t appear in the 1990 television adaptation nor the new movie in theaters now.
In an interview with EW, writer Gary Dauberman, who is one of three credited writers on It, explained why the scene was left out. “Besides Georgie in the sewer [the It opening], I think it’s the one scene that everybody kind of brings up and it’s such a shame,” he said. “While it’s an important scene, it doesn’t define the book in any way I don’t think and it shouldn’t. We know what the intent was of that scene and why he put it in there, and we tried to accomplish what the intent was in a different way.
