[Editorial] The Losers Club: The Best Friends I Never Had

I can’t quite remember exactly what age I was when I first read It by Stephen King but I think I was around 13.  I remember what my brother’s paperback looked like when I borrowed it to start my first epic journey and how thick it was.  It was probably the thickest book I’ve ever read.  I had never read anything like it.  I think it was the first King book I read and I was blown away, beginning a lifelong love of his work.

Not long after reading the book, I watched the TV miniseries.  It was terrifying.  Tim Curry as Pennywise was one of the scariest villains I’d ever seen.  I had to pop over to our neighbours that night to feed their cats and they lived in a kind of ominous creepy big old house and I remember walking up their drive and being convinced Pennywise would jump out at me from the bushes!  I never was bothered one way or the other about clowns until I saw that miniseries!

Growing up, I was never one of the popular kids.  I wasn’t really bullied but I was quite academic and a bit of a goth.  I liked horror movies, X Files, Stephen King books and ghost stories.  I loved Marilyn Manson (my views on him have changed somewhat in light of recent news) and heavy metal.  I resonated with the kids in It so much.  Bill, Ben, Bev, (although not sure we needed 3 characters with the same initials) Mike, Ritchie, Eddie and Stan would have been my friends if I had known them.  I would have been a proud member of the Losers’ Club. 

The book was my first introduction to the Losers.  I had friends and I thought we enjoyed adventures but nothing like those of the Losers.  I think the most adventurous thing we ever did was arrange to meet in a local cemetery for a séance at midnight and then we all chickened out.  My friends and I would not have been much help battling Pennywise AKA the eater of worlds.  I was reading the book in what would have been the late nineties and the kids in the book are growing up in the 1950s.  It wasn’t an era I knew much about as most movies  I watched at the time were from the 80s/90s.  It sounded like Americana heaven – all cokes and sweets and double movies at the cinema but also Americana hell – rife racism, bullying, casual animal cruelty.  But what struck me was the friendship the kids shared.

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I found it particularly interesting that one girl was friends with six boys.  At that age, I didn’t have many male friends.  I admired Bev for her tenacity, her courage, and the way her gender didn’t define her – she could easily hold her own in the friendship group.  It’s a shame that King gave grown up Bev the job of a clothes designer, not that there is anything wrong with that career but it does feel a bit of a typically feminine job for someone who didn’t appear to have any interest in clothes as a child.

All the Losers face challenges in their lives..  Bill has a stutter.  Ben is fat.  Mike is black at a time when racism was even more rife than it is now.  Bev is a girl from the ‘poor part of town.’  Eddie is often sick or appears to be.  Stan is Jewish in a town obviously wrought with antisemitism.  Ritchie has thick glasses and annoys people with his impersonations.  As a young girl who wore a lot of black and listened to alternative music with interests in the occult, ghost stories and horror movies, I knew I’d fit right in with the Losers. 

Bill and Ben are in a strange love triangle with Bev (maybe that’s why all their names begin with Bs?) which on paper sounds like it would be a bit twee but it works so well you don’t actually mind who she ends up with.  It also rings quite true.  When I got older and started mixing in mixed groups of girls and boys, these types of situations really did happen.

The darkest part of the story, apart from the demonic children eating Pennywise and the strange crime riddled town who seemed to turn the other cheek rather than face its oddities, was Henry Bowers and his gang of greaser bullies.  King seems to have a thing for these kind of bullies as they crop up time and time again in his work which makes you wonder if they represent King’s own demons at high school.  Everyone has come across bullies to some extent whether in school or in the workplace and in some ways they are scarier than Pennywise.  We might not have all met the extreme example of Henry Bowers but we have all met a bully.

The Losers Club in Tommy Lee Wallace’s 1990 miniseries are all very close to my heart given I saw it very soon after I read the book for the first time and I rewatch it pretty much annually but they don’t quite live up to how I thought the Losers Club would be after reading the book.  Bev, in particular, just seems a bit wet considering how strong she is in the book.  That is not a criticism of Emily Perkins who plays young Bev.  I just don’t think she’s written as well in this version.  Some completely unrelated trivia – Emily Perkins shows up in an episode of The X Files called All Souls and she is one of at least four actors from the miniseries who also appear in The X Files.  I was (and still am) pretty obsessed with The X Files so I suppose that is vaguely related in a Coming-of-Age sense.

The strongest kids in the miniseries are probably Ritchie (Seth Green) and Bill (Jonathan Brandis).  Stan (Ben Heller) doesn’t get much to do which is possibly intentional given his story arc and poor Mike (Marlon Taylor) who is so important in the book is kind of side-lined, at least until the adult part of his story.  Eddie (Adam Faraizl) is a strange character in the miniseries.  He’s like an old man trapped in the body of a child and isn’t really given much to work with.  Despite all of this and although they aren’t quite as special to me as their literary counterparts, I love them all dearly.

Like most It superfans, I was unbelievably excited for the 2017 film adaptation.  As much as I love the miniseries, the story deserved the big budget treatment and I couldn’t wait to see it and see how my favourite gang would be depicted.  It’s worth noting that the Losers in the 2017 adaptation were definitely inspired by the Stranger Things kids (right down To Finn Wolfhard being cast in both) which is a weird conundrum given that Stranger Things is very heavily influenced by It the book.  I wasn’t sure initially how moving the timeline from the 50s/80s to 80s/10s would work but I think it was an excellent choice and, crucially, the 80s were in vogue at the time given the popularity of Stranger Things and associated 80s nostalgia. 

Going to see It, I was like a kid, despite being a good 20 years older than when I first fell in love with the material and I adored it.  Going back to it now, it’s not perfect but the depiction of the Losers is great and probably closer to the book than the miniseries.  Bev (Sophie Lillis) is just sublime – everything that I would have wanted from the character.  She’s tough, kind, funny but still portrays the vulnerability that makes her so likeable in the book, the scene where she cuts her hair really captures this.  As does the scene where she is buying tampons, possibly for the first time.  She has more going on here too with not only an abusive father but some proper nasty Mean Girls type bullies.

Bill (played confidently by Jaeden Martell) portrays the trauma of losing a brother so young particularly well.  It really is heart-breaking seeing him using the model he’s made in the garage to try and find a way that his little brother, George, might still be alive.

Ben (Jeremy Ray Taylor) is so loveable, from his clumsy meeting with Bev to hiding his New Kids on the Block posters from his new friends.  The scene with Henry carving into his stomach is particularly nasty in this adaptation.  In fact, Henry Bowers (Nicholas Hamilton) is far scarier here than he was in the miniseries.  He’s completely unhinged from the moment you see him instead of just bad like Jared Blancard’s portrayal in the miniseries.  Having Henry be so unhinged, and possibly psychopathic, right from the start of the movie raises the stakes even higher for the Losers in this version.

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The startling difference with the Losers’ in this version of the story is how Eddie (Jack Dylan Grazer) is portrayed.  Gone is the side shed and waistcoats and in are the Mum/Sister jokes and profanity.  He’s still Eddie with his overbearing Mother who’s always convinced he’s ill but he’s smarter and funnier, possibly even than in the book.  The yin to Eddie’s yang is Ritchie (Finn Wolfhard).  He’s still the joker who loves impersonations but he makes sex jokes and swears here.  Eddie and Ritchie are a pretty good double act and I do remember that kind of banter really well from high school (mid to late 90s) so it feels pretty real.

Just like in the miniseries, child Mike (Chosen Jacobs) is robbed of some agency.  You see a little more of his own story here with the abattoir scene and the brief vision of the fire at the Blackspot but apart from that he’s not got much to do.  Mike isn’t supposed to be at the same school as the other kids and that’s possibly related but the school term ends as soon as the movie starts so he could have had more going on.  His role of historian/custodian of Derry which granted is more a part of his adult character could have been shown here.  Instead, Ben ends up getting to be the history fan explaining all the weird tragedies in Derry’s history (the interludes of the book which as I get older I enjoy even more).  Child Mike is quite let down by this adaptation which saddens me as he’s such a great character in the book.

Stan definitely has more of an arc here than the miniseries.  His faith is explored and he has some extra creepy moments added here with a weird painting monster that is particularly creepy.  Stan still feels a bit outside the friend group but again I think it’s intentional given how his story ends.

The group in this adaptation do feel more at ease with each other than the miniseries Losers.  The sunbathing scene and the ‘Apocalyptic rock fight’ especially show this.  There is more realness in the film too from the smoking, swearing, the boys all perving on Bev while she sunbathes, the ribbing each other.  It all just felt more real although setting the kids part in the 80s probably had quite a bit to do with that.  The chemistry between the characters works so well and when they are in peril (the slideshow scene and Neibolt House scenes in particular) you really do believe that the friends all love each other.

As much as I adore the Losers Club as kids, it would be remiss not to mention them as adults.  Like the kids, the adults are portrayed quite differently between the book, the miniseries and the films. I like them all to varying degrees in all 3 mediums but I’ve got to be honest and say it’s the relationship between the kids that really spoke to me when I was a kid and still speaks to me today. 

As much as I didn’t quite have the adventures the Losers had, the bonds you make when you are young are quite different to the bonds you make as an adult.  I love my adult friends, some of whom have been friends since school but it’s so much harder to make friends as an adult and with everything else going on in life, sadly you can neglect your friends unintentionally.  Stephen King writes about it in another coming of age story, The Body, which the excellent Stand by Me was based on and the line from that move can equally sum up the Losers:

I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve, Jesus does anyone?


Vanessa Cordner – honorary lifelong Losers Club member.

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