This article contains SPOILERS for Stephen King’s “IT,” as well as the films IT: Chapter One and IT: Chapter Two.

IT Chapter Two may clock in at a bladder-bursting 170 minutes, but even combined with the 150 minutes of IT Chapter One, the films can’t hold a candle to the massive scale of the book, which spins its time-hopping narrative out over a door-stopping 1100ish pages. Although five hours worth of film sounds like a lot, when it comes to adapting such a massive tale, there’s bound to be a significant amount of material that doesn’t make the final cut. And when you’re dealing with the work of Stephen King, some of that omitted material is going to be, to put it mildly, pretty weird.

Although both recent IT films included more than their fair share of oddness - IT Chapter Two's scene of Stan Uris' decapitated head sprouting spider legs and attacking the Losers wasn’t exactly your standard, run-of-the-mill nightmare fuel -- they still barely even approach how bizarre things get can in the book. From the cosmically awesome to the grotesquely horrifying, here are nine strange scenes from Stephen King’s IT that didn’t make it into the films.

Mike Hanlon Sees a Bird

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Image via Warner Bros.

“The bird’s tongue was silver, its surface as crazy-cracked as the surface of a volcanic land which has first baked and then slagged off. And on this tongue, like weird tumbleweeds that had taken temporary root there, were a number of orange puffs.”

-- IT by Stephen King, Chapter Six, “One of the Missing: A Tale from the Summer of ‘58”

The Book: In Mike Hanlon’s first chapter, he comes across a bloody pocket knife in the summer of 1958, a grisly souvenir from Its most recent victim, although Mike doesn’t realize that yet. The blood on the knife stirs a memory of something that happened to him earlier that spring, when he went to explore the abandoned Kitchener Ironworks, at his father’s suggestion. Derry makes people forget, so Mike hadn’t thought about the Ironworks in months, but now he recalls that as he entered the Ironworks, he was thinking about a movie he once watched with his father -- Rodan, a film about a giant Pteranodon-like monster.

Mike tries to shake off the memory of the film, which unsettles him as he imagines the creature watching him in the darkness of the Ironworks, but instead it leads him to imagine images of skulls and ghosts, increasing his sense of dread even as his curiosity drives him to keep exploring. As he looks into the cellar hold, he sees a monstrous bird nested inside, and suddenly the ground begins to shift beneath his feet, sending him careening toward the bird, who takes flight and begins to chase him. Mike flees, and after a few near-misses with the bird’s sharp beak and talons, he hides in a fallen smokestack. The bird tries to follow him in, but Mike throws pieces of broken tile at and gouges out its eye. Parasites crawl out of the wound, and Mike continues hurling tiles at the bird until it lands on the outside of the stack above him. It paces back and forth, but Mike yells that he’ll keep attacking it unless it leaves, and eventually the bird flies away.

The Movies: It’s kind of a shame that this scene didn’t make it into the films, and not just because Mike Hanlon was by far the least developed of the Losers in both films and could’ve used some more screen time, especially in Chapter One. The bird imagery is the perfect combination of creepy and cool, and works as an effective illustration of how It preys on the specific fears of children. It’s also a nice bit of foreshadowing of how the Losers will eventually defeat It, by refusing to give It the fear It seeks, and determinedly fighting back.

Ben Hanscom Gets a Library Card

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Image via Warner Bros.

“Its face was deadly pale, its eyes purplish-red, the color of bloodclots. Its mouth dropped open, revealing a mouthful of Gillette Blue-Blades that had been set in the gums at angles; it was like looking into a deadly mirror-maze where a single misstep could get you cut in half.”

-- IT by Stephen King, Chapter 11, “Walking Tours” 

The Book: In It: Chapter Two, the adult Losers split up in order to search Derry for tokens from their childhood that will help them perform the Ritual of Chüd (not to be confused with the Ritual of Chüd from the book, which is totally different and which we will get to later). However, in the book, they part ways for a very different reason -- to remember how it feels to be guided by instinct like they did when they were children. Ben’s intuition takes him to the Derry Public Library, where he asks the librarian if he can get a library card. After telling her that he used to live in Derry as a child, she offers to renew his old card, but as she talks, the voice of Pennywise the Clown starts calling to Ben from the stacks up above, asking Ben to come up and join him.

Ben refuses to respond, reminding himself in his mind that it’s not really a clown, but It, and that Ben and his friends are going to kill It. Pennywise reads his thoughts and warns him to get out of town, saying It will come for the Losers after dark, and that they’re now too old to stop It. Pennywise then transforms into Dracula, but instead of teeth as sharp as razors, this vampire has actual razor blades for teeth. It slices off pieces of its own face as it screams at Ben, taunting him about the deceased Stan Uris and spraying blood and bits of flesh over the library patrons below. Ben fights to stay calm, reminding himself of the time they made a silver dollar into silver slugs to fight It as children, and the vampire disappears.

The Movies: Although Mike Hanlon still works at the Derry Public Library in IT: Chapter Two, surprisingly little of the film takes place there. Instead, Ben Hanscom’s search for his token takes him to the middle school, where he remembers a time as a child when Pennywise chased him through the halls and he had to hide in his locker. Ben leaves with the page from his yearbook that only Beverly signed.

It probably wasn’t totally necessary to change this scene from what was in the book, even with the addition of the tokens subplot, since Ben’s library card probably would’ve made a decent token as well. But considering that Beverly’s token was the haiku that Ben wrote her as a child, Ben’s was likely meant to mirror hers, setting up their happily-ever-after ending, and a library card wouldn’t have accomplished that. Plus, a vampire with a mouthful of Gillette Blue-Blades that slice off chunks of its face every time it speaks is nearly impossible to even imagine, so it likely would’ve posed a significant challenge to film.

The Bradley Gang Shootout

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Image via Warner Bros. / New Line Cinema

“By the time the firing stopped, those cars didn’t look like cars at all anymore, just hunks of junk with glass around them. Men started to walk over to them. No one talked. All you could hear was the wind and feet gritting over broken glass. That’s when the picture-taking started. And you ought to know this, sonny: when the picture-taking starts, the story is over.”

-- IT by Stephen King, “Derry: The Second Interlude” 

The Book: Although the films touch on the cycles of horrific violence that repeat in Derry every 27-ish years, the book goes into much greater detail on some of the “monstrous sacrifice[s]” that have begun and ended previous cycles throughout Derry’s history. Over the years, Mike has interviewed nearly everyone in the town that might have been old enough to remember what happened during earlier cycles, and keeps track of it all in his journal. The story of the Bradley Gang was told to him by Mr. Keene, the town pharmacist.

In October of 1929, a gang led by a mobster named Al Bradley was hiding from the FBI outside of Derry but decided they wanted to do some hunting, so they head into town to purchase ammunition. After placing an order at the local sporting goods store, they’re told to return the following day to pick it up. However, that night, the store owner alerts everyone in town to the Bradley Gang’s plans, and the next day, every man in Derry is waiting in front of the store with a gun. Al Bradley arrives with his people, and the townspeople immediately open fire. They don’t stop until every man and woman that came with Bradley is dead. Later, the paper will call it an FBI shootout, and everyone in the town will claim to not have been there. At the end of Mr. Keene’s story, he mentions to Mike that several townspeople had spotted a clown among the shooters, although no one could agree on exactly where they saw it, and that it cast no shadow.

The Films: The only brief insight we get into Derry’s history in the films is in Chapter One, when Ben reads a book from the library about a fatal Easter egg hunt in 1908, and later tells the Losers about the mysterious disappearance of the town’s founders. No mention is ever given to the Bradley Gang or their violent end, which is kind of a shame, but there is a nod to their tale in the form of a mural, which can be seen in the alleyway outside the pharmacy where the Losers patch up Ben after his run-in with Henry Bowers. While the films do hint that Derry itself may be evil, those clues mostly consist of creepy stares and adults looking the other way while children are in jeopardy. That’s troubling, to be sure, but a far cry from the reveal that most of the adults in the town over a certain age helped either commit or cover up a mass-murder and that no one thinks anything of it.

The Troubling Tale of Patrick Hockstetter

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Image via Warner Bros. / New Line

“There was no pain… but there was a hideous draining sensation. Screaming, whirling, beating at his head and neck with his leech-encrusted hands, Patrick Hockstetter’s mind yammered: It isn’t real, it’s just a bad dream, don’t worry, it’s not real, nothing is real --

 

But the blood pouring from the smashed leeches seemed real enough, the sound of their buzzing wings seemed real enough… and his own terror seemed real enough.”

--IT by Stephen King, Chapter 17, “Another One of the Missing: The Death of Patrick Hockstetter” 

The Book: While Pennywise is undoubtedly the most evil character in the book, the most vile human is almost certainly Patrick Hockstetter, one of Henry Bowers’ pre-teenage cronies who receives what may be the second most disturbing chapter in the whole novel. (The most disturbing is still up ahead, brace yourself.) After Beverly observes Bowers and his gang, including Patrick, lighting their farts on fire at the dump, the novel jumps back in time to when Patrick was five years old. After explaining how Patrick considers himself the only “real” person or living creature in the world, the narrative reveals how young Patrick smothered his infant brother, Avery, by pushing his head into a pillow until he died while their mother napped.

The narration then jumps forward to Patrick as a twelve-year-old, and details how he likes to use an abandoned refrigerator he found at the dump to kill small animals, abducting the pets of the residents of Derry and locking them inside until they die. It is this refrigerator -- his “killing-bottle,” as Patrick thinks of it -- that leads to his own death. When Patrick goes to check on a pigeon he left inside the refrigerator, he finds it is filled with “flesh-colored objects that looked like big macaroni shells.” These objects turn out to be giant, flying leeches, an exaggerated manifestation of one of Patrick’s only fears. They attach all over Patrick’s body, to his limbs, his eyes, his tongue, draining his blood until they burst. After Patrick collapses from blood loss, he is dragged out of the dump by It, toward the Barrens, where It begins to eat him.

The Films: Patrick makes an appearance in both films -- in one as a kid, and the other as a corpse -- but they’re mercifully brief. The films never give us any hint of the infanticide in his past, and if he enjoys murdering animals as a middle schooler, we never see it. Patrick is still killed by It, but it’s a fairly straightforward death scene, in which Patrick enters the sewers, searching for Ben Hanscom, and encounters instead the reanimated corpses of It’s past victims. After running away from the decaying children, Patrick sees a red balloon, which pops to reveal Pennywise, who then kills him.

I can’t speak to anyone else’s taste, but I, for one, am grateful to director Andy Muschietti for not subjecting us to the baby-killing, puppy murder, and grotesque leech attack of the Patrick Hockstetter chapter in the films. Reading about it was rough enough, and no one needs to see leeches exploding with child-blood while attempting to chow down on movie theater popcorn.

The Ax Murders at the Silver Dollar

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Image via Warner Bros.

“Behind them, Floyd Calderwood was shrieking. A few of the men leaning against the bar took a casual look around in time to see Claude Heroux bury his woodsman’s axe in Tinker McCutcheon’s head.”

--IT by Stephen King, “Derry: The Fourth Interlude” 

The Book: Another Derry resident that Mike interviews for his journal is a 93-year-old man named Egbert Thoroughgood, who tells Mike the story of a lumberjack named Claude Heroux, who killed five men with an ax during a poker game in 1905. Earlier in the year, several of Heroux’s friends had been brutally murdered -- hacked to pieces with an ax, and one of them with his mouth stuffed full of his own severed toes -- and Heroux had escaped, although no one knew how.

Several months later, on September 9, Heroux walked into the Silver Dollar, a bar where the men who he said had murdered his friends were drinking and playing poker. After a few drinks, Heroux approached their table and began to chop them up with his ax. Despite the screaming and bloodshed, the other Silver Dollar patrons never looked up from their own activities, seeming to not even notice the carnage taking place in their midst. After Heroux completes his violent task, he sat down and calmly waited for the sheriff to come and arrest him. However, that night, Heroux was taken from his cell by a mob of 70 townspeople and lynched from a nearby tree.

The Films: As with the story of the Bradley Gang, this one doesn’t get a mention in the films, and doesn’t have anything to do with the main plot of the Losers and Pennywise. If it had been included, it would’ve served a similar function to the previous “Interlude,” which shows just how far gone the people of Derry are, and how it’s possible for so many murders to go mostly unnoticed.

The Losers Fight the Creeping Eye

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Image via Warner Bros.

“A gigantic Eye filled the tunnel, the glassy black pupil two feet across, the iris a muddy russet color. The white was bulgy, membranous, laced with red veins that pulsed steadily. It was a lidless lashless gelatinous horror that moved on a bed of raw-looking tentacles. These fumbled over the tunnel’s crumbly surface and sank in like fingers, so that the impression given in the glow of Bill’s guttering match was of an Eye that had somehow grown nightmare fingers which were pulling It along.”

-- IT by Stephen King, Chapter 21, “Under the City” 

The Books: When the Losers descend down into the tunnels under Derry for the first time in 1958, It takes a number of different forms in its attempts to literally scare them to death. Pulling from the fears of each of the Losers, one of the shapes it takes is the Creeping Eye, the monster from the film The Trollenberg Terror that terrified Richie. The tentacles begin to pull the Losers in, and they seem powerless to do anything about it, until Eddie Kaspbrak leaps forward, wielding his aspirator and spraying it at the Eye, screaming that it’s full of battery acid.

Eddie urges the Losers to fight, telling them over and over that it’s just an eye, nothing to be afraid of. Ben and Bill begin to punch the Eye as Eddie continues to taunt and spray, urging Richie to follow suit. Moving sluggishly, Richie throws a single weak punch, but it seems to be enough -- possibly because it was his fear the Eye was drawing from -- and the Eye disappears.

The Films: In both films, It spends most of its time in the guise of Pennywise, and the sewers are no exception. In IT Chapter One, when the children head down into Pennywise’s lair, while It briefly takes a number of different forms, they all appear more or less human -- the woman from the painting that scares Stan, a mummy, Bill’s brother Georgie, Beverly’s father. It’s probably not the biggest loss that the films never include the disgusting Creeping Eye beyond a brief nod during the restaurant scene in Chapter Two, but it is deeply unfortunate that Chapter One doesn’t give Eddie his moment of heroism using the power of his imagination.

In the book, Eddie’s ability to imagine that he possesses a weapon that is deadly to It saves the lives of his friends in both timelines, and both times, his secret weapon is his “medicine,” which is really a placebo. Although Chapter Two still includes a heroic save by Eddie using a weapon he convinces himself will kill monsters, it lacks the thematic resonance of Eddie relying on the very thing that has always helped him only because he believes it will.

The Turtle and the Ritual of Chüd

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Image via Warner Bros. / New Line Cinema

"I’m the Turtle, son. I made the universe, but please don’t blame me for it; I had a bellyache.”

--IT by Stephen King, Chapter 22, “The Ritual of Chüd”

The Books: After the Losers have tracked It to its lair and see it in its true form -- which most closely resembles a giant spider -- Bill locks eyes with It and is telepathically transported to “the Void,” an alternate dimension where he fights It in a battle of wills called the Ritual of Chüd. While in the Void, Bill senses another presence, even older and more powerful than It. He moves toward it, and sees that it is a giant Turtle, its shell blazing with colors. Bill begs it to help him, but although he feels that the Turtle is good, it refuses to interfere, telling Bill that he already knows what he has to do.

Bill repeats a tongue twister he has used throughout the novel to help with his stutter -- “He thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts” -- using it to gain strength and steel his will against It. He then starts listing all the good, childish things he believes in using his imagination, such as Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, and uses the power of that belief to wound It enough that when they both return to their bodies, It scuttles away, grievously injured, and lies dormant for the next 27 years.

In the timeline of the adult Losers, Bill tries to defeat It using the Ritual of Chüd again, but his imagination is no longer as strong as it was when he was a child. He finds himself losing the battle of wills, and Richie jumps in to help him. For a time it appears as though it may be enough, but then Richie too is overcome and calls for help. At Richie’s cries, Eddie leaps forward, once again pulling out his aspirator and shooting It in its eyes and mouth, believing it contains “strong medicine.” Once again, it works, and Eddie’s imagined weapon is enough to save Bill and Richie.

The Films: After IT Chapter One made no mention at all of the Ritual of Chüd, IT Chapter Two spent what felt like the entire film building it up, but it was not at all the same as it was in the book. The film’s version was a Native ritual that Mike attempted to mimic that involved burning tokens, chanting “turn light into dark,” and believing strongly that it will work. While the belief part is the same as the ritual in the book, nothing else is, and unlike in the novel, the version of Chüd in the film didn’t work at all.

Of all the strange parts of the book that the film omitted, the complete Ritual of Chüd is probably the greatest loss. While the films did include a couple images of turtles, they were nothing compared to the ancient, galaxy-swallowing version of the Turtle that is included in the novel. And as cool as it was to watch the Losers take turns swinging away at It using makeshift weapons at the end of Chapter One, it lacked the cosmic scope of Bill’s confrontation with It in the book. The Ritual of Chüd as it was originally written also makes it clear why It was so afraid of a group of children -- it’s only through belief that is more powerful than fear that It can be defeated, and no one has a stronger imagination than a child.

The Losers Escape the Tunnels, aka, THAT Scene

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Image via Warner Bros. / New Line

“I know something,” Beverly said in the dark, and to Bill her voice sounded older. “I know because my father told me. I know how to bring us back together. And if we’re not together we’ll never get out.”

-- IT by Stephen King, Chapter 22, “The Ritual of Chüd”

The Book: Where to begin with this. After the -- and I cannot stress this enough -- children defeat It using the Ritual of Chüd, they attempt to escape the tunnels, but can’t find their way out. After the boys begin to panic, thinking they’ll never escape, Beverly says that she has an idea and begins to undress. The boys ask what she’s doing, and she says that in order to find their way out, they have to be together, and that in order for them all to be together, they all have to have sex with her, one after the other.  And they do. In detail. For many pages. And for some inexplicable reason, Beverly's plan works.

The Films: Thankfully, neither film ever so much as hints that this scene could’ve ever taken place. The Losers defeat It at the end of Chapter One, and then suddenly, they’re out of the tunnels, no orgy required. Which is really all that needed to happen in the book, because no matter how you slice it -- even if you buy Stephen King’s justification that he “wasn’t thinking of the sexual aspect of it,” and that it’s really about “connect[ing] childhood and adulthood” -- a bunch of kids who just recently graduated the fifth grade having group sex in order to recalibrate their internal GPS is an extremely weird thing to do.

Plus, Beverly’s suggestion that they should all have sex because her father told her that’s what boys and girls do when they’re together is based on her father’s absurdly toxic worldview, which also included regularly beating his daughter and insinuating that he was sexually attracted to her. The fact that Beverly not only took what he told her as truth but that it actually worked, is beyond problematic. And that’s if you can get around the fact that it’s an explicit sex scene between a group of pre-teens, most of whom don’t even really want to be participating in it, which I cannot. Thank you, Andy Muschietti, for not putting this scene in either of your movies. We would’ve all had to spend some time staring directly into the sun if it had been included.

Bill Denbrough Goes for a Ride

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Image via Warner Bros. / New Line

“Hi-yo Silver, AWAYYYYYYY!” Bill Denbrough cried deliriously, and rushed down the hill toward whatever there would be, aware for one last time of Derry as his place, aware most of all that he was alive under a real sky, and that all was desire, desire, desire.  He raced down the hill on Silver: he raced to beat the devil.”

--IT by Stephen King, Epilogue, Bill Denbrough Beats the Devil

The Book: Early on in the book, we meet Bill’s wife, Audra. Audra is a Hollywood actress, and while Bill tells her to stay home and keep shooting her movie while he travels to Derry, Audra is concerned and tells her director that she needs to go after him. However, after arriving in Derry, Audra is abducted by Beverly’s abusive husband, Tom, and taken down to Its lair, where she is driven into a catatonic state. Bill finds her during their final confrontation with It and manages to bring her back up out of the tunnels, but he can’t seem to wake her up. Finally, as his memories of the Losers begin to fade and he realizes that if he doesn’t restore her mind soon, he never will, he tries his very last idea, even though it doesn’t make much sense -- he puts her behind him on his old childhood bike, Silver, and rides as fast as he can through Derry. As he picks up speed, yelling in glee and going so fast that he risks losing control and killing them both, Audra’s arms tighten around him, and eventually, she comes back to herself completely, with no memory of anything she’s been through.

The Films: While we do get a glimpse of Audra at the beginning of IT Chapter Two, that’s the only time we see her in the film. She doesn’t follow Bill to Derry or get taken into Its lair, and for all we know, she’s still blissfully unaware of anything her husband went through by the end of the film. It may have been for the best; Bill’s solution is hard to understand, even in the strange context of the book. Still, the scene does nod one last time to the greatest weapon the Losers possessed: their imagination. Bill believed the bike would be able to save his wife, and it did, showing that the power he wielded against It in the tunnels -- the power of the Losers -- might still be at his fingertips.