The ideal genre for these times: With World War III looming and divisiveness booming, it's a real horror show
In one of the scarier moments of "It," Andy Muschietti's smash-hit movie adaptation of the 1986 Stephen King novel, seven kids survey a map of their Maine hometown, searching for clues that will help them battle the child-murdering clown known as Pennywise.
The slide projector they're using suddenly starts behaving like a demon-possessed zoetrope, and to the kids' horror, the sharp-toothed Pennywise himself lunges into and out of the frame, obliterating the boundaries of the screen.
It's a potent illustration of the idea that cinema can take on a terrifying life of its own. Or, indeed, that life can suddenly turn into a horror movie, as it no doubt feels for those who have interpreted "It" as a thinly veiled parable of life in Donald Trump's America.
What better stand-in for this most openly antagonistic of presidents, the argument goes, than Pennywise, a once-amusing popular entertainer warped beyond recognition, who now feeds on human fear and terrorizes the most vulnerable among us?
King himself acknowledged the parallel
