Double Leopardy

With the Losers’ Club all grown up into the likes of Jessica Chastain and James McAvoy, and with darker themes, stronger scares and a pissed-off Pennywise, It Chapter Two promises adult content. Total Film quivers on set of the horror event of the decade.

- Jamie Graham

A great deal of work goes into ensuring a hobo vomits into a handsome leading man’s face in just the right way.

It’s day 77 of It Chapter Two’s mammoth 87-day shoot and Total Film stands on a soundstage at Pinewood Studios in Toronto, watching James Ransone, who plays germophobe Eddie Kaspbrak, get blasted with puke again and again and again. We’re talking a whole afternoon’s worth of takes.

“It’s getting gross!” chirps director Andrés ‘Andy’ Muschietti as he walks by, flashing TF a grin before returning to the monitor to call action on, you guessed it, a bucketload of barf smashing Ransone right in the fizzog. In between takes, DoP Checco Varese fusses to ensure everything is lit just perfectly – all the better to view every chunk of upchuck.

“Andy is an aestheticist,” he explains, “and every frame is adjusted at his will for its maximum effect. It’s fun, a lot of fun, creating the contamination of the character. Andy pushes us to our limit. We started and he said, ‘Can we do 120 frames?’ I said, ‘Ugh. Yes.’ He said, ‘Oh, if you said yes to 120, can we do 300?’ I’m like, ‘Yes we can. Of course.’”

So there you have it – viewers can expect to see a man spattered in spew at 300 frames per second for crystal clarity. But there’s more to this scene than merely putting punters off their popcorn. The set is the basement of the Keene pharmacy, where asthmatic Eddie (played by Shazam!’s Jack Dylan Grazer) picks up his medication in the 2017 movie and receives a nasty shock. In this sequel, Eddie returns to the

Keene Pharmacy 27 years later, only to be traumatised once more.