Dear Horror Movies, Short and Sweet Please

A fan's plea for a shorter runtime.

By: Josh McCormack

IT: Chapter Two is nearly a half-hour longer than Goodfellas.

Let that sink in for a second.

Martin Scorsese's sprawling gangster epic that chronicles not only the rise and fall of the mafia, but the disintegration of a love life, and the changes in America over the course of decades is STILL not nearly as long as a sequel to a movie in which a bunch of kids fight an evil clown.

IT: Chapter Two has a lot of problems. A lot of good stuff too, yes. But the overall viewing experience is a frustrating one. And after sifting through my mixed emotions on the film, I think most of my issues can be attributed to the film's obscene length. 

Clocking in at nearly three hours, IT: Chapter Two is an exercise in needless excess. The majority of the film is just things happening to pad out the film's runtime. Our lead characters spend practically the entire endless second act separated and it stalls the film's sense of momentum and it's never truly able to recover. I understand that director Andy Muschetti wanted to make a horror epic, but "epic" doesn't always have to mean "incredibly long". 

It doesn't help that Stephen King's 1986 novel that the film is based on is over 1,000 pages long, but what made the first film work so well was how it was able to filter King's somewhat manic story (a story seemingly written on a year-long cocaine bender I might add) into something palatable, heartfelt, and still utterly disturbing. 

The problem then comes with the added baggage that the adult storyline of IT is not terribly interesting and in fact is the weakest part of the story. In an attempt to elevate the source material perhaps, Muschetti and his writing team add endless comedic gags, more gross-out horror sequences, and a handful of subplots that go nowhere to distract you from the imperfections in King's original story. And this just eventually leads to an exhausting two hour and 49 minute viewing experience. 

This is just my opinion, but a good horror movie, like a good comedy, needs to know its limitations. Very few horror concepts lend themselves to runtimes this long. Of course there are exceptions to this rule, but for the most part I find myself more attracted to the horror film that is less than 120 minutes. Two of the better horror movies of the year, Crawl and Ready or Not managed to be incredibly exciting and edge of your seat theater experiences with runtimes like 87 minutes and 95 minutes, respectively. 

Even a film like Ari Aster's Midsommar which had wonderful themes of relationship toxicity and grief wore out its welcome for me due to the fact that it truly felt like a 90 minute premise, stretched out to nearly two and a half hours. Yeah, I know a lot of y'all love it, but this is my blog dammit!

Luckily this is less of a trend than it is a more recent development. Last year's Suspiria remake, one of my personal favorites, clocked in at two hours and 32 minutes. Yet, I think a film with that sense of slow-building dread and political subplots about the conflicts in Berlin post-WWII and with the constant dread of a divided country is the perfect type of non-traditional horror film that lends itself to a longer story. Also, it doesn't feel its length in the slightest. Nevertheless, it may have been at ground zero for something that could have a negative effect on horror films down the road.

IT: Chapter Two is bound to make hundreds of millions of dollars over the next several weeks and I hope the takeaway from Hollywood is to make more quality, big budget horror movies but not to try and replicate the way this particularly story was told. At no point during IT: Chapter Two with its endless celebrity cameos, multiple endings, or constant flashbacks did I feel this story needed to be three hours long and I can think of very few horror stories that need to be this long at all.

Hollywood, please keep making quality horror flicks. Just keep 'em short.