In case you needed to refresh your fear of clowns from 2016’s Clownpocalypse, this September will surely deliver.
New Line Cinema released its first teaser trailer for It at SXSW last week, and it hit the web today. The horror drama is based on Stephen King’s 1986 novel, which also had a TV mini-series adaptation in 1990.
Here a group of seven kids—called “The Loser’s Club”—endure both peer bullying and a psychotic killer clown in fictional Derry, Maine. (Finn Wolfhard from Stranger Things is playing Richie Tozier, a leader of the clique.) This clown, called Pennywise, is a monster who haunts the sewer system and is responsible for the town’s growing list of missing persons.
The new trailer begins the same way the mini-series began. A little boy named Georgie chases his newspaper boat along a stream until it falls into the street gutter. When he tries to retrieve his boat, Georgie is faced with a terrifying clown.
If the trailer is any sign of director Andrés Muschietti’s style, we’re in for a treat. Iconic images from the novel and mini-series, such as red balloons and Pennywise’s claws, flash dramatically throughout the trailer as a child’s voice narrates the suspicious happenings within Derry.
It premieres Sept. 8, and will be the first of a two-part film series. King’s novel is split into two time periods: The first of the characters as children between 1957 and 1958, and the second when they’re adults who’ve returned to finally kill Pennywise. These periods are interwoven throughout the book as flashbacks and the like, but the films will separate them into two different movies.