Quentin Tarantino dismisses Stephen King’s It as a ripoff of A Nightmare on Elm Street

The 1986 novel It is one of the most popular works ever created by author Stephen King – in fact, King has said, “I think that when I die I will kind of disappear from the paperback racks, but that f*cking clown is going to live forever.” A lot of horror fans love the 1990 mini-series adaptation of the story, and the more recent two-film adaptation was a massive box office success. Right now, fans are eagerly anticipating the October 26 premiere of the HBO prequel series It: Welcome to Derry… but someone who doesn’t get the hype is Quentin Tarantino, who sees It as nothing more than a ripoff of writer/director Wes Craven’s 1984 film A Nightmare on Elm Street.

CBR shares that, on an episode of the podcast Eli Roth’s History of Horror: Uncut, Tarantino took the opportunity to knock It down a peg. He said, “The book It is Stephen King’s ripoff of Nightmare on Elm Street. He just replaces Freddy Krueger with Pennywise. It’s just exactly like he sees Nightmare on Elm Street, ‘Oh wow, that’s a really neat idea. That’s really clever. That’s cool. Well, let me take that idea and do my version of it.’ Now, his version of it is going to be a 560-page novel. He’s a terrific writer in that regard, so he fills it full with minutia, and he fills it with his good prose. And he fills it full of his good writing, which is what Wes Craven didn’t have. Take away all that cake frosting, and all the little frosting flowers that are put on it, and all that—it’s basically a ripoff of A Nightmare on Elm Street.“

Tarantino got the page count wrong by about half (the first edition of It had a page count of 1,138), but he also didn’t take into account that it took King (who has said that a novel should take “no more than a season” to write) four years to write that epic. So he was working on It long before A Nightmare on Elm Street reached theatres. He could have reworked it after seeing Freddy Krueger in action, but that seems unlikely.

What do you think of Quentin Tarantino’s opinion of It, and will you be watching It: Welcome to Derry? Let us know by leaving a comment below.

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