It (2017) succeeds by being two things simultaneously: a genuinely scary horror film and a deeply felt story about childhood, friendship, and the specific terror of being young in a world you cannot fully understand or control.

Pennywise the Dancing Clown, Stephen King’s ur-monster, is reinvented by Bill Skarsgard as something more genuinely alien than Tim Curry’s theatrical interpretation. Where Curry was camp and menacing, Skarsgard is wrong in ways that take you a moment to place: the direction of his eyes, the sounds he makes, the unnaturally wide smile. He is deeply uncomfortable to look at, which is the correct effect.

The Losers Club, the group of misfits at the film’s center, are the reason the film works. Andy Muschietti casts remarkable child actors and lets them be real: foul-mouthed, frightened, funny, brave in ways that cost them something. Finn Wolfhard as Richie is the comic relief that doesn’t undercut the horror. Jack Dylan Grazer as Eddie brings a neurotic energy that is both hilarious and touching.

Beverly Marsh (Sophia Lillis) is the film’s emotional anchor: a girl navigating abuse and puberty and the way boys look at her, all channeled into the specific horror of Pennywise’s appearances in her bathroom drain.

The film is set in 1989 Derry, Maine, and Muschietti builds the town as a world. This is horror with roots, where the monster is also a metaphor for everything the town chooses not to see.

Stronger than its sequel and genuinely essential summer horror.