The Most Infamous ‘It’ Scene Was Intentionally Left Out Of The Movie

[Potential spoilers for IT — continue reading at your own peril]

Stephen King’s IT is over 1,000 pages long, so a lot of material had to be removed for Andy Muschietti’s IT movie, which is expected to break multiple box office records this weekend, to work. One such scene that didn’t make the book-to-film cut takes place near the end of the novel, when, without giving too much of the ending away, Beverly suggests that the six pre-teen male members of the Losers’ Club have sex with her in the sewers of Derry.

Here’s an excerpt.

“I have an idea,” Beverly said quietly.

In the dark, Bill heard a sound he could not immediately place. A whispery little sound, but not scary. Then there was a more easily placed sound … a zipper. What— he thought, and then he realized what. She was undressing. For some reason, Beverly was undressing.

“What are you doing” Richie asked, and his shocked voice cracked on the last word.

“I know something,” Beverly said in the dark, and to Bill her voice sounded older. “I know because my father told me. I know how to bring us back together. And if we’re not together we’ll never get out.”

“What” Ben asked, sounding bewildered and terrified. “What are you talking about”

“Something that will bring us together forever. Something that will show—”

“Nuh-Nuh-No, B-B-Beverly!” Bill said, suddenly understanding, understanding everything.

“—that will show that I love you all,” Beverly said, “that you’re all my friends.”

“What’s she t—” Mike began.

Calmly, Beverly cut across his words. “Who’s first” she asked.

It’s a scene author Stephen King would later regret including in IT. “I wasn’t really thinking of the sexual aspect of it,” King wrote in 2013. “The book dealt with childhood and adulthood — 1958 and Grown Ups. The grown ups don’t remember their childhood. None of us remember what we did as children. We think we do, but we don’t remember it as it really happened. Intuitively, the Losers knew they had to be together again. The sexual act connected childhood and adulthood. It’s another version of the glass tunnel that connects the children’s library and the adult library. Times have changed since I wrote that scene and there is now more sensitivity to those issues.”

Needless to say, there was little to no debate on whether to include the underage orgy in the movie. “Besides Georgie in the sewer, I think it’s the one scene that everybody kind of brings up and it’s such a shame,” Gary Dauberman told Entertainment Weekly (he co-wrote the screenplay with Chase Palmer and Cary Fukunaga, who left the project in 2015). “While it’s an important scene, it doesn’t define the book in any way I don’t think and it shouldn’t. We know what the intent was of that scene and why he put it in there, and we tried to accomplish what the intent was in a different way.”

This is one instance where sticking to the source material is a bad idea. You know what else is a bad idea Hunting for a clown in the sewer.