“It was weird to me how, then, Teddy could care so much about his father, who practically tried to kill him. And I couldn’t give a shit about my old man, and he hadn’t laid a hand on me since I was three! And that was for eating the bleach under the sink.”

Two films, decades apart, the former a nostalgic, bittersweet depiction of the 1950s made in the 1980s, the latter a popcorn driven shocker set in the 1980s. Despite this, each have strands of the same DNA.

Stephen King has the ability to take his own childhood and twist it into deformed shapes, managing to present the 1950s as simultaneously romantically innocent  and corrupt. The original novel IT, written in the 1980s, was set in King’s own childhood replete with Universal horror characters, but the film updates it and in doing so depicts children almost exactly the same age I was back then. Stand by Me isn’t a horror, more a road movie, coming of age comedy, but it still has the dark heart that we would expect from King. In this film it’s balanced perfectly: a gang of kids set of through the Oregon countryside in search of a dead body. The downbeat discovery acts as a critical part of the end of their childhood – the film deftly pinpoints the exact time in a child’s life when they begin their journey towards becoming cynical and disillusioned adults.

IT is less subtle, but achieves what it sets out to do: to appeal kids slightly younger than the 15 the film is rated. In many ways, IT is the dead body at the end of the young viewer’s journey – it’s dark but still has enough ironic humour to propel it along. Unlike the short story that Stand by Me was based on, IT’s mega-novel length doesn’t result in a snappy film, even though the story has been split between two movies. Instead, the feeling is an episodic one, each episode providing a new variation on the idea of a haunted town. It’s baggy and not as elegant or crafted as Stand by Me, but, like The Goonies (1985), it’s a populist primer for juvenile horror. It shouldn’t be judged alongside some of the stand out horror movies of recent years (Get Out (2017) and Hereditary (2018) to name two) but the success of IT is in the way it has built it’s audience despite not having the Lucasfilm logo at the beginning and not featuring a superhero.

Stand by Me is a classic slice of nostalgia that speaks to anyone who grew up primarily outdoors. IT is a fairground ride that happens to tap into the pop-culture of my own childhood. A great double-bill.