Quentin Tarantino once slammed Stephen King’s It as a Nightmare on Elm Street ripoff

Stephen King’s It is in the news right now thanks to TV series Welcome to Derry hitting HBO next week, but Quentin Tarantino has had longstanding issues with the original novel, calling it a Nightmare on Elm Street knock-off.

Stephen King horror novel It was published in 1986, and revolves around an evil entity terrorising the kids of a small town. It was first turned into an acclaimed mini-series in 1990, before a pair of big-budget movie adaptations were released in 2017 and 2019, and grossed over $1 billion between them.

Andy Muchsietti directed the two films, and now he’s overseeing a prequel series called Welcome to Derry, that plays out in 1962, and sees ‘Pennywise the Dancing Clown’ doing more psychological and physical damage to the children of that town.

We’ve seen the first few episodes, and wrote in our It: Welcome to Derry review that “the series offers commentary about trickle-down-trauma, paranoia, and racism instead of just explaining who the iconic villain is.” But while we are fans of this new iteration, Quentin Tarantino has very specific issues with the book where it all began.

Quentin Tarantino believes It just replaced Freddy Krueger with Pennywise

When appearing as a talking head on ‘Eli Roth’s History of Horror Uncut,’ Quentin Tarantino talked up the movie adaptations of Stephen King novels Carrie and The Green Mile, but his thoughts on the It novel were more mixed.

“The book It is Stephen King’s ripoff of Nightmare on Elm Street,” complains Tarantino. “He just replaces Freddy Krueger with Pennywise. It’s just exactly like he sees Nightmare on Elm Street – ‘Oh wow, that’s goes 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.”

Tarantino adds that he’s a fan of the book itself, saying: “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 [director] Wes Craven didn’t have.”

But he then finishes his piece by doubling down on that original opinion: “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.”