Quentin Tarantino's Stephen King Criticisms Literally Don't Make Sense

Quentin Tarantino's contributions to the form are undeniable. "Pulp Fiction" is one of the leading examples of the independent film boom of the 1990s, "Inglorious Basterds" is one of the great antifascist movies of the 2000s, and "Once Upon a Time... In Hollywood" is possibly his best film to date. With all that said, he's an infamously opinionated man who's often known for talking out of his own red apple. No one will deny Tarantino's obscene wealth of knowledge surrounding the annals of film history, but his arrogance can often lead to confounding or even flat-out wrong interpretations of other people's work, like Stephen King's "It."

King's 1986 terror tome about a group of New England outcasts battling a cosmic evil in the guise of a clown named Pennywise is often considered one of his most famous stories, and rightfully so. It's a massive text that features all of his best and worst tendencies as a writer, much like Tarantino. The "Kill Bill" director, however, holds a weird opinion of it. In a 2019 podcast discussion on "Eli Roth's History of Horror: Uncut," Tarantino talks about how he believes King's "It" is a ripoff of Wes Craven's "A Nightmare on Elm Street." He said:

"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 let me do my version of it.' Now, his version of it is going to be a 560-page novel."

You can make some surface-level parallels to King and Craven's works by way of a group of kids being tormented by a shapeshifting evil with a loud mouth who's able to hurt them based on how much fear they exude, but that's about it.

Both Pennywise the Dancing Clown and Freddy Krueger are infamous murderers whose negative force affects their respective towns, albeit in much different ways. The "Elm Street" movies have played a bit fast and loose with how Freddy can enact his powers, but for the most part, the razor-fingered slasher hurts the teenagers of Springwood through their dreams. Meanwhile, the interdimensional clown hiding beneath the sewers of Derry is a very present metaphysical threat in the real world. Freddy is driven by revenge, while Pennywise is merely doing it out of a means for survival. Even beyond other in-universe details, such as the adults being purposefully oblivious to these monsters, Tarantino is wrong about "It" as a rip-off based on timeline logistics alone.

The original "Nightmare on Elm Street" came to theaters in 1984, followed by the novel publication of "It" hitting bookstore shelves two years later in 1986. But it's not as simple as that. For one, a 1980 profile from The Toronto Star proves that King had actually started writing his horror epic four years before "Elm Street" came out. Although Craven certainly had ideas of deadly dreams floating around in his head since the '70s, he didn't start writing the film until 1981. Each artist was working within their own bubbles, and their work just happened to coincidentally correlate thematically in small ways. No one could confuse Pennywise for Freddy. So why would Tarantino purport that one was a rip-off of the other? The answer is simple: his own misinformation.

In the same interview from "History of Horror," Tarantino makes an admission that he's never actually read "It." "Now if you've talked to anybody who's read the book ... now I'm just repeating what they're saying. I haven't read the book," says Tarantino. It should have been obvious this was the case, considering he believed "It" was around 560 pages when that's about half of its actual length. At that point in time, Tarantino had never seen the 1990 miniseries with Tim Curry, so he was going off of the 2017 film and what he had been told by other people about King's novel. Although not a big fan of the film, he expressed interest in seeing "It: Chapter Two" to see how it all wraps up.

There's also this bizarre moment where Tarantino admittedly props up King as a great author, only to claim Craven's screenplay for "Elm Street" wasn't well written:

"He's a terrific writer in that regard, so he fills it full of minutia, and fills it full of 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.'"

Setting aside that King's story spans decades (and sometimes centuries), I will not hear Craven slander in relation to his involvement with the first "Elm Street." It's one of the best slasher movie texts for a reason. In terms of making rip-off claims based on extreme similarities between two texts, all I can say is glass house, Quentin. Glass houses.

"It" and "A Nightmare on Elm Street" are currently streaming on HBO Max.