This one is dedicated to Brandi and Lucas, who got married earlier this month and had the BEST reception table centerpieces I’ve ever seen. Here’s to a lifetime of love, happiness, and rockin’ out! 

The next song in our INK-King October lineup is “IT Is the End,” which like last week’s “Enjoy Your Slay,” is featured on the band’s 2018 The Silver Scream album. “IT Is the End” is inspired by King’s IT (1986) and its multiple film adaptations, including Tommy Lee Wallace’s 1990 miniseries and Andy Muschietti’s two IT films (Chapter One, 2017; Chapter Two, 2019), with the video’s costume design visually riffing on these films and the larger discourse surorunding IT.

The song draws upon some of the most iconic moments from King’s novel and the film adaptations, including Georgie, his boat, and Pennywise’s ill-fated invitation that Georgie “Just reach your hand down here and take it / If you really want it back.” The line “We all float down here” is particularly resonant, both in the song’s chorus and in its eerie, ethereal repetition in the closing lines, a shared touchstone that echoes across the decades from King’s book through the film adaptations to “IT Is the End.” 

In addition to the looming threat of a terrifying clown, “IT Is the End” also deftly captures the balance of horror and humor central to King’s novel and its adaptations, which is a core survival skill, particularly when the members of the Losers Club are children. The line “Just like Georgie / IT’s all of hand” is simultaneously tragic and hilarious. Every time I watch Muschietti’s IT Chapter One and Georgie (Jackson Robert Scott) takes a header right into the sawhorse in the opening scene, I can’t help but laugh, and the same is true for this line of the song. We know what’s coming, we know it’s going to be terrible, but there’s something so unguarded, so innocent about Georgie chasing his boat with abandon down that flooded street and in the irreverence of this play on words that it makes me laugh even as it breaks my heart. This is an incredibly hard balance to strike, but in King’s description of Bill and Georgie as Georgie prepares to set out with his boat, in Muschietti’s opening scene, and in these lines of “IT Is the End,” each of these versions of IT hits it pitch perfect. What they’re saying and how they’re saying may be different, but they have a common emotional core and heart, which hits me like a sublime punch in the face every single time. 

“IT Is the End” is also central to The Silver Scream film that was compiled as a frame narrative for the album’s music videos: “IT Is the End” is the film’s final segment, in which Spencer and Dr. Ian Black are kidnapped and held captive in an abandoned funhouse, where the song and its performance play out. These events is paralleled in the true crime-style book The Silver Scream (2023) as well. We won’t go into much detail of the events that play out here, so as to not give away the end of “IT Is the End,” but one of my favorite moments from the video is another King shout-out, in which Spencer berates Black for getting them into this situation, telling him “You’ve gotten me Misery-ed, you son of a bitch!” 

Whether from a crazed fan, an evil clown, or a serial killer, there’s definitely danger lurking around every corner, which is lavishly revealed as the funhouse car in which Black is bound makes its way around its route of horrors. And while it may in fact be “the end” for some characters, much like the perennial return of King’s IT every twenty-seven years, there’s no end to the horror presented here, which continues beyond the bounds of the song and its larger narrative. In some ways, “IT Is the End,” but in others, it’s really just getting started.