It (1985) Hit its DV Marks Hard

Embarrassing confession. Until 2026, I had never read Stephen King’s debatable magnum opus, It (1985). I had seen multiple film adaptations, never really found them all that engaging. Nor even really that scary. I think clownphobia is close to genetic: you either are born fearing them, or you just don’t get it. Kind of like how some people eat cilantro and taste soap, and some people just taste cilantro. So I had never really given It much attention, either affective or scholarly. But I reread Dolores Claiborne recently, a brilliant, haunting, painful novel about domestic violence and not properly a “horror” novel because of its highly redemptive and indeed happy ending, and it reminded me that I should take the time to crawl through the King corpus at least a little more fully and assiduously.

So I read It. Which, it turns out, is only barely about the terrifying clown, Pennywise. It is much, much, much more deeply about human nature, and, specifically, it’s about moments when one person becomes so consumed by the desire to exercise power and control over another person that the first person becomes, in effect, a clownish fucking monster.

This happens repeatedly over the course of the novel, but I’ll focus on the scene that hit me the hardest. It is a scene of searing domestic horror, ala Rosemary’s Baby or The Exorcist, in being focused not just on some supernatural threat, but instead on a woman’s vulnerability to predatory masculinity exercised in a domestic and intimate context.

So. Pretty early on in It, we meet Beverly. But we meet her through the narrative voice of her boyfriend and then husband, Tom Rogan. Tom talks about his courtship of Bev, how attracted he was to her, but also how desperate he was to control her. He informs her, relatively early on, that he finds her smoking habit revolting. He tells her to stop. One day, soon thereafter, as they leave a movie theater, she lights up. He “lets” her keep dragging on the cigarette until they’re both sitting in the car together. At that point, cooped up in the closed environment of the car, he smashes his hand into her face, to punish her for forgetting what he had told her about smoking. King spends a lot of narrative time playing out Bev’s shock, pain, and humiliation, all seen through the eyes of Tom, who loves that he’s terrified her, loves that he’s hurt her. He feels reinforced in his identity by her pain, by his certainty that he can get her to bow to him. He hits her again. She thinks of leaving the car and escaping, but he comes around and opens her car door for her, inviting her to leave. Like so many women in situations of domestic abuse, her freeze reflex kicks in, so she stays.[i] He makes her say, out loud, to him, that she is “sorry” and that she wants to stay with him. It’s a harrowing scene, mostly for its realism, its feeling of accuracy, its immediacy, its plausibility. Stephen King somehow managed to crawl into the mind of an abuse victim and play out all of her actions, seen from the mind of her abuser. The abuser knows how to play her, because he can see that, somewhere, deep inside her, there’s a vulnerability that he can exploit. There’s pain there. He can feed on it, turn it against her.

When Bev and Tom get back to Tom’s apartment, they have sex, and it’s fantastic for both of them, though King makes clear that Bev is horrified by her sexual response to her clearly abusive boyfriend. It’s as though he’s taken control not only of her mind and will, but also of her body. Tom has taken possession of her, invaded her, overwritten her survival instincts, and hijacked her sexual response patterns. It is terrifying.

Bev and Tom get married, and Tom continues to pound Bev regularly, to keep her in her place, to exert his control. They fall into a pattern where, if she fails to have a hot meal on the table, he beats her and then fucks her. Rapes her? Not in his mind, but we wonder. Or she’ll forget to let him know she’s coming home from work late; he’ll beat her, he’ll fuck her. He is unapologetic about this, unabashed. Like most abusers, he clearly thinks he is well within his rights to do this to her.[ii] We see and hear of this entirely from his perspective. Their life rolls along, with Tom dominating, battering, and violating Bev at his leisure, unchecked.

Unchecked until her own past catches up with her; she receives a phone call directing her to return to her hometown. She had a trauma there—we don’t know what it was yet—and she is compelled to go home. More compelled, it turns out, than she is to obey Tom.

From Tom’s vantage—which is the vantage the scene is written from—Bev is in the house, smoking while packing her suitcase. He experiences her smoking as a terrible violation of his power, his control. He determines to sneak up on her and beat the hell out of her with a black belt that he wraps around his hand for leverage. He’s done this before, and he’s aroused and excited by the idea of doing it again. But this time, for the first time in their relationship, Bev resists. When she sees him, belt in hand, she tells him she’s leaving. She has to go home. He needs to stop threatening her. He is beyond angry at her reaction. He is beyond enraged. He is afraid. In fact, he is horrified. King renders the existential fear of an abuser losing control over his victim beautifully and hauntingly. Tom begins to ask himself if he—Tom—is real. If he really exists. Am I really here? he wonders, thunderstruck and terrified. Do I exist? Is Tom real? What King renders in this fucking perfect scene of domestic violence is that the abuser’s ego—his very sense of self—is built around his capacity to terrorize his victim. If his capacity to terrorize her falters, he enters not only into anger, but into existential despair.

Tom tries to hit Bev with the belt, panicking, needing to restore order to his universe. But she moves, so he only barely clips her shoulder. He strikes again and again, sometimes hitting her and sometimes missing. Eventually, she starts verbally deriding him, telling him she will kill him if he doesn’t let her go, calling him a fat sack of shit. Which he is. As she resists him—by moving, by deriding him, by threatening him—his sense of existential panic and despair only ratchet up. He swings more and more wildly, but also begins to regress into an almost childlike state of terror. Her refusal to be terrorized is breaking him as a man. No, not as a man. That’s wrong. It’s breaking him as a monster.

In making all of this so explicit, in making us hear Tom’s own narrating voice repeatedly wondering whether he is even real anymore, King highlights something that even scholars of domestic violence sometimes have trouble articulating. The abuser’s ego is frail, and it needs to be organized around the subjectivity of someone else. Someone it can construe as weaker, whether it really is or not. Maybe it’s a child. Maybe a wife. Maybe a girlfriend. Maybe an elder. The abuser does not have a stable sense of self in relation to world. The abuser is weak, afraid, and disorganized. I don’t mean “disorganized” like that their house is a mess. I mean it in the way that attachment theorists talk about “disorganized” attachment styles. The abuser doesn’t have a stable attachment to himself. He cannot autonomously anchor himself to the world, or to his own mind or body, unless he has someone to organize himself around. Someone to abuse. Someone to control. Bev is Tom’s anchor, his primary attachment object.

But now, today, this one evening, a phone call has made her reject his years of conditioning her to obey and fear him. He is made to realize how weak, frail, friable, and contingent his power over her—and therefore his own being—is.

As the scene trundles painfully along, she gains control of the belt. She beats him. She even whips him in the genitals, emasculating him in a more literal, corporeal way than he would ever have believed possible. She wrangles her suitcase and makes her way down the stairs, while he calls quite pathetically after her, threatening her, but sounding more like an inflamed, terrified child than anything else. She keeps expecting him to barrel down the hallway or stairs after her, but he never does. Because he has been destroyed: his ego has crumbled. Bev gets halfway down the block before she even realizes she has no shoes on, no money, no credit cards. And yet, she’s undaunted, and she moves on.

Now, I want to hurry up here to note that, as glorious as this scene is, it’s also painfully unrealistic in how it theorizes an abuse victim’s level of agency. Most abuse victims need friends, allies, therapists, support groups, somone to help them make the leap to leave. Most abuse victims do not succeed in wresting a weapon away from an abuser; it’s much more common for women to die in their own homes than for them to dominate and defuse their abuser. This scene is fiction, and it’s fantasy. We don’t live in a world where abused women can just walk the fuck out because they get a phone call that is somehow liberatory. We just don’t.

But what is crucially realistic about this scene is, as I’ve said, the way it outlines Tom’s mentality. His frailty. His weakness. His delusionality. His sense of power as entirely contigent upon his ability to terrorize her. This is what we need, as a culture, to tackle. Yes, better laws would be hugely helpful to abuse victims, as would more adequate police training, more systematic education in primary schools to children about violence in relationships. I’d like there to be more shelters, more resources for women, new laws around custody in cases of abuse. There are many, many ways we could help abuse victims escape and become survivors. But reframing our public discourse around the relationship between abuse and masculinity? That would be huge. If we could decide, as a culture, to recognize the truth that abusiveness is a manifestation of a weak, disorganized ego? If we could commit, as a culture, to a worldview in which abusers are pathetic parasites, latching onto their victims in order to force reality to snap into a focus that they—the abusers—can tolerate? That would be amazing.

And if that’s going to happen, it’s going to happen through art. King’s novel is exemplary in its treatment of the psychology of the domestic abuser, and it’s not the only one: read The Shining, read Gerald’s Game, read Dolores Claiborne. King is pervasively interested in how weak, broken people become abusers, and what their victims can, should, or will do to save themselves and, in some situations, their children.

Let’s have some more horror books and films that do this work, this all-important work of highlighting abuse as frailty, weakness, insecurity. Let’s have some more horror that shows the abuser as someone hollow, empty, and afraid of disappearing into nothingness without his victim.

Like I said, I’m not a person who’s afraid of clowns. But I’m grateful to King for reminding me that abusers—of whom, as a class, I am deeply afraid—actually are precisely the clowns we should be most afraid of.

[i] See Jennifer Percy, Girls Play Dead (2025).

[ii] See Lundy Bancroft, Why Does He Do this? (2002) for the once-revolutionary and now-canonical “cognitive” analysis of the psychology of the abuser. For Bancroft, men who abuse women do so because they believe they are within their rights to to do; they believe, indeed, that it’s incumbent upon them to correct and control female behavior. They believe, in many cases, that women want this control and abuse. In my own work with survivors of DV, I have heard women say that their abusers used to say precisely this to them: I am well within my rights to do this to you. Stephen King’s novel, written nearly 20 years before Bancroft’s analysis, comes to the same conclusion. Fascinating.