The trailer opens with footage of Bill Denbrough making a paper boat for his little brother Georgie. We then move outside, where Georgie is chasing his boat in a rainstorm as it floats next to the curb.
Suddenly, Georgie runs right into a street barrier, which knocks him down on the ground. He then watches as his boat sails into a gutter. He runs to the gutter and tries to see if he can see his boat. As he looks deep into the sewers, Pennywise abruptly appears before the screen cuts to black.
Then we are shown the members of the Loser’s Club meeting each other and realizing that they’ve all been seeing the same entity, before one of them finally says ‘The Clown’. Once that happens, the teaser then moves into its centerpiece, which shows the members of the Loser’s Club looking at pictures on a carousel slide projector that suddenly acquires a life of its own and begins moving through the slides at an increasingly alarming speed.
The pictures are of Georgie and his parents, and each slide zooms in on Georgie’s face before cutting to his mother, whose hair is covering her face. As the projector moves from slide to slide, the hair moves out of his mother’s face, and her face is revealed to be that of Pennywise himself.
The trailer then blows through a flurry of shots, as most trailers are wont to do. The most striking image from this succession of shots is the unforgettable moment when blood flows out of Beverly’s sink, only in Muschietti’s film it spews out like a geyser and blasts her in the face.
There is also a sublime image of Pennywise approaching two of the children (he has them cornered against a wall), but the shot is framed in a way so that only his long, bony fingers fill the screen. The children are in the background, out of focus but clearly terrified.
The teaser ends with Bill walking down into his flooded basement, where Georgie’s ghost taunts him by repeatedly screaming ‘We all float down here!’ before Pennywise rises from the water and rushes at him, in a moment that had the entire audience screaming. It is at this moment that the screen cuts to black and the word ‘IT’ appears on screen.”