IT in Shared Reality at Cosm Los Angeles

IT in Shared Reality at Cosm Los Angeles: Pennywise Gets Bigger, but Does He Get Scarier?

There are few horror images more immediately recognizable than Pennywise the sinister Dancing Clown emerging from the darkness, his red balloon drifting ominously through the streets of the fictional town of Derry. In IT, Andy Muschietti’s 2017 adaptation of Stephen King’s classic novel, the terror depends on a deceptively simple idea: something is hiding just out of sight. A storm drain. A darkened bedroom. The corner of a room. The spooky space beneath your bed…

Now imagine encountering that movie inside an enormous dome. That’s exactly what you get with IT in Shared Reality at Cosm Los Angeles, where the iconic coming-of-age horror movie is presented across the venue’s massive 87-foot LED dome.

The New Line Cinema horror thriller, based on King‘s bestselling novel, It marks Cosm’s first-ever horror experience, which made its debut at Cosm venues late last month.

Rather than simply enlarging the picture, Cosm’s format surrounds the audience with expanded imagery, allowing the world of IT to extend beyond the conventional boundaries of a cinema screen, granting viewers an immersive presentation in which the film’s environments unfold around the audience.

And, unsurprisingly, Pennywise looks enormous and extra terrifying!

The first thing that strikes you is scale. IT was already a film built around oversized visual ideas, such as Pennywise’s exaggerated and menacing grin, the towering house on Neibolt Street, the massive sewer system snaking beneath Derry. On Cosm’s dome, those images aren’t merely larger, they dominate your vision. At times, the effect feels genuinely disorienting. Instead of looking toward Derry, you feel temporarily deposited inside it. Of course, that distinction really matters with horror. Typically, the darkness outside the frame becomes a part of the suspense, but Cosm fundamentally changes that relationship. The frame is no longer a neat rectangle separating viewer from image – rather, the environment surrounds you.

At its best, the dome amplifies the movie’s sense of place. Derry feels less like a backdrop and more like a world enveloping the children. The geography of the film becomes experiential: streets, houses, sewers and the looming spaces between them acquire an almost dreamlike physicality. Pennywise’s spooky appearances benefit enormously from this added scale. A creature designed to invade a child’s field of vision suddenly dominates the adult viewer’s as well.

But bigger isn’t automatically scarier.

We all know that horror traditionally thrives on restraint. Our imagination is often far more frightening than the monster itself. Muschietti’s film certainly understands this concept, particularly in its quieter passages, when the kids of the Losers’ Club are simply making their way through an apparently ordinary town and something feels wrong.

Cosm’s immersive presentation does occasionally work against that intimacy. The technology is so impressive that you can become conscious of the presentation itself – the dome, the scale, the spectacle – when what you really want is to forget where you are.  So, that tension is perhaps the most interesting aspect of seeing IT this way.

Given that Cosm was conceived as a social entertainment venue rather than a conventional movie theater,  the atmosphere is closer to an event than a traditional screening, with food and drinks available within an environment designed around communal viewing. That can be exhilarating for a blockbuster experience, but bear in mind it also means the surroundings aren’t necessarily as hushed or isolated as they would be in a cinema.

For IT, however, the communal element has an unexpected advantage – fear is contagious.

A sudden appearance by Pennywise becomes a collective event. The laughter, gasps and nervous reactions around you become part of the experience. It feels less like privately watching a horror movie and more like being trapped inside one with a very large group of other people.

Bill Skarsgård’s performance remains the heart of IT. No amount of technological spectacle can manufacture the peculiar combination of menace, absurdity and unpredictability he brings to the character. The clown’s movements remain unsettling precisely because they don’t behave like those of a normal human being. On a giant screen, the details of Skarsgård’s face become almost grotesquely prominent, but his performance itself is key.

IT in Shared Reality works best when you stop thinking of it as a superior way to watch a movie and start thinking of it as a different way to experience one. Find out for yourself!

IT is now playing at COSM Los Angeles

COSM and Warner Bros. have announced it as their first-ever horror “Shared Reality” experience, based on the 2017 IT movie with Bill Skarsgård as Pennywise.

Purchase tickets here.