Bill Hader slipped a tribute to John Carpenter's The Thing into It Chapter Two

Horror fans everywhere spent the weekend at the movies to see exactly how the struggle with Pennywise ended in It Chapter Two, director Andy Muschietti's much-anticipated follow-up to It which adapts the other half of Stephen King's beloved novel. The film made a killing at the box office over the weekend, and now that the general public's finally had a chance to see the Losers Club take on their Dancing Clown nemesis one more time, the people behind the movie can talk a little more about how we got here. In Bill Hader's case, that includes a revelation that he slipped an Easter egg referencing another horror classic into a key scene. 

**Spoiler Warning: There are spoilers for IT Chapter Two below.**

Bill Hader is a lifelong movie nerd, so he's able to recognize a lot of little cinematic patterns and homages when they come along, and one such moment arrived during the shooting of a key scene in Chapter Two. In the scene in question, Hader's Richie Tozier and his friends Eddie Kaspbrak (James Ransone) and Bill Denbrough (James McAvoy) are confronted by a horrific Pennywise taunt in the form of the severed head of his friend Stanley Uris, who committed suicide rather than return to Derry to face the clown again. The scene was made famous by the 1990 TV miniseries version, but the film adaptation pushes the horror into new territory by giving us a version of Stanley's head that grows appendages. If you're a longtime horror fan, just reading that description might conjure up the image of another severed head growing legs and walking around in John Carpenter's The Thing. Hader, fortunately for us, had the same realization while shooting the scene. 

“When he turned into a spider, I said to Andy, ‘Oh, man, this is like The Thing,'" Hader told Uproxx. "And I said, ‘Oh, let me say what the guy said in that.'”

Hader recalled a similar version of events back in July when a clip featuring Stanley's spider-head screened at ScareDiego, though we couldn't reveal the exact tribute at the time due to Spoilers. After a bit of a YouTube refresher, Hader got the exact line — "You've gotta be f***ing kidding." — and dropped it into the scene. It's a fantastic homage, because it's the kind of moment fans who've seen The Thing several times will recognize immediately, but it's not so overt that the audience is taken out of the moment of what's actually happening to the characters in the scene. It's also subtle enough that it makes us want to go back to the theater right now just to try and find even more obscure horror Easter eggs buried among all those red balloons.