It: Chapter Two’s gay-bashing scene exploits a real-life killing for cheap scares.

It: Chapter Two opens at a town fair in Derry, Maine, as a man gleefully beats a little girl in a carnival game. Chastain, the movie’s female lead and an outspoken critic of screen depictions of sexual assault and violence against women, offered a very similar defense, right down to using many of the same words. I think it was important to see Adrian’s scene and not to change it from what it is in the novel because we’re living in a time right now where it is very much a part of our culture and part of our conversation and we haven’t moved past it.” These explanations—that it was part of the original source material, and that anti-gay hate crimes still happen today, so it was “important” to depict this particular one—suggest a half-baked understanding of what calls for different kinds of violence on screen. In It: Chapter Two, the murder takes place in 2016, and then it’s never mentioned again—unless you count the brief reappearance of Adrian as a swishy, flirty zombie who shows up to torment Richie Tozier, one of the grown-up kids now back in Derry. With the camera somberly trained on Richie’s face, a voice-over implores him to be “proud” as he looks on from a carving of his and Eddie’s initials together.