By If you like horror movies, you know what It is. It exploded onto the scene in 2017 and became the highest-grossing horror movie of all time. Now, with the original story wrapped up, Warner Bros and HBO Max are diving back into the well with It: Welcome to Derry. With most of the adult cast members present, as well as showrunners Jason Fuchs and Brad Kane, and even Andy and Barbara Muschietti, who directed and produced, respectively, the two films, the team assembled to talk about why this was a story that needed to be told.
Andy started off by saying how eager he was to continue the series following It: Chapter 2 and conceived Welcome To Derry as a prequel that could satisfy fans on numerous levels. Purely from a narrative point of view, because this prequel would take place 27 years before the first film, setting it in 1962 would allow imagery and sets that were more in line with King’s original novel. Kane then went on to say that it would also open the series to explore different types of fears, alluding to the Cold War, Civil Rights Movement, and Red Scare, that wouldn’t be possible to explore in any other time period.
There’s also an opportunity presented by a prequel series to answer some of the questions surrounding the overarching series. Kane said, in particular, Pennywise would be a figure that would eventually be explored in greater detail. “Why does It, a being of pure light, come back to Derry time and time again? Why does he continue to take the form of Bob Grey?“
The nature of Derry as a community is also going to be explored in far more detail, mostly through the character of Rose. Her actress, Kimbery Norris Guerrero, is a descendant of one of the original Losers, who were a group of indigenous kids. She said that Welcome To Derry would look at what makes Derry such a unique focal point, ominously hinting that “the land knows. It remembers.”
Now, all that’s well and good, but is It: Welcome to Derry actually scary? In short, it sure seems to be. The audience was shown several clips from the series, including the new trailer, but there was also an extended look at a scene taking place in a grocery store. It was definitely unnerving, with plenty of unusual stares, shifting walls, and increasingly bizarre announcements being made over the intercom, culminating in a sequence that feels as if the late David Lynch was directing a Silent Hill movie. I wouldn’t say that it scared me a lot, but it sure did impress me.
It’s hard to say how much of It: Welcome to Derry will keep that tone through its eight-episode run, but at the very least, it seems to be channeling a lot of that It terror that made the first film so effective.
It: Welcome to Derry will release on October 26th on HBO.
