SPOILER ALERT! This article contains details from HBO’s third episode IT: Welcome to Derry.
The children of Derry, Maine, in 1962 have already been tormented by numerous horrific incarnations of IT, the supernatural monster that haunts their town. But there is one protest in particular that has yet to make its grand debut in the HBO prequel series Welcome to Derry: Pennywise the Dancing Clown by Bill Skarsgård.
Until episode 3, where the terrifying harlequin finally seems to appear from the black depths of a crypt inside the Derry cemetery. Although Will Hanlon (Blake Cameron James) doesn’t actually do it see Pennywise, he takes a quick photo of whatever is growling at him from inside the crypt, and when it expands, the dark figure looks awfully familiar.
“What is this?” » asks Lilly (Clara Stack) as the children look at the developed photo. As the screen fades to black, Will responds ominously, “He’s a clown.”
All signs point to Pennywise, but let’s not go too far here, caution co-showrunners and executive producers Brad Caleb Kane and Jason Fuchs.
“Is that Pennywise at the end of 103?” Kane teased cryptically when Deadline asked about the moment. “I don’t know. We think that’s the case… as you can see at the end of the first episode, we tried to pull the rug out from under the audience. So right away you feel like, no matter who I’m rooting for, no one is safe on this show, and nothing is as it seems, and anything can happen.”
So it might be the bloodcurdling clown, but “it might not be Pennywise,” Kane adds. He smiles as Fuchs offers, “I think it’s Pennywise, right?”
Kane adds, perplexed: “I think it’s Pennywise. It’s absolutely Pennywise. That’s what I’m going to tell your viewers, and they should think that. We’ll have to see what happens in the second half of the season.”
Although none of them offer any certainty on Pennywise’s question, their answers fan the flames of anticipation for his eventual arrival. As mentioned, Pennywise’s absence also opened the door to all sorts of other gruesome visualizations of IT. There was the terrifying but utterly memorable mutilated baby demon that viewers encounter in the series’ opening sequence, who ends up brutally killing several children at the end of the first episode.
Then there was the lampshade made of human faces. It would be hard to forget Ronnie’s (Amanda Christine) rebirth nightmare, where she is pushed into a monstrous birth canal beneath her sheets. There’s also Lilly’s (Clara Stack) grocery store debacle where she finds her father’s remains inside the pickle jars.
In episode 3, before encountering this disturbing Pennywise-like creature in the crypt, the children are determined to take a photo of this evil entity that is tormenting them. So, they decide to bring it out by summoning the spirit to a cemetery. They succeed, if poorly prepared, and must struggle to escape when the cemetery is invaded by swarms of horrible ghosts.
“It was really, really scary,” Arian S. Cartaya, who plays Rich, tells Deadline about filming that scene in episode 3.
The children have not really seen the most horrible scenes of Welcome to Derry (it’s TV-MA, after all), but they said they braved the first of HE films together in preparation for their roles.
“Why were we watching it at night? I don’t know, but we did, and it was scary,” Christine told Deadline of the young actors’ screening.
She shudders at the memory of “that scene where Pennywise comes out of the garage to the kids,” although they all acknowledge that the film helped them understand how much they would need to hone in on their own performances.
Stack adds: “A lot of scenes in this show are really intense and gruesome, and there are definitely a lot of moments where we have to dig deep and get to that vulnerable place.”
Retaining Pennywise from the first half of the prequel is a strategic decision, Fuchs and Kane agree. After two HE films of Welcome to Derry director-producer Andy Muschietti (and a previous two-part TV adaptation directed by Tommy Lee Wallace), the creatives behind the prequel series expected audiences to be somewhat desensitized to this particular horror franchise.
So they eased the fear.
“There’s a trend in horror shows, as the show goes on, for people to lean into the comedy and make it seem less gruesome. People like Pennywise as a character now. He’s funny, he’s scary, but is he really scary once you take him into your life and make him part of the pop culture that he’s become?” Kane explained. “I think so, it’s still scary, but we wanted to go back… and make it really scary again, as scary as possible. [to] It really makes the fears even greater. [and] really make the settings even scarier.
Kane and Fuchs, who describe themselves as “mega fans” of Stephen King’s novel, say the prequel series is also their attempt to answer some long-standing questions about the interdimensional being that has been eating the town’s children every 27 years for who knows how long.
As Fuchs says, some of the questions they seek to answer in the first season of this prequel series are: “Why does IT, who can take on virtually any form under the sun as a shapeshifter, choose to keep returning to this form of Pennywise the Dancing Clown? Obviously the book has clues and suggestions… but what does it all mean? What draws him to this form? We wanted to explore why an inter-dimensional entity, which is a creature of light in its most natural state, why would This being choose to stay in Derry? There are denser and seemingly more interesting hunting grounds beyond its surroundings.
The best way to make him seem like such an enigma is to hide his presence until the right moment. And anyway, computing is far from the only problem facing residents of Derry, Maine.
Writing a series set two years before the passage of the Civil Rights Act, the creators would have been hard-pressed to ignore the very real and very sinister racism that reigned in America at that time, even in the Northern states, which are often seen as a refuge from the South during the Jim Crow era.
In Episode 3, the police are still trying to determine who killed those kids in the movie theater, and Ronnie’s father, Hank Grogan (Stephen Rider), the local projectionist, has been wrongly accused of the crime after Lilly is forced to admit that maybe he could have been there that night. She doesn’t really know.
Plus, she’s too afraid to admit the truth about what they all saw for fear of being sent away to a mental hospital. Even if it means her friend’s father is in jail because of it.
“I mean, they must have proof if they arrested him, right? This is America. You can’t throw people in jail for nothing,” Rich muses near the lockers as they watch Ronnie find his locker vandalized by his classmates, who think his father is a killer.
An incredulous Will turns to him and quips: “Are we talking about the same country?
Neither Will nor Rich were there that night, and once they finally hear the truth about what’s going on, they have a hard time believing the girls until they themselves are confronted by IT in the cemetery.
Will, an ancestor of Mike Hanlon, and his family are characters to watch, Muschietti teases, because all of Derry’s sinister forces will eventually coalesce around them.
“This particular family is from the South, where things are significantly more difficult. So I think they come with expectations to Maine, and they find that no place in America is safe in those terms,” he says. “There’s an internal divide of beliefs. Leroy Hanlon is a guy who’s in the military, lives in the system and he’s married to Charlotte Hanlon. She’s an activist in the civil rights movement and she doesn’t believe in the system…so it’s an interesting dynamic for this family. They have to navigate those differences over the course of the story in which they have to face adversity not only from the racial situation, but also from their internal divide and the presence of an inter-dimensional monster that wants to eat them. child.”
The third episode constitutes something of a point of no return. Now that the public knows that Dick Hallorann (Chris Chalk) is able to connect to IT through “the shining” and that the military is using him to try to harness this supernatural force for their own agenda, this should make the hairs on the back of everyone’s neck stand up.
The worst, it seems, is yet to come.
IT: Welcome to Derry airs Sunday nights at 9 p.m. ET/PT on HBO. It’s also available on HBO Max starting at 9 p.m. ET/6 p.m. PT on Sundays.
