We were already on edge anticipating it: Welcome to Derry, the HBO prequel series laying the groundwork for Stephen King’s tale of a small town with a sizable demonic clown problem. But the new peek just shared in-room at San Diego Comic-Con—building off that evocative teaser from a few months back—signals it’s going to be a show that interrupts your sleep on a regular basis.
We saw the opening of the very first episode. It’s 1962 in Derry, Maine—near Christmas, going by the snow and the decorations—and people are watching The Music Man at the local movie theater. The camera shifts from the screen (surely not by coincidence, it’s the number where Howard Hill is warning the people of River City they’ve “got trouble!”) to the audience, and we see a kid of about 12 sitting by himself, sucking on a pacifier.
He’s too old for a pacifier, but that detail recedes for a bit when an usher appears and tells him to leave. “Pity is not going to keep the lights on, Hank!” the usher snaps at the projectionist when he urges him to go easy on the pint-sized freeloader. The projectionist’s daughter, who’s about the same age as the pacifier kid, helps him sneak away, and he makes his way outside to the dark, frozen road.
A family—dad, pregnant mom, two kids—pulls over and warmly offers to give him a ride; when they ask where “home” is, he says, “Anywhere but Derry.” They say they’re going to Portland, and he’s welcome to come along.
But this is Welcome to Derry, not Escape from Derry. The kid starts to notice that there’s something very off about the people who’ve picked him up. The little boy brags about what a great speller he is, but the words his mother flings at him to show off with keep getting creepier (“necrosis,” “kidnapping,” “strangulation”). Meanwhile, his sister opens a plastic container marked “liver” and starts snacking on it… raw. Then she sticks her bloody hand in the pacifier kid’s face.
The kid starts frantically jiggling the door handle, but it’s no use. The freakiness rapidly escalates inside the car—and outside, as the car cruises by the same “Welcome to Derry” sign for the second time—but nothing prepares you for what comes next. The mom goes into labor, and there’s a grotesque shot of her belly pulsating in such a way that you know what’s coming out isn’t human.
And, yes, there’s a gruesome birth in the front seat; it produces a monstrous infant with wings and a truly awful face. After it chaotically zooms around the inside of the car with its umbilical cord still attached, it clamps its terrible gaze on the kid and pounces on him.
The car window breaks, and we see the pacifier soaring through the air and into the water near the road… then drifting into a sewer tunnel, exactly the kind of place our friend Pennywise the clown likes to hang out.
It’s a deeply unsettling sequence, and it sets up so many elements that It: Welcome to Derry will explore. While good people do live in Derry, like the projectionist and his daughter, there’s also something festering just below the surface—a force capable of supernatural illusions and expert mindfuckery that takes special delight in tormenting children. This may be the small screen, but the frights will not be diminished.
After the footage, Andy Muschietti and Barbara Muschietti—the sibling team behind the recent It movies and the co-developers of this new spin-off, with Andy directing several episodes—came out to talk more about the series.
The genesis of Welcome to Derry came when the Muschiettis were working on the movies. They were exhausted, as was star Bill Skarsgård, when they were done—but as Andy recalled, “We always fantasized about doing the origin story, how ‘It’ becomes Pennywise, which is one of the big mysteries in the book … We loved [the idea of a] TV series because of the opportunities that gives you: a larger canvas to tell the story, more characters, more nuances, and more complicated arcs.”
Barbara added that when they took the idea to Stephen King, it was his idea to go back in time, following Pennywise’s 27-year cycle, to 1962. “There’s a reason why it goes back in time, but we can’t let you know yet,” Andy teased.
“At the end of the book, nobody knows what the hell ‘It’ is. What does ‘It’ want? Who is Bob Gray [Pennywise’s real name]? How did it all happen? We are going to ruin this,” he joked, but noted that while Welcome to Derry will answer some of the book’s long-standing questions, it will raise new mysteries too.
A second teaser trailer was also shown in the room at SDCC. It expands on the first teaser with more distressing imagery—”missing” posters, a Shawshank State Prison bus, a red balloon, people behaving in unfriendly ways, the tiniest glimpse of Pennywise—and will be released to the public, though a date wasn’t given.
It: Welcome to Derry debuts this October on HBO and HBO Max. It will run nine episodes and stars Taylour Paige, Jovan Adepo, Chris Chalk (playing Dick Halloran, a character who appears in the It novel but is best known for The Shining), James Remar, Stephen Rider, Madeleine Stowe, Rudy Mancuso, and—of course—Bill Skarsgård as Pennywise.
Behind the scenes, it was developed by Andy Muschietti and Barbara Muschietti (It and It Chapter Two) and Jason Fuchs (It Chapter Two), with Andy Muschietti handling directing duties on multiple episodes.
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