Horror is all about the anticipation. If there’s a monster in the shadows, we want to feel it breathing down our necks before we even spot a single claw. We want to shiver before we scream. That puts It: Welcome to Derry, the new prequel series based off Andy Muschietti’s two-part blockbuster adaptation of the Stephen King novel, at a distinct disadvantage.
IT: Welcome to Derry - Season 1
To put it bluntly, it takes forever to show us a clown we’ve already seen. The show flashes back several generations before the Losers’ Club, to 1962 in Derry, Maine, as the forces of American social upheaval rattle the town’s gates.
At the local school, the children watch as Bert the Nuclear Safety Turtle teaches them to scramble under their desks if the Soviets finally strike. New in town are Leroy (Jovan Adepo) and Charlotte Hanlon (Taylour Paige), whose eventual grandkid is the films’ Mike Hanlon (played by Chosen Jacobs and Isaiah Mustafa). Charlotte was already active in the civil rights movement down South. She’s not about to let small-town mentality crush her spirits.
Yet, as one character sneeringly declares, “this ain’t America, this Derry”. And, while the forces of history keep finding a way to stop by, in the form of gangster shootouts and the violent displacement of indigenous people, we already know there’s something even more sinister afoot. In fact, we’re pretty intimate with it already. We saw it chase Bill Hader around.
In turn, that familiarity renders the entire structure of Welcome to Derry – developed by the film’s original team of Andy Muschietti, Barbara Muschietti, and Jason Fuchs – pretty much moot. Pennywise the Clown is in the series, and still played by Bill Skarsgård, but a vast amount of time is spent diffusing him into the air, so that we’re being shown surprise reveals of objects and locations that already feature on a Blu-Ray sitting on a good chunk of the audience’s shelves.
It’s a frustrating approach to an “iconic” monster (look, instead, to Disney+’s recent Alien: Earth, which used its Xenomorph effectively but still sparingly). And it’s only made more frustrating by the simple fact Welcome to Derry doesn’t have enough material to otherwise fill its runtime, or at least the runtime of the five episodes (of eight) screened for critics.
We’re given a new batch of children for Pennywise to torment from afar, yet the living nightmares they’re subjected to are somehow both fiendishly odd and swiftly repetitive. Muschietti, who directs several key episodes, relies on the same tricks: repeated phrases, out-of-focus figures with rictus smiles, and jaunty CGI creations. One girl (Clara Stack) was briefly institutionalised at Juniper Hill Asylum (one of many King references) after the death of her father in a mechanical accident; another (Mikkal Karim-Fidler) is descended from survivors of the Buchenwald concentration camp. We’re always given just enough detail to guess what horrors await them.
The show’s creative team (TV veteran Bradley Caleb Kane serves here as co-showrunner with Fuchs) are clearly invested in the mid-century period’s racial politics, but it’s frequently literalised to the point of becoming superficial. There’s a direct reference to the white supremacist idea of “manifest destiny”, while another exchange goes, “This is America. You can’t just throw people in jail for nothing.” “Are we talking about the same country?” King hasn’t always been the most tactful in his exploration of social issues, but when It is such a straightforward embodiment of America’s evils – do we really need to explain the metaphor to people like this?
Most promising as a character is Charlotte, not only because Paige possesses real movie star presence, but because it’s interesting to be presented with someone who’s already fought her hardest battles and arrives here, in Derry, totally unafraid of her oppressors. I hope the actor is given the material she deserves in the back half of the show.
What ultimately feels the most awkward about Welcome to Derry is its choice to enter a new chapter in Pennywise’s autobiography, in which he’s essentially recruited to end the Cold War. Yes, you read that right. Chris Chalk appears, too, as Dick Hallorann, the telepathic chef from The Shining. This is all standard King stuff, but let’s be honest here – what the average audience member is going to be thinking about is Netflix’s Stranger Things, however much it owes to the author’s work. Welcome to Derry is a full circle moment, but not in a good way.
