Welcome To Derry’ Composer On Scoring Stephen King Prequel Series

Bill Skarsgård appears as Pennywise the Clown in Season 1, Episode 5 of HBO’s ‘IT: Welcome to Derry.’

Courtesy of Brooke Palmer/HBO

For composer Benjamin Wallfisch and filmmaker Andy Muschietti, all roads (or sewers, one might say) lead back to Derry.

After all, the fictional Maine town created by Stephen King served as the backdrop for the duo’s very first collaboration on IT: Chapter One, which sparked a fruitful partnership that now comprises four projects—and counting.

“Were were just brothers immediately,” Wallfisch recently told me over Zoom. “We’ve been close friends from that first day. Andy’s so musical and has such incredibly good taste across the board. But his musical instincts are so interesting and bold and really unique. In a way, it gave me this chance to stretch my wings as wide as I could.”

Their latest effort, IT: Welcome to Derry (now airing), floats viewers to the spine-tingling world of Mr. King, with the HBO series serving as a prequel to Muschietti’s two-part adaptation of the original book. It (no pun intended) was a dream come true for Wallfisch, who had been itching to dablle in the world of long-form television, “just because of the cinematic nature of it and the creative opportunity of having that scope,” he admitted. “It’s the most intensively we’ve ever worked on something together … We scored each episode as if they were movies.”

Adhering to the slightly altered timeline of events established by the films, Welcome to Derry depicts the Pennywise cycle of 1962. The tense Cold War setting, a time of anti-Soviet paranoia and the specter of nuclear armageddon, forms the ideal hunting ground for the fear-loving entity (Bill Skarsgård) dwelling in the sewers.

“Derry, is a character in of itself,” said Wallfisch, who filtered the score “through the lens of the strangeness of the place.”

As you might expect, nearly all of the adult characters remain blissfully unaware of the monster’s sinister presence, prompting the formation of a proto-Losers Club made up of ostracized youngsters led by Lilly Bainbridge (Clara Stack).

One of the most important things on the musical front was to capture “a slight sense of yearning and whimsy and also playfulness,” Wallfisch noted. “The yearning of young people finding their identity … The focus on horror is obviously super important. But equally, if not more important, is our emotional connection to the characters and their journeys. I would say that’s taken to a whole other level in Welcome to Derry.”

Despite the familiar narrative setup, Wallfisch and Muschietti agreed they could not simply repeat the movie themes. Rather, it was a process of laying the groundwork for what’s to come. “We’re not finishing a saga, we’re setting it up,” stressed the composer. “I’ve never done that before and it’s been one of the most satisfying things ever because you know where you’re headed. It’s that act of subtraction.”

The score, he added, “needed to still be forming its identity”—both in deference to the show’s coming-of-age story as well as its exploration into the origin and motivations of the eldritch being that often assumes the Pennywise persona.

“It’s almost like having a cousin of the [movies scores] rather than the sibling,” he continued. “We had to make sure there was lots of flexibility, because the story evolves in all kinds of interesting and fascinating ways.”

While not every character gets their own theme, Wallfisch did assign original cues to pivotal players in the story like Lilly, “the main protagonist of the kids,” and a pre-Overlook Hotel Dick Halloran (Chris Chalk), whose “Shine” is defined by one of the most powerful or clearest recurring themes,” the composer shared. “Whenever that happens, you hear this incredibly strange, otherworldly vocal, which was a really fascinating thing to create.”

A notable character in The Shining and Doctor Sleep, Halloran appears in Welcome to Derry as a member of the Air Force who uses his supernatural abilities to track Pennywise because his superior, General Francis Shaw (James Remar), thinks the Military can direct It’s power against the Russians.

But like Harvey Keitel said in Mean Streets, “You don’t f*** around with the infinite.”

King himself uses that quote to introduce the book’s second interlude, which reveals Halloran was present for the burning of the Black Spot, a social club for African American soldiers in segregation-era America. It’s one of three tragic events, each one a particularly violent encore to a Pennywise cycle, Muschietti plans to show onscreen.

The journey of getting to those events, however, involved “small pieces building something rich,” Wallfisch concluded. “As long as the seeds were planted, we had tons of potential. Then we’d be able to figure out how it was all going to come together in this huge puzzle at the end. And luckily, we were able to do that.”

IT: Welcome to Derry airs Sunday nights on HBO at 9:00 p.m. ET