It: Welcome to Derry arrived on HBO and HBO Max this week, a spinoff prequel series to the 2017 and 2019 two-part blockbuster adaptations of horror author Stephen King’s iconic novel It. I reviewed the first five episodes of Welcome to Derry, and it is among the best and most King-like, faithful expansions of his terrifying worlds and novels.
Bill Skarsgård stars in “It.”
Source: Warner
It: Welcome To Derry By The Numbers
Developed by It and It: Chapter Two director Andy Muschietti (who directs the first four episodes of the series), producer Barbara Muschietti, and screenwriter/actor Jason Fuchs (who wrote the pilot and a couple of other episodes), Welcome to Derry features cinematography by Daniel Vilar and editing by Esther Sokolow. This team and the rest of the crew and excellent ensemble cast deserve much credit for their ambition in daring create a prequel to King’s beloved work, and even more credit for their success.
But that shouldn’t actually come as a surprise. First and foremost, the same team who developed Welcome to Derry were behind adapting It to the big screen. The two-part cinematic version (written by Chase Palmer & Cary Fukunaga and Gary Dauberman) is notable for being in the top-tier of greatest Stephen King adaptations, alongside Carrie, The Shining, Stand By Me, Misery, and The Shawshank Redemption as worthy contenders for Oscar consideration in major categories like Best Picture and Best Director. It and It: Chapter Two also combined for a spectacular $1.17 billion in worldwide box office and rave reviews, not to mention widespread fan acclaim.
Additionally, the so-called modern renaissance in horror cinema – which has been going on a long time now, honestly – has included a great deal of consistently top-notch adaptations of King’s work. Mr. Mercedes for example, although inexplicably seemingly not widely seen, was brilliant and contains performances better than half of what you see nominated at the Oscars, it’s crazy-good. Likewise, The Outsider was another impressive adaptation, and Castle Rock’s “expansion” rather than direct adaptation of a King novel was terrific.
It: Welcome to Derry – The Review
The thing that stands out about Welcome to Derry is also what stood out about It and It: Chapter Two. Namely, they feel like reading King’s book. The pacing, the tone, the visual look and style, all of it is like King’s novel manifest on the screen. That’s not a knock to the other films and adaptations, but rather a note that the team around this particular property isn’t attempting to turn King’s work into something new and different representing themselves and/or their own vision, distilling the stories through their approach and voice.
Instead, Muschietti and the writers, editors, and cinematographers all seem to have ingested King’s novel and strived to understand fully what he was conveying not merely in story and themes and character, but in environment and aesthetics and pacing.
They crucially realize a key to King’s storytelling, and to making an adaptation that feels like the experience a reading a King novel, is that you spend a lot of time with a lot of characters doing a lot of things unrelated to the plot. You wander around the town and these characters’ lives to get a feel for them, you hold longer in uncomfortable or cringy moments, you let people stumble over what they’re saying or doing, you let time pass.
That sounds simple, but it’s among the most misunderstood and lacking aspects of many King adaptations, even some of the best and otherwise most effective ones. But if any world needed to truly feel and play out exactly like one of the Master of Horror’s books, it was It.
So, like many of King’s novels, Welcome to Derry at times feels a bit bloated with details and takes long roundabout ways toward moments and points. It’s also not inclined to let a scare rest, going an extra moment or three as King’s stories sometimes do with their big scare moments and climaxes.
But interestingly, it’s also like King’s books in that all of these little flaws and moments that at first feel dragging and unnecessary start to feel like its just the personality of the story, that it pulls you into its world and forces you to get comfortable being uncomfortable in such moments. And smartly, it uses this to great advantage when emotional or horror payoffs land hard and stop, leaving you in those moments without providing an escape. The lingering ordinariness of the setting and most of the people, then, contrasts sharply with sudden bursts of horror and violence.
This fully embraces fantastical scenes and effects for those horror and monster moments, and nobody will complain about the effort that went into making sure It: Welcome to Derry is visually impressive.
The series also uses the period setting and societal racism to good effect, establishing the tone of the era, doubling down on themes of integration and the clear villainy of racists. Using those truths of social prejudice of the era to build the sizzling tension and malevolence under the surface, it’s fascinating how the passive and aggressive forms of racism and violence play out and are often more of a real threat than the hallucinated horrors that sometimes arise.
The social themes and how characters navigate discrimination or confront it head-on serve as a powerful backdrop, as does the involvement of the military during a time of tremendous paranoia and investment in all manner of terrible weapons and ways of hurting people. Such was the Cold War, such was segregation, such was the horror of life for many people in what we pretend were some sort of “golden era” of peace and prosperity in America.
The ways Welcome to Derry threads those historic facts and events within the larger story slowly reveals that in fact, the horror stories are threaded through the larger truth of historic evils like discrimination and nuclear testing, not the other way around. Pennywise is at home in our world, the way Jack the Ripper was at home in the 1980s in the film Somewhere In Time.
If I were to have a real complaint, and without spoiling anything, there is a certain solution attempted at one point to handle the fear induced by Pennywise, and I’m always a bit worried about going too far toward clever application of modern awareness of science to explain and “ground” otherwise inexplicable and fantastical elements.
That said, it’s fun and plays out interestingly without stepping on the story’s or the horror’s toes, and It: Welcome to Derry manages an eloquent balance of the sci-fi and Cold War science alongside the supernaturalism, and their frequent convergences.
The ensemble cast are all up to the task, and I look forward to seeing the rest of the series, and hopefully a second season. They admirably portray normal people already struggling with personal and social issues, now facing a growing supernatural evil threatening their families and town, and not knowing what exactly they can do about it.
It reminds me of watching A House of Dynamite, all of those people trapped in an impending apocalypse, terrified and desperate, hoping someone – anyone – has a way to stop it, and yet stuck doing their duty and going through the motions of a disaster already beyond their control.
And we’re all feeling trapped in that House, in Derry, aren’t we? We all feel nobody realizes the nightmare taking place, people don’t believe it and want to deny it, until they can’t ignore it anymore and they feel powerless in the face of the enormity of the task and the threat facing ourselves and our world. These stories are speaking to very real anxieties and sense of impending doom, from the larger world all the way down to our own front door. I created a Halloween movie watchlist of entirely nuclear war movies precisely for that reason.
It: Welcome to Derry is the It sequel/prequel we wanted and needed, expanding King’s world and deepening the mythology by holding up a mirror to our world, as the best horror always does. When considering what to watch this weekend for Halloween, be sure to add Welcome to Derry to your plans – and don’t forget my other Halloween movie list of the best horror viewing from the 2020s.