How That Brutal Twist in the IT: Welcome to Derry Premiere Ups the Stakes of the HBO Prequel Series

Warning: This post contains spoilers for Episode 1 of IT: Welcome to Derry. The Losers Club may have finally figured out how to defeat Pennywise once and for all in 2019’s IT Chapter 2, but in Andy Muschietti’s new HBO prequel series IT: Welcome to Derry, the director of the two-part IT film adaptation takes us back in time to an era when the dancing clown—along with all of It’s other iterations—were alive, well, and hungry for children. In the wake of the groundbreaking success of 2017’s IT, the highest-grossing horror movie of all time, and its subsequent sequel, Welcome to Derry is based on the five interlude chapters from Stephen King’s iconic 1986 novel and is intended to play out over the course of three seasons, set in 1962, 1935, and 1908, respectively. The project, which was developed by Muschietti alongside his sister, Barbara Muschietti, and co-showrunner Jason Fuchs, will explore the origins of Pennywise (with Bill Skarsgard reprising the role) by turning back the clock in 27-year intervals to historical periods that coincide with the cycles in which It was awake and actively preying on the children of Derry, Maine. The series sticks with the timeline of Muschietti’s movies rather than King’s book, meaning the original Losers Club encounter with It takes place in 1989 rather than 1958, and the final battle in 2016 rather than 1985. In a Spanish-language interview with Radio TU translated by Bloody Disgusting, Muschietti explained why the interlude chapters—which are drawn from the diary of Mike Hanlon, the only member of the Losers Club who remains in Derry after they send It back into an early hibernation as kids—are significant. “The interludes are basically chapters that reflect Mike Hanlon’s research. They’re fragments of his research. For 27 years, it’s the guy trying to figure out what it is, what did it, who did it, who saw it, and all that stuff,” he said. “Every time [Pennywise] comes out of hibernation, there is a catastrophic event that happens at the beginning of that cycle.” The Welcome to Derry premiere, which aired Sunday on HBO, opened with a prologue sequence in which we witnessed the horrifying disappearance of little Matty Clements (Miles Ekhardt), a boy way too old to be sucking on a pacifier the way he was, after he hitched a ride from a family possessed by It following a night out at Derry’s movie theater. From there, the show jumped ahead four months to April 1962, when a group of Matty’s fellow outcasts—including Phil (Jack Molloy Legault), Teddy (Mikkal Karim-Fidler), and Lilly (Clara Stack)— began to realize Matty may have been the victim of something more sinister than a run-of-the-mill missing-persons case. After Lilly heard Matty singing The Music Man song “Ya Got Trouble” through the drain in her bathtub and saw his bloodied fingers popping up through the pipes, it set in motion a chain of events that led the trio—along with Phil’s little sister Susie (Matilda Legault) and Ronnie (Amanda Christine), the daughter of the cinema’s projectionist—back to the movie theater to investigate what really happened the night Matty disappeared. But when Ronnie set the theater’s copy of The Music Man in motion on the projector, Matty appeared on screen holding what looked like a baby swaddled in a blanket. Moments later, all hell broke loose when Matty, suddenly sporting one of Pennywise’s signature maniacal grins, launched the contents of the bundle through the screen and it was revealed to be the winged demon baby we saw the woman in the car that picked Matty up give birth to in the prologue. Except, now the creature had grown far larger. Everything up to this point in the episode had seemed intended to lead viewers to believe that they had found their new Losers Club in the form of this gang of endearing misfits banding together to find Matty. However, the demon baby then proceeded to brutally rip apart and kill Teddy, Phil, and Susie, leaving only Lilly and Ronnie alive before the credits rolled. The final moments of the episode, which was directed by Muschietti, were both gruesome and shocking. They also seemed to signal that whatever Welcome to Derry has up its sleeve in the next seven episodes, the showrunners don’t want viewers to feel like they’re just getting a rehash of the IT movies—or, maybe more importantly, that they have any idea what’s coming next.