In Stephen King’s universe, the town of Derry, Maine, has always been more than a setting — it’s a living, breathing organism of evil. HBO’s IT: Welcome to Derry, the ambitious prequel series to Andy Muschietti’s IT films, attempts to explore how that darkness began. Set in 1962, decades before the Losers Club’s battle with Pennywise, the show examines the roots of Derry’s evil through a massacre that leaves a small town haunted and fractured.
On paper, the series has everything a King adaptation needs — rich mythology, generational trauma, and a chance to deepen the story behind one of horror’s most iconic monsters. But while Welcome to Derry succeeds in expanding the lore, it’s also repeating one of the IT films’ biggest mistakes: relying too heavily on shock horror and CGI jump scares instead of the psychological dread that defines King’s work.
As one critic observed after the premiere, “Welcome to Derry looks terrifying — but it rarely feels terrifying.”
The Premise: A Town Built on Tragedy
Set twenty years before IT: Chapter One, Welcome to Derry opens with a horrific child massacre that leaves the town reeling. The sole survivor, Lilly Bainbridge (Clara Stark), becomes determined to uncover what really happened. Her search leads her to form a fragile bond with a new group of outcasts — Ronnie (Amanda Christine), Will (Blake Cameron Smith), and Rich (Arian S. Cartaya) — echoing the Losers Club dynamic from the films.
Meanwhile, General Francis Shaw (James Remar) recruits Dick Hallorann (Chris Chalk) — a telepathic soldier with “the shine” — to investigate the source of the evil. Hallorann’s inclusion ties the IT timeline to The Shining, establishing an early connection between King’s supernatural universes.
| Series Overview | Details |
|---|---|
| Title | IT: Welcome to Derry |
| Setting | 1962, Derry, Maine |
| Genre | Psychological Horror / Supernatural Thriller |
| Main Cast | Clara Stark, Chris Chalk, Taylour Paige, Amanda Christine, James Remar |
| Showrunner | Andy Muschietti & Barbara Muschietti |
| Platform | HBO / Max |
| Connection to Kingverse | Prequel to IT (2017–2019); ties to The Shining and Doctor Sleep |
While the setup is ambitious, the show’s early episodes rely too much on IT’s familiar tropes — gruesome kills, CGI terror, and jolting jump scares — instead of exploring what made the town of Derry truly horrifying: the everyday evil that feeds the monster.
Jump Scares Over Substance: The Wrong Kind of Fear
The first episode cleverly misdirects audiences by suggesting that Lilly’s young group will serve as the main protagonists — only to kill most of them off in brutal fashion. It’s an effective shock, but what follows leans too heavily into surface-level scares.
Nearly every episode includes a handful of predictable gotcha moments — a flickering light, a sudden face, a loud scream — but these sequences rarely carry emotional weight. Unlike the films’ Losers Club, whose fears mirrored their personal trauma, Welcome to Derry’s scares often feel disconnected from character psychology.
Take Lilly’s supermarket hallucination or Will’s near-drowning in “The Great Swirling Apparatus of Our Planet’s Function.” While visually striking, these scenes exist mostly to jolt the audience, not deepen our understanding of the characters. The only exception comes from Major Leroy Hanlon (Jovan Adepo) — Will’s father — whose growing paranoia about Derry’s secrets hints at a more nuanced horror the show barely touches.
“The show mistakes loudness for fear,” says horror scholar Dr. Rachel Evans. “King’s horror isn’t about what jumps out of the dark — it’s about what’s already inside the people standing in the light.”
Jump scares can be thrilling in a two-hour movie, but on television — where tension needs room to breathe — they quickly lose impact. Instead of building dread, they undercut it.
How Welcome to Derry Repeats the Movies’ Mistakes?
Andy Muschietti’s IT films were visually spectacular but emotionally uneven. They succeeded when grounded in character psychology — Beverly’s fear of her abusive father, Bill’s grief over Georgie — and faltered when overrun by CGI and spectacle. Welcome to Derry follows the same trajectory.
The show’s computer-generated horror sequences feel overproduced, a symptom of Muschietti’s blockbuster instincts (The Flash comes to mind). But horror in Derry shouldn’t look like a comic-book spectacle — it should feel like something unspoken, lurking just beyond the streetlights.
Worse still, Welcome to Derry seems too eager to recreate the Losers Club dynamic without giving its new cast distinct emotional depth. Each young character is an archetype — the sceptic, the believer, the outcast — but none are fully realised.
| Problem | Effect on Storytelling |
|---|---|
| Overuse of jump scares | Undermines psychological tension |
| Weak characterization | Diminishes emotional stakes |
| CGI-heavy visuals | Replaces atmosphere with spectacle |
| Nostalgic callbacks | Prevents original storytelling |
| Overreliance on IT tropes | Makes the show feel derivative |
As a result, Welcome to Derry becomes less about the town’s haunting legacy and more about replicating the visual grammar of Muschietti’s films — without their strongest moments of character intimacy.
Where the Series Shines: The King Connections
Despite its flaws, Welcome to Derry finds flashes of brilliance when it leans into King’s interconnected mythology. Dick Hallorann’s involvement as a telepathic investigator provides fascinating connective tissue between IT and The Shining, enriching both narratives.
Similarly, the subplot involving Ronnie’s father Hank (Stephen Rider) — a Black man wrongfully accused of murder — gives the series a thematic depth missing from its monster scenes. It grounds the supernatural horror in real-world systemic evil, invoking parallels to The Shawshank Redemption’s exploration of injustice and perseverance.
The show’s best scenes aren’t the ones featuring Pennywise’s shadow — they’re the quiet, human ones. Charlotte (Taylour Paige) investigating police corruption, or Hallorann confronting the moral cost of his psychic gifts, feel far more terrifying because they expose how Derry’s evil seeps through ordinary institutions: law enforcement, politics, and memory itself.
“The monster isn’t Pennywise,” writes Horror Quarterly critic Jonah Patel. “It’s the town’s willingness to look away.”
The Real Horror of Derry: Evil Beneath the American Dream
When Welcome to Derry slows down enough to explore its setting, it achieves moments of genuine dread. The show’s period backdrop — postwar 1950s and early 1960s America — offers fertile ground for thematic horror.
Beneath the optimism of a “booming” America lies repression, racism, and paranoia. The idea that Derry’s supernatural evil feeds on these societal evils makes the series far more compelling than any supernatural set-piece.
It’s here that the show finds its true power: not in Pennywise’s monstrous grin, but in the ordinary smiles of neighbors complicit in unspeakable acts.
What IT: Welcome to Derry Needs to Do Next?
To realise its potential, Welcome to Derry must trust the subtle horror that made King’s stories timeless. That means:
- Fewer jump scares, more atmosphere. True terror comes from anticipation, not interruption.
- Deeper character arcs. The series should prioritize emotional reality over nostalgia.
- More Derry, less “It.” The evil in King’s world is societal as much as supernatural.
- Grounded visual storytelling. Use production design and silence to build fear, not CGI excess.
If the series can course-correct and embrace what made IT resonant — the tragedy of growing up in a world that pretends not to see evil — it could still become one of the most meaningful adaptations in King’s canon.
Conclusion
IT: Welcome to Derry is ambitious, stylish, and occasionally chilling — but it’s haunted by the same flaw that limited Muschietti’s films. It mistakes fear for volume, spectacle for substance. The show’s most terrifying potential lies not in Pennywise’s return, but in the quiet horror of a town that keeps forgetting its sins.
If Welcome to Derry can find the courage to slow down and let its dread breathe, it could become what IT never fully managed to be — a story not about a monster beneath Derry, but about the monsters living above it.
FAQs
While the entity’s presence looms large, Pennywise (Bill Skarsgård) only appears briefly, as the series focuses more on Derry’s origins.
Through Dick Hallorann, whose psychic abilities (“the shine”) link the two stories across decades.
Primarily 1962, roughly twenty years before the Losers Club’s story in IT: Chapter One.
It expands King’s mythology but often prioritises visual horror over the author’s psychological depth.
HBO has hinted at future instalments if the series maintains strong viewership, possibly bridging closer to the events of IT: Chapter One.
