We were already on edge anticipating it: Welcome to Derry, the HBO prequel series laying the groundwork for Stephen King’s tale of a small town with a sizable demonic clown problem. But the new peek just shared in-room at San Diego Comic-Con—building off that evocative teaser from a few months back—signals it’s going to be a show that interrupts your sleep on a regular basis.
We saw the opening of the very first episode. It’s 1962 in Derry, Maine—near Christmas, going by the snow and the decorations—and people are watching The Music Man at the local movie theater. The camera shifts from the screen (surely not by coincidence, it’s the number where Howard Hill is warning the people of River City they’ve “got trouble!”) to the audience, and we see a kid of about 12 sitting by himself, sucking on a pacifier.
He’s too old for a pacifier, but that detail recedes for a bit when an usher appears and tells him to leave. “Pity is not going to keep the lights on, Hank!” the usher snaps at the projectionist when he urges him to go easy on the pint-sized freeloader. The projectionist’s daughter, who’s about the same age as the pacifier kid, helps him sneak away, and he makes his way outside to the dark, frozen road.
A family—dad, pregnant mom, two kids—pulls over and warmly offers to give him a ride; when they ask where “home” is, he says, “Anywhere but Derry.” They say they’re going to Portland, and he’s welcome to come along.
But this is Welcome to Derry, not Escape from Derry. The kid starts to notice that there’s something very off about the people who’ve picked him up. The little boy brags about what a great speller he is, but the words his mother flings at him to show off with keep getting creepier (“necrosis,” “kidnapping,” “strangulation”). Meanwhile, his sister opens a plastic container marked “liver” and starts snacking on it… raw. Then she sticks her bloody hand in the pacifier kid’s face.
The kid starts frantically jiggling the door handle, but it’s no use. The freakiness rapidly escalates inside the car—and outside, as the car cruises by the same “Welcome to Derry” sign for the second time—but nothing prepares you for what comes next. The mom goes into labor, and there’s a grotesque shot of her belly pulsating in such a way that you know what’s coming out isn’t human.
And, yes, there’s a gruesome birth in the front seat; it produces a monstrous infant with wings and a truly awful face. After it chaotically zooms around the inside of the car with its umbilical cord still attached, it clamps its terrible gaze on the kid and pounces on him.
The car window breaks, and we see the pacifier soaring through the air and into the water near the road… then drifting into a sewer tunnel, exactly the kind of place our friend Pennywise the clown likes to hang out.
It’s a deeply unsettling sequence, and it sets up so many elements that It: Welcome to Derry will explore. While good people do live in Derry, like the projectionist and his daughter, there’s also something festering just below the surface—a force capable of supernatural illusions and expert mindfuckery that takes special delight in tormenting children. This may be the small screen, but the frights will not be diminished.
After the footage, Andy Muschietti and Barbara Muschietti—the sibling team behind the recent It movies and the co-developers of this new spin-off, with Andy directing several episodes—came out to talk more about the series.
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