The lasting effects of Stephen King’s horror novel Itcan be felt almost 40 years after the book was published, thanks to its traumatizing villain. And now Pennywise’s origin story makes its way to the small screen in HBO’s Welcome To Derry, which premieres October 26. The prequel series brings It‘s Bill Skarsgård back into the fold as the maniacal clown who gleefully terrorizes and attacks children. But the show also delves deep into the eerie lore of its titular small Maine town, with stories inspired by the interludes in King’s novel. Series co-creator Andy Muschietti, who helmed 2017’s It and Chapter Two, tells The A.V. Club that he’s been itching to get back to this franchise since the latter film was released in 2019.
Set in 1962—a whole 27 years before the Losers initially encountered Pennywise in the recent films—Welcome To Derry introduces a new group of kids who become the creature’s targets. Muschietti dubs them the “new Losers,” who investigate the disappearance of a friend in the sewers while confronting some of their darkest fears. Meanwhile, the adults (played by the likes of Jovan Adepo, Taylour Paige, Chris Chalk, and James Remar) embark on their own secret missions that unwittingly put them on the same dangerous path as the kids. All roads, of course, lead to Pennywise.
The A.V. Club spoke to Muschietti about establishing Welcome To Derry‘s “intense” tone and aesthetic, bringing in a major King character, crafting a new narrative that ties into the Native American community, and how much we’ll get to see of Skarsgård in that darn clown costume.
The A.V. Club: What was it about the interludes in Stephen King’s books that felt like compelling entry points for an It spin-off?
Andy Muschietti: So there are two things here. One was we all shared a desire to go into the origins of Pennywise or the monster who became the clown. And part of that equation was the conversations I had with Bill Skarsgård while filming It Chapter Two. Both of us were excited about the prospect. We thought it would be a movie at first. But then life happened, and we went into different projects. But this idea kept coming back to me and took shape into something deeper and more extended. It was my curiosity that made me dig into the other parts of Stephen King’s book, particularly the research and investigation done by Losers Club member Mike Hanlon that form the interludes that are shrouded in mystery. Mike just gets bits and pieces of information, and he tries to build this puzzle, but never gets to put all the pieces together. In a way, I desired to put those pieces together and create an expanded story about everything that happened in Derry before the events of the movies, and hopefully create a compelling, emotional story.
AVC: The show takes place in 1962. How does this specific time period affect the arc and aesthetics of the show?
AM: 1962 is the Pennywise cycle previous to the story in the movie, but in the book, the main story happens in 1958 with the kids. So that was exciting to us right away because even if it’s not the same characters, we’re going into a similar cultural era covered in the book. We wanted to capitalize on the fear of being in the Cold War and the panic of possibly being bombed by Russia. There’s also another range of fears from this era I wanted to tap into from the kids’ perspective, which is things like radioactive mutations. Using both those angles to help with the creation of this world, aesthetically speaking, was appealing. I treated this season as if it were a movie, in the sense that we got Chapter Two‘s production designer [Paul D. Austerberry] and costume designer [Luis Sequeira] because I wanted to preserve that cinematic feel. Everybody was very excited to jump into the early ’60s and embrace not only the aesthetic parts but the deeper idiosyncrasies of what an American small town at that time was like.
AVC: Does the show match the film’s tone in terms of creepiness, or did you get to change things since you have eight hourlong episodes?
AM: I wanted to maintain the same tone of the movie because I wanted the movies themselves to maintain the tone of the book, which is terribly scary and graphically violent. There are heightened emotions, but there’s also a lot of humor. The mandate for me was always being faithful to all that, but I will say the show does get more intense. We had the opportunity to make it creepier because it’s a bigger canvas with more characters and more of their fears to explore. The intention is to take things to the edge and give audiences more than what they’ve experienced in the movies before.
AM: Yeah, I wanted to establish a sense of how no one is really safe in this world, which is a little bit of the same idea that we expressed in the first movie’s opening with Georgie’s death, which is pretty gruesome, and also with Adrian Mellon’s death at the beginning of Chapter Two. In general, as an opening for the show, I wanted to create an augmented feeling that nothing is sacred or safe in Derry. The challenge was how to do it and make it more spectacular, especially for people who have seen the movies and understand how effective a graphic incident like the show’s opening scene is. It all comes from what I mentioned before about my desire to make a creature that stems from what a kid’s fear in the early ’60s was, which is a mutant of some sort.
AVC: Did you always sign up to direct four installments, or did that choice come about naturally while working on the scripts?
AM: That part evolved a bit. I knew I wanted to develop and create the show with other writers, but I knew I couldn’t direct all eight because that’s a big task. I also wanted time to make other movies. But over the course of the first few months, as the drafts were happening, I realized that I wanted to do more, so I thought I’d direct episodes one and two for the specific reason of establishing certain new characters. I was committed to that. And then I said, “Well, of course I’ll do the finale, too.” But the lead-up to our finale is so great that I didn’t want to not be part of the penultimate episode. So then I committed to doing those four, and I love and respect the other directors who came aboard.
AVC: A huge source of tension in It is the disconnect between the kids experiencing Pennywise’s terrors and the adults not necessarily believing them. How does that aspect factor into Welcome To Derry?
AM: Yeah, that’s the fog in Derry, when adults don’t seem to see or pay attention to what’s going on. It’s mostly about the kids suffering. Kids are gifted with the ability to imagine things that don’t exist, for good and for bad. Our monster is a creature made of belief and will obviously target and use that as bait, which is more effective on younger people. That’s one of the reasons we wanted to go back to his origins, to understand more the how and why of It becoming a clown. This fog is based on what Stephen King perceives as a sort of real-life behavior and a larger reflection about childhood versus adulthood. There are moments when you become an adult where your imagination fades away, unless you carry the child that you were within you. We absolutely use it in our show as a love letter to memory and the child inside who keeps the imagination alive. The fog is the end of childhood. Adults don’t pay attention to everything in the world of children; that’s impossible to do when you’re occupied with life stuff. When we don’t listen to kids to the full extent that we should, things can get forgotten or overlooked, or brushed under the carpet.
AVC: Another important arc seems to be about the Native American rituals and beliefs about the monster and how they tie into what the adults are doing.
AM: The intervention of Native characters in the book is very important, and we wanted to grab it and extend it. In the interludes, it unlocks the investigations of the Losers and makes them face reality differently. I was always very attentive to that in the book. Natives were the first people on this land and so the first people who encountered It. In many ways, their story is as or more important than the story that our Losers go through. But it’s a big question mark in the book about how this happened. So we basically go into that in the show and open the drawer to create a story that might be unfamiliar to readers as well. It’s a new narrative that connects to the Indigenous community.
AVC: One of the main characters is Dick Hallorann, played by Chris Chalk, who fans of The Shining will be familiar with. What was the idea behind bringing him into Welcome To Derry in such a big way?
AM: Dick has a very predominant role in this story. In the book, he’s part of the Black Spot tragedy when it burned down, but that story is told in fragmented pieces. We don’t know the full extent of Dick’s participation, and that’s what we wanted to find out here. We realized he plays a much larger role. Chris Chalk is exceptional in this. I hadn’t known him before in person before casting him, and when I saw his tape, it blew my mind. He brought a great deal of mysticism, but he’s also grounded. His character goes on a weird journey as someone who has “the shine” and is in conflict with that throughout.
AVC: We can’t end without a tease of just how much we’ll see of Bill Skarsgård as Pennywise.
AM: I cannot say when and how Pennywise appears because it would be a spoiler. Of course, we’re going to see him incarnated in different ways, but eventually, we will see the clown that we all love to hate. There was an attempt to keep Bill not in the proximity of the new young actors to preserve that aura that he has when he’s in costume and in character, at least just to preserve the first scene when they all see each other. But then, after that, everyone quickly became friends with Bill. He’s very careful about the effect he has on people when he’s in costume, but all the actors were very excited about Pennywise showing up on set.
