SPOILER ALERT! This post contains details from the third episode of HBO‘s IT: Welcome to Derry.
The kids of 1962 Derry, Maine, have already been tormented by plenty of gruesome incarnations of IT, the supernatural monster that haunts their town. But, there is one manifestation in particular that has yet to make his grand entrance in HBO’s prequel series Welcome to Derry: Bill Skarsgård’s Pennywise the Dancing Clown.
That is, until Episode 3, when the terrifying harlequin seems to finally appear from the pitch black depths of a crypt inside the Derry cemetery. While Will Hanlon (Blake Cameron James) doesn’t actually see Pennywise, he snaps a quick photo of whatever is growling at him from inside the crypt and, when it develops, the shadowy figure looks awfully familiar.
“What is that?” Lilly (Clara Stack) asks as the kids lean in over the developed photo. As the screen cuts to black, Will replies ominously, “it’s a clown.”
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All signs point to Pennywise, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves here, warn co-showrunners and executive producers Brad Caleb Kane and Jason Fuchs.
“Is that Pennywise at the end of 103?” Kane cryptically teased when Deadline asked about the moment. “I don’t know. We think it is…as you can tell by the end of the first episode, we tried to pull the rug out from underneath the audience. So right away, you feel like, no matter who I’m rooting for, nobody is safe in this show, and nothing is as it seems, and anything can happen.”
So, it could be the blood-curdling clown, but “it might not be Pennywise,” Kane adds. He smirks as Fuchs offers, “I think it’s Pennywise, don’t you?”
Kane perplexingly adds: “I do think it’s Pennywise. It’s absolutely Pennywise. That’s what I’m going to say to your viewers, and they should go in thinking that. We’ll have to see what happens in the latter half of the season.”
While neither offer any certainty on the matter of Pennywise, their answers do fan the flames of anticipation for his eventual arrival. As mentioned, Pennywise’s absence has also opened the door for all kinds of other horrific visualizations of IT. There was the terrifying yet quite memorable mutilated demon baby viewers meet in the opening sequence of the series, which eventually brutally kills several kids at the end of the first episode.
Then there was the lampshade made out of human faces. It would be hard to forget Ronnie’s (Amanda Christine) rebirth nightmare, where she’s pushed through a monstrous birth canal under her bedsheets. There is also Lilly’s (Clara Stack) grocery store debacle where she finds her father’s remains inside of the pickle jars.
In Episode 3, before they encounter whatever that unnerving Pennywise-like creature in the crypt turns out to be, the kids are determined to get a photo of this evil entity that’s been tormenting them. So, they decide to draw IT out by conjuring the spirit in a cemetery. They’re successful, if ill-prepared, and are left scrambling to escape when the graveyard is overrun by swarms of ghastly ghosts.
“It was definitely very creepy,” Arian S. Cartaya, who plays Rich, tells Deadline of filming that scene in Episode 3.
The kids haven’t exactly watched back the most gruesome scenes from Welcome to Derry (it is TV-MA, after all), but they did say they braved the first of Muschietti’s IT films together in preparation for their roles.
“Why we would watch it at night? I don’t know, but we did, and it was scary,” Christine told Deadline of the young cast’s screening.
She shuddered at the memory of “that one scene when Pennywise comes out from the garage at the kids,” though they all acknowledge that the film helped them understand how deep they’d need to dig in their own performances.
Adds Stack: “So many of the scenes in this series are really intense and horrific, and there are definitely a lot of moments where we have to kind of dig deep and get to this vulnerable place.”
Withholding Pennywise from the first half of the prequel is a strategic move, Fuchs and Kane agree. After two IT movies from Welcome to Derry director-producer Andy Muschietti (and a previous two-part television adaptation directed by Tommy Lee Wallace), the creatives behind the prequel series were expecting audiences to be somewhat desensitized to this particular horror franchise.
So, they dialed up the scares.
“There’s a tendency in horror series, as the series goes along, for people to lean on the comedy of it and for it to feel less horrific. People love Pennywise as a character now. He’s funny, he’s spooky, but is he truly scary anymore once you’ve taken him into your life and made him a part of the pop culture in the way he’s become?” Kane explained. “I think so, yes, he is definitely still scary, but we wanted to go back…and really make him scary again, as scary as possible [to] really make the fears that much higher [and] really make the set pieces that much scarier.”
Kane and Fuchs, who are self-described “mega fans” of Stephen King’s novel, say the prequel series is also their attempt to answer some long-asked questions about the inter-dimensional being that has been eating the town’s children every 27 years for who knows how long.
As Fuchs says, some of the questions they seek to answer in the first season of this prequel series are: “Why is it that IT, who can take virtually any form under the sun as a shape shifter, chooses to keep coming back to this form of Pennywise the Dancing Clown? Obviously, the book has hints and suggestions…but what does it all mean? What is it that draws IT to this form? We wanted to explore why an inter-dimensional entity, who is a creature of light in its most natural state, why that being would choose to remain in Derry. There are denser, seemingly more interesting hunting grounds beyond its environs? Why does it stay there?”
The best way to make him feel like such an enigma is to conceal his presence until just the right moment. And anyway, IT is far from the only problem the residents of Derry, Maine, are facing.
Writing a show that takes place two years before the Civil Rights Act was passed, the creators would’ve been hard pressed to ignore the very real and very sinister racism in America at that time, even in northern states, which are often widely thought to have been a safe haven from the South in the Jim Crow era.
In Episode 3, the police are still trying to figure out who killed those kids in the movie theater, and Ronnie’s dad Hank Grogan (Stephen Rider), the local film projectionist, has been wrongfully accused of the crime after Lilly is coerced into admitting that maybe he could’ve been there that night. She doesn’t really know.
Plus, she’s way too afraid of admitting the truth of what they all saw lest she be sent back to a mental hospital. Even if it means her friend’s dad is in jail because of it.
“I mean, they must have evidence if they arrested him, right? This is America. You can’t just throw people in jail for nothing,” Rich muses by the lockers as they watch Ronnie find her locker vandalized by her schoolmates, who think her dad is a killer.
An incredulous Will turns to him and quips: “Are we talking about the same country?”
Neither Will nor Rich were there that night and, once they do finally hear the truth of what’s been going on, they have a hard time believing the girls until they’re confronted by IT themselves in the cemetery.
Will, an ancestor of Mike Hanlon, and his family are characters to watch, Muschietti teases, as all of Derry’s sinister forces will eventually coalesce around them.
“This family in particular, they come from the South where things are definitely tougher. So I think they come with expectations to Maine, and they find that no place in America is safe in those terms,” he says. “There’s an internal fracture of beliefs. Leroy Hanlon is a guy that is in the military, lives in the system, and he’s married to Charlotte Hanlon. She’s an activist in the civil rights movement, and she does not believe in the system…so it’s an interesting dynamic for this family. They have to navigate these differences over the course of the story in which they have to face the adversity of not only the racial situation, but also their internal fracture and the presence of an inter-dimensional monster that wants to eat their child.”
The third episode acts as a point of no return, of sorts. Now that audiences know Dick Hallorann (Chris Chalk) is capable of connecting with IT via “the shining” and that the military is using him to try to tap into this supernatural force for their own agenda, it should raise the hairs on the back of everyone’s necks.
The worst, it seems, is yet to come.
IT: Welcome to Derry airs Sunday nights at 9 p.m. ET/PT on HBO. It is also available on HBO Max beginning 9 p.m. ET/6 p.m. PT on Sundays.