Welcome To Derry’ Keeps Making One Big, Annoying Mistake

HBO’s new IT prequel, Welcome To Derry, is at times incredibly frightening and at times a compelling character drama about a weird little town in Maine during the Civil Rights era. Unfortunately, it’s also incredibly frustrating. One creative decision in particular keeps holding it back from true greatness. Light spoilers ahead.

The story, based on the novel by Stephen King, follows a sprawling cast of characters, both children and adult, as mysterious events begin to occur in Derry, Maine. There is a group of kids, reminiscent of those from the book and movies, investigating the disappearance of another child, and later the disappearance of several more. Something wicked has found its way into the town.

The military has also set up shop, investigating this dark presence, and they’ve even brought in a young Dick Hallorann (Chris Chalk), the psychic from The Shining, to help in their efforts. We follow a number of these military men and their families as this investigation plays out. We also meet a new character, Rose (Kimberly Norris Guerrero), in Episode 3 – a local indigenous woman who shares a past with General Shaw (James Remar) who is heading up the military operations.

We also follow Lily Bainbridge (Clara Stack) a young girl who has spent time in a mental institution for her “visions” and Ronnie Grogan (Amanda Christine) a young black girl whose father has been accused of murders he didn’t commit. They’re joined by a number of other children, but these are the central young protagonists.

‘Welcome To Derry’s Biggest Mistake

At its best, Welcome To Derry is quite scary. The picture at the top of this post is from the opening of the third episode, when a young boy visits a house of horrors at a traveling circus outside of town, decades before the events of the main story. He sees a shadowy figure who invites him to come closer. When he approaches, the withered old one-eyed man strikes a match and says “Now you see it!” in a terrifying voice, and the boy runs from the tent, terrified. It’s a great moment, underscored by his father’s reaction. “Don’t be a sissy,” he snaps, before giving his son a slingshot.

Later, the boy and his new friend, a young indigenous girl, are playing out in a meadow. The boy runs into the woods and she calls after him to stop, clearly frightened of the forest. But the boy doesn’t listen, and when he realizes he’s alone, deep in the forest, it’s too late. The old man from the house of horrors appears, popping out from behind a distant tree. Then he appears closer, stepping out from behind a different tree. It’s deeply unsettling. I was urging the boy to run for it as I watched, while fully expecting that no matter which way he went, the creepy old man would be there waiting.

And then Welcome To Derry makes the same mistake it keeps making episode after episode (though chiefly in the first and third): It transforms the creepy old man into a slavering beast, running on all fours with its massive jaw snapping open and shut hungrily as the boy runs away.

This, of course, is a form of Pennywise the Clown (Bill Skarsgård). One incarnation of that infamous evil, at least, and an earlier one. But it’s so much more frightening as a strange grey man staring out across the green underbrush than it is as a monster charging after the boy.

The Demon Baby Of Derry

A similar thing happened in the first episode. A young boy is running away from Derry and a clearly abusive home one cold winter night, when he’s picked up by a nice family. The dad drives and the mom fusses over the boy, who is sat in the backseat next to another boy and his older sister. The brother has a weird quirk: He spells everything out. The mother encourages this, giving him words to spell.

As they drive – “Anywhere but Derry,” the boy pleads – the spelling bee grows darker and more ominous. The girl reaches down and pulls out a tupperware labeled “liver” and begins eating pieces of it while staring at the runaway. The scene gets more and more intense and frightening until suddenly the mother cries out in pain. She’s pregnant, and she’s about to have the baby.

Her bulging belly wriggles as if a Xenomorph is preparing to pop its little head out, and then the baby is born, rocketing to the floor of the car in a wet heap. We can assume, now, that this is the reincarnation of Pennywise, who must have been killed between the earlier flashback and this time period (though maybe I’m wrong about this). It’s a little demon baby with wings, and it starts flapping around the car, still umbilically tethered to the mother.

Once again, this is where the show’s terror falls off a cliff. The demon baby is kind of goofy. It has a scary face, but when it flies around like a demented cherub I just think it’s funny. It’s much less scary than the family chanting “Trouble!” as the runaway boy clamps his eyes shut, willing himself to wake from this awful nightmare.

Later, the baby returns in a truly harrowing scene of gore and slaughter, but as crazy as that scene was, I still thought the actual monster was pretty silly and not very scary. The end of Episode 1 is genuinely shocking, but the monster . . . I would have rather not seen it at all.

The Scooby-Doo Cemetery

Which brings us to the final moments of Episode 3, which landed on HBO Max this past Sunday. The kids – and I’m avoiding listing all the names here for spoilery reasons – head to the local cemetery to attempt a ritualistic summons. They want to photograph the monster so that they have proof so that the town’s grownups don’t think Lily is crazy and she can tell them what actually happened, getting Ronnie’s dad off the hook.

It’s not a very smart idea, really, when you think about it – given what happened the last time they faced the monster – but they’re kids and kids aren’t always that bright. In any case, that’s not my point. The summons doesn’t go quite as planned. Instead, the entire cemetery comes to ghoulish life.

As they bike to the gates, the gates keep getting further away (which is a nice, spooky touch). A Jesus statue grins a decidedly clownish smile. Then the ground starts to crack open. Ghosts swoop down from above, harrying the kids on their bicycles. The special effects here are . . . not very good. I’m reminded of Casper from the ’90s. The ghosts, like the monster in the woods and the demon baby, are more humorous than horrifying. The whole thing feels like a swerve into campy, B-movie territory, which is tonally and visually very off-putting.

There’s one great moment near a crypt, when one of the kids sees a shadowy figure flicker past the entryway. This could have been the entire scene as far as I’m concerned. The kids could have tried (and seemingly failed) to summon the monster. On their ride out of the cemetery, one of them could have dropped the camera down into a crevasse of some sort. One of the kids could have clambered down to get it and just as he picked it up, seen the shadowy figure in the crypt. He’d approach nervously, amping up the suspense, then take the same picture as before. The other kids would wait, just the same, for him to appear (and we’d wait just as nervously to see if he’d make it out). After fleeing the cemetery, the kids would develop the photo and see the same unsettling visage staring out at them from the dark. A clown.

Show Don’t Tell, But Also Less Is More

Less is more, is what I’m trying to say. One of the key tricks of quality horror films is what we don’t see. What is not shown. The car ride with the creepy family didn’t need to end with a demon baby. It should have ended with her giving birth and the runaway screaming, and then the shot of his pacifier floating into the sewer. Maybe a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it glimpse of the demon baby’s eyeless face.

The end of Episode 1 could have made it clear that something terrible happening (and still shown plenty of gore) without showing the actual monster. One of the characters was in a different room and couldn’t see everything taking place, which would have been a good perspective interspersed with close-ups of the victims, monster offscreen.

Many TV shows and movies these days have a problem simply trusting audiences. Modern writers feel compelled to beat us over the head with expository dialogue that leaves little room for interpretation or subtext. Welcome To Derry’s handling of its things that go bump in the night is a similar, if distinct, problem. But any storyteller worth their salt knows that our imagination creates far more horrific monstrosities than CGI ever will.

Not all the horror scenes are bad in Welcome To Derry, which makes these ones all the more frustrating. The scene where Ronnie’s dead mother tries to reel her back into her womb, which is lined with chomping teeth, was pretty great. Lily’s supermarket vision was mostly quite good and very trippy, other than the goofy head in the pickle jar, which looked fake and cartoonish. Welcome To Derry has a lot going for it, and I’m still enjoying it a great deal, but it could be so much better if only the show’s creators trusted their audiences to fill in the blanks.

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