Welcome To Derry’ Probes Faith, Fear And Childhood Ideation

“I think that Stephen King, at this point, had enough confidence in us or in the possibilities that we could bring that he said, ‘Just go for it.’”

This is Andy Muschietti, talking about King’s thoughts about the new series IT: Welcome to Derry.

Andy developed the series with his sister Barbara Muschietti and Jason Fuchs, all of whom were involved in the It films.

The series is set in the 1960s and details the time leading up to the events of the first films in the franchise It (2017) and It Chapter Two (2019).

Taylour Paige, Jovan Adepo, Chris Chalk, James Remar and Stephen Rider star in the series, along with Clara Slack, Amanda Christine, Mikkal Karim-Fidler, and Bill Skarsgard (who also serves as an executive producer) reprising his role as Pennywise from the films.

Speaking at a press event, Andy says that in this version, “[It’s] different because we were detouring more [from] the books.”

As for King’s involvement, Andy says that, “Of course, he’s always reading and blessing every single step, but he was very open to this hidden story that I was talking about. And that involves a lot of creation that is not something that you have in the book.”

Barbara adds that King welcomed the additions and revisions, saying, “He welcomes it and he gets excited by it. He writes to us about it all the time which is just the best. We’d find an email from Stephen loving a blood explosion or whatever we’re doing.”

As for trying to replicated King’s style, Andy comments that, “He mixes tones, and he basically puts a scoop of everything that he likes in the same world, because that’s what life is also made of — it has comedy, it has drama, it has horrific events, so we’re doing the same thing.”

He says that the creative team started with ‘speculating about making the origin story of the clown of Pennywise.’

“We felt that there was something there,” explains Andy. “The book is very cryptic. Stephen King intentionally makes it very mysterious, like shrouded in this enigmatic feel. But, [that’s]s exactly what draw us to that. And, I realized that if you’re going to go to the past, why don’t we make a bigger journey? Soon enough, I found myself visualizing an invisible, hidden story within that incomplete puzzle that Stephen created.”

Decoding the theme of the series, Andy reveals that, “Kids are beings [who are] more capable of having faith and imagination and believing in things that don’t exist. That’s their power, and that’s basically their misfortune as well, because for someone that is that kind of predator, that preys on fear, preys on faith, that’s the big conclusion.”

This, he admits, he got this concept from the source material. “It only appears once in the book, but I read it 1000 times.”

He says that it’s because of this faith that, “the kids see it and are the prominent victims of this thing, because adults don’t believe in things that don’t exist. So, it’s a lingering question — is it real, or is it something that we create?”

Caulk, offering a thought about the creature at the center of the story, says, “I don’t think we necessarily had the conversations about what ‘It’ is, but we have our own interpretations. I also see it as our incessant addiction to our own fears. We could develop our own personal way to deal with fear, but what we do instead is hide and we don’t grow and we don’t evolve, and ‘It’ takes advantage of that, saying, ‘hey, grow up, or we’re going to devour your world.’ So that I see as a lesson in if you never grow up, this thing will continually come back and eat you alive.”

Andy adds that, “There’s different bloodlines and different arcs for different characters, but the one dominating one, one of the big themes in the book, is all the virtues that children have that just disappear when [they] turns into an adult. The adults become like the other. The adults become sort of like the enemy to everything that is beautiful about childhood. King knows this because he struggles to keep the child within alive all the time.”

Summarizing the series, Andy concludes that, “Obviously the game here is, here [are]the new losers, let’s fall in love with them so we can go across the journey, and the subversion is there to basically tell the audience, ‘nothing is safe.’”

‘IT: Welcome to Derry’ will premiere Sunday, October 26th on HBO, and will be available so stream on HBO Max. New episodes of the season will debut weekly leading up to the season finale on Sunday, December 14^th.